NHP Technical News
co-exist easily with a solution of this type. NHP also recommends
consideration of a ‘back-up’ electrical load management system
in conjunction with solutions of this kind, so that in the event of
loss of communications, the overall building load profile is not
compromised. See the ‘Electrical Load Management’ section of
this article for detail.
It should also be noted that if a solution of this kind is being
implemented, it should be capable of providing smart load
management as well as billing, drawing input from either energy
meters on-site or the local building management system, as an
independent smart load management system will not typically
As this is a very new area, it is not yet clear how issues like
vendor-lock-in are going to be managed. For example, if a
charging equipment installation is procured from a vendor who
also provides the cloud-based billing system, one question that
should be asked is how readily an alternative billing solution
provider could take over the service provision, in the event
of the customer looking to change providers, or the original
supplier going out of business. It is issues very much like this
that prompted the power of choice reviews of the embedded
network space in 2012.
WHAT OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE FOR DATA
REPORTING
No Data Reporting
Depending on the implementation, specialised data reporting
requirements might be non-existent, or might already be
captured via another system. For example, in the context of a
domestic home with an EV charger, or an apartment dweller with
an EV charger on an embedded network, the data provided on
their regular bill might be sufficient. This will especially be the
case in places with smart meters, where most consumers already
have access to live and historical energy use data on their smart
phones. 1) Are we collecting individual data from individual EV chargers,
or just looking at them as a group?
In a workplace, for the first one or two EV chargers installed,
it may be sufficient to the site owner’s expectations that they
work. He or she may not be interested in the data, provided the
hardware itself is operational. The next three sections cover several approaches along these
lines.
The above said, in many cases in commercial implementations,
there will be a desire to see usage patterns of the EV charging
equipment, either as a proxy for cost, or to establish whether
there is need to expand the amount of EV charging equipment
available at the site. Note that these requirements are distinct
from data collection for load management and billing, but that
systems designed to perform load management and billing will
often be able to perform data reporting at a reasonably granular
level as a by-product of their core function. The most practical implementation of metering for a group of
EV chargers will be to feed them from a dedicated distribution
board, and install a basic check-meter with a visible kWh display.
Assuming billing and load management solutions are not
required, but that visibility on energy consumption is, the two
key questions that will define the complexity of the system are:
b. How frequently are we collecting the data? Each
minute, hour, day, month, quarter?
2) How is the data conveyed to the interested person?
a. In person inspection of an energy meter display?
b. Charted and reported by email?
c. Presented on a live cloud-based dashboard?
Check-Metering
At a glance, the person inspecting the energy meter will be able
to identify the total amount of energy that has been supplied
through the meter, which will have a direct correlation with cost.
If this person is (for example) the site facilities manager, and is
collecting this data point once a month or once a quarter, it will
enable a trend to be drawn showing the change in energy use
over time.
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