ChargePilot® Load Management & Charging Logic
Efficient ChargePilot® Load Management.
You would like to charge several electric vehicles at your location? Often the local power grid does not provide sufficient charging power for the connected vehicles. For this reason, the use of a load management system is advisable: Not only does it save you high investment costs for the expansion, it also prevents expensive load peaks and thus high ongoing energy costs.
ChargePilot® offers you the load management that suits your requirements and distributes the charging power to your vehicles in the best possible way.
Load management regulates the charging power of multiple charging points while adhering to a certain power limit. Depending on the individual situation, different types of load management ensure the greatest possible benefit at your location, while avoiding load peaks.
Static or dynamic? The basic decision
Vehicle charging can take place both with a fixed limit – statically – and taking into account other consumers in real time – i.e. dynamically. This is the main distinction of our load management types.
Static load management
If the charging stations are integrated at a new interconnection or an existing distribution without further consumers, the static load management of ChargePilot® is usually recommended.
A maximum power limit is set for the charging infrastructure. ChargePilot® distributes the available power evenly to all connected vehicles, taking phase load into account. The power distribution is continuously optimized. For example, once a vehicle is fully charged and no longer accepts power, the remaining energy is intelligently distributed to other charging points.
However, the charging power available for the entire charging infrastructure remains constant and does not adapt to other factors such as the current load of the building on site. This solution is therefore suitable for locations with low fluctuations in consumption.
Dynamic load management
If the charging stations are integrated into an existing distribution system to which other consumers (e.g. lighting, heating, lift, etc.) are already connected, it is usually best to use the dynamic load management of ChargePilot®.
The available connected load is optimally utilized, as a locally installed meter measures the current energy consumption to the second. ChargePilot® dynamically adjusts the available total charging power for the charging infrastructure in accordance to the site load in real time. For example, if the consumption in the adjacent building decreases, more power becomes available for vehicle charging. The second-by-second measurement and continuous adjustment of the power based on this, taking into account the phase load, makes ChargePilot® the most efficient system on the market.
Further load management variants on top
Dynamic or static load management not enough for your individual requirements? With ChargePilot® you can decide flexibly whether your load management should take into account solar power, varying energy time of use rates or other circumstances:
Charging with solar power
If required, ChargePilot® also incorporates locally generated energy from a photovoltaic system, for example, in the intelligent control of your charging infrastructure. → Learn more
Schedule-based load management
If the charging of your electric vehicles is subject to a fixed timetable, our schedule-based load management could be useful for you.
ChargePilot® takes into account driving profiles during charging, i.e. departure times and energy requirements of the individual EVs. If a vehicle needs to be ready for use again earlier, it can be charged with priority. This ensures even more efficient power distribution, which can reduce the required grid connection power by up to 80%.
Time-based grid limits
If energy prices differ in recurring periods – for example at night compared to during the day – the ChargePilot® feature time-based grid limits can be beneficial.
The grid limit is automatically reduced during the periods you define to save costs or to take into account regularly occurring site loads. In the ChargePilot® web portal, this setting can be activated and deactivated as desired.
A practical example: One of our customers uses this feature to charge the fleet mainly from 11 pm onwards, as energy prices there are much lower at night. Throughout the day, the vehicles are charged at a lower power level. During peak hours between 5 and 7 pm the limit is set to 0 kW, meaning the vehicles are not charged at all. Our customer therefore saves 11 cents per kWh. On a site with 50 charging stations, this is equivalent to yearly savings of about $14,600.
Grid-friendly charging
Charging sites with multiple vehicles and high concurrencies are especially challenging for the grid. As a consequence, grid operators often demand controllability of these locations. The ChargePilot® feature grid-friendly charging enables exactly that: The control of the charging power according to the specification of the distribution grid operator and thus the implementation of demand response events.
This not only helps your grid operator: you also benefit from considerable savings when charging your vehicles without having to put up with inconvenience. This is because electric cars are usually connected to a charger for much longer than they actually need to be charged.
The unique ChargePilot® charging logic
ChargePilot® controls vehicle charging with a logic that is subject to several rules. They ensure that your EVs are charged in the most reliable, efficient and affordable way:
When schedule-based load management applies, the first-come-first-serve logic is replaced by the schedules in the case of schedule-based load management.