EV charging monitoring

One of the significant changes of the current grid networks is the addition of the EV (Electric Vehicles) charging stations. The charging stations typically has to bill the customer and provide information about the energy they give to the car. But they don’t really meter or monitor the energy that they actually consumed from the grid. Thus arise the question how does the EV charging stations are monitored by their owners and also by the landlords. ThingsLog solves that problem by implementing independent EV charging monitoring solution that can be used by both EV charging station operators and property owners.

EV charging station operators and the grid

Current electricity grids are not optimized for EV charging station deployments. Typically there is either lack of existing infrastructure for the places where is really worth it to deploy EV charging stations. If there is pre-deployed infrastructure the place might be not so attractive as locations for electric car owners.

Thus a conflict arises – the EV charging operators have to deploy their stations typically in somebody else property or location – retail shops, gas stations, barns and yards close to high ways and many, many other locations.

On most of those places nobody ever envisioned that one day there will be electric cars and typically grid infrastructure is not enough to handle the new load.

Handling locations with shared infrastructure between EV charging stations and other users

Even if there are a lot of cars EV charging stations are not “fully” loaded most of the time. Typically EV charging station monitoring energy consumption profile initially look like this

With time things get better and people start charging more and more:

The infrastructure has to handle 🙂 on the initial load and than on more and more often excessive load.

In addition to that there are more and more problems with capacitive reactive power returned from the EV charging stations to the grid. EV charging station generates capacitive reactive power, returns it to the property and the property to the grid. The reactive power provides extra load on grid infrastructure – cables, transformers and pipes. The operator has to transport it and at the same time can provide less useful energy to its customers in the area. Thus reactive power shall not be returned and customers that return it got penalized. Therefore it is important to have metering and monitoring solution able to measure both active and reactive power consumed and generated by the EV charging stations.

ThingsLog solution for EV charging station monitoring

Our EV charging station metering and monitoring solution is a subset of ThingsLog energy consumption monitoring. It provides cost effective way to monitor EV chargers and at the same time to provide data both to the operator and the customer.

ThingsLog EV charging metering and monitoring data logger and energy meter

EV monitoring solution consists of:

  • LPMDL-1104 data logger with global roaming SIM card with built in RS-485, pulse inputs, relays and alarm ports
  • 5 Options for energy meters:
    • Small EV charging stations – Inline energy meter< 63A
    • Medium EV charging station – Energy meter with 400A CT (Current transformers)
    • Large EV charging stations – Energy meter with 1000A CT or more
    • S0 pulse output – if there is an existing meter and you can just hook to its S0 pulse output
    • Blinking led pulse output for optical pulse counting – in case there is an existing meter that does not generate pulses but just blinks.
  • ThingsLog IIoT Platform – unlimited accounts and users, unlimited reading/transmission frequency, high energy use alarms, alarms for over voltage.
  • ThingsLog mobile
ThingsLog monitoring

Conclusion

Finally if you are a charging infrastructure operator or a property owner and need a reliable and easy to deploy solution for EV charging station monitoring please contact us.

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