Electric car ‘street of the future’ project gets underway

An £9m trial that could monitor the impact of electric vehicle charging upon the local electricity infrastructure got underway in Buckinghamshire soon. The ‘My Electric Avenue’ project will examine 11 ‘clusters’ of Nissan Leaf drivers around the nation over subsequent 18 months, and provides details about how better to manage the interest in electricity when a lot of EVs in a similar street are plugged in on their charging points simultaneously. The scheme’s first ‘street from the future’ is created in Marlow, Bucks, where nine neighbours have received their new Leafs.  Each ‘cluster’ of drivers needs to receive their electricity from a similar substation, so must live close to at least one another.  The motorists have leased their Leafs for £100 per month, and had the charging equipment installed at no cost. Electricity demand reaches its peak between 5. 30-6. 30pm, when residents drive home from work, turn on lights, watch television and prepare food. There‘s currently an issue mark over what additional effect the charging of many lots and lots of electric vehicles would have upon the grid. As section of the scheme, a brand new section of technology called Esprit is fitted to each one of the participants’ charging posts, along with in the local substation. When the interest in electricity reaches a particular level, the new device can delay the vehicle charging until later through the night once the involve electricity has subsided. Project director David A Roberts said : “Transition to some low-carbon economy will certainly bring some fairly big changes towards the way all of us use electricity and energy. In particular, once we commence to decarbonise transport, that will certainly pose challenging towards the electricity networks, both nationally and locally. “It’s that local point that we’re really curious about. What we’ve seen using the uptake of technology for example photovoltaic solar panels in people’s homes is ‘clustering’. This can be a social occurrence where one person inside a street has them installed, and also the rest are likely to follow. “Our hypothesis is identical will happen with electric vehicles, which could pose challenging since the local electricity network isn’t designed to do business with everyone inside a street using their appliances simultaneously. ”Participants' driving and charging habits will provide details about managing the local electricity network as sales of cars with ‘plug-in’ capability always rise. Additionally it is the very first trial that directly controls domestic EV charging to avoid underground cables, overhead lines and substations being overloaded. With many of the nation’s electricity infrastructure first put set up inside the 1930s, the project aims to prove a solution that will steer clear of the got to dig in the roads to install higher capacity electric cables. The My Electric Avenue project was initially announced a year ago, and also has now fulfilled all the standards began by energy regulator Ofgem to obtain full funding coming from the latter’s low carbon networks fund. Along with Marlow, another residential ‘clusters’ are actually in Chineham, Chiswick, Lyndhurst, South Gosforth and Wylam, with two more based in South Shields. Additionally there will be two ‘workplace-based clusters’ : Slough Borough Council and Your Homes Newcastle. The project is led by private company EA Technology along side Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution, and includes several other companies including Nissan, Fleetdrive Electric and Zero Carbon Futures. Electric car ‘street from the future’ project gets underway