As electric vehicles uptake increases, there is a growth in the installation of EV fast charging infrastructure across the country. There are several fast chargers-vehicle communication standards emerging like CHAdeMO, CCS (complying with IECE 62196), Tesla proprietary superchargers etc. Alongside this, the standard SAE J1722 home chargers are likely to mushroom with increasing ownership of EV’s.
From power systems viewpoint two things need assessment considering very high penetration of closely co-located fast charging stations. Firstly, understanding better the various communication methods and possible ways to seamlessly interrogate them, if they are to provide future grid services for collective vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid services. Secondly, for collocating fast chargers, the question of how many of these could be safely installed from a distribution feeder, so that it does not impact the voltage, temperature and power-quality impacts of simultaneous charging will become important.
Northpower, a distribution utility company has worked with Power systems group since they installed the first free NZ’s fast chargers in 2015. They are now interested to explore the above questions to help them plan their network assets better in future. Students doing this project will be given access to their charging infrastructure in Whangarei, their network plans, long-term monitoring information and personnel to carry out actual tests. They will be also arranging interaction with charge vendors, EV manufactures and consumers. Preference will be for students who have drivers licence (to test EV's) that will help them enable collect practical data from different EV models to correctly model temporal behaviour of the charging cycle behaviour. In addition, they have one fast-charger which has some issues that will need to be resolved and if possible repaired. Actual use cases from their existing charging infrastructure will be provided to realistically model the fast-charge model.Undergraduate
- Complete a comprehensive reporting of technicalities, issues and use-cases of all currently available charger to vehicle communication protocols and demonstrate an interface to showcase bi-directional flow control (vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home scenario).
- Propose a scalable, coordinated and secure communication framework for all the connected EV fast charging units for its potential use as a grid service controlled through the electricity distribution SCADA system.
- Develop a planning guide for distribution network utility to help them decide the maximum number of allowable co-located fast charging stations that can be safely approved.
- Assess issues and offer solutions to repair the one currently non-functional fast charger in Northpower system.
- At least one student must be enrolled in ELECTENG 731 course. Enrolling in communication related courses also will be very useful for achieving some of the practical outcome expected.
Lab allocations have not been finalised