What is happening in the market?
While aiming for a sustainable transportation sector, EV numbers are increasing rapidly in Europe and around the globe.
This means more charging locations are required, and existing locations need to be expanded to fulfill charging demand.
However, grid capacity on location is often limited while grid expansion is costly and not always (rapidly) possible.
Solution needed
The required solution: dynamic load balancing.
Adapt charging processes in such a way to always stay within grid limits, while making sure office buildings and other non-flexible loads stay oprational.
However
- A lot of existing charge stations are incapable of load balancing
- There are hardware incompatibilities: charge station brand X cannot balance together with charge station brand Y
- Technically complex local situations are near-impossible to setup
What is Edge
Edge is a solution developed by Last Mile Solutions for adding Smart Charging, Loadbalancing and other functionalities to a group of chargepoints. Edge is designed to run on location close to the chargepoints with standard communication protocols.
Edge is a software package that has been built to be hardware agnostic. The
hardware currently provided to you is designed to run on location and is shown in
the following image.
Key customer benefits
How does Edge work?
Edge is a small device that is placed on site. All the charge points on site will connect to the Edge using OCPP1.6 over Ethernet. Edge will perform dynamic load balancing on location.
Edge will have frequent communication between the charge points to gather information required for load balancing. Edge will filter this communication from the back-office so the charge points will remain fully transparent in EVC-net
Edge will also have it’s own transaction database and card database to allow fast response times to the charge points and to allow the grid to function when the connection to the cloud fails.