Fleet Connected Smart Charging

In 2020?Miralis and Envisij were successful in gaining Innovate UK funding as part of the Catalysing Green Innovation: strand 2: Securing the future of ZEV for our Connected Smart Charging (CSC) project (79473). This project was undertaken to investigate if managing the electric vehicle charging schedule?could extend beyond individual vehicles to fleets, while taking into account the required load and, cost of electricity, and predicting the usage requirement of the vehicles.

The proposed solution aims to deliver 50% savings to operators on fleet EV charging by taking advantage of time of use tariffs. Machine learning algorithms are used to ensure all vehicles are charged as required, with minimal input from users, but complete control is still given to the operator to manage their fleet if they need to.

Completed in March 2021, the project was successful in showing that it was possible to scale up the solution. We made updates to the Envisij platform and to Miralis' Fuuse charge point management system to show how the mechanisms of this technology could work in the real world and undertook an extensive technical design process to show the ambition of what could be achieved.

In addition to fully realising the ambition of the original project, the Fleet Connected Smart Charging project aims to extend the scope further by facilitating home charge reconciliation through Mina Energy. The project will see all solutions taken through to complete market readiness. It will see us build an innovative demand response tool that allows EV charge point operators to participate in the these lucrative contracts, while at the same time providing critical balancing mechanisms for the national grid. It will take the technical designs for the Fuuse platform from the previous project and turn them in to a solution that is ready to take to market.

Further than this, because the solutions we are building are already defined, designed and validated, we will be able to begin development work as soon as the project starts. This means that, even with the short timing of the project, we will have time to perform full real-world operational environment testing on the solution over a long enough period to measure the impact that the solution has.