SMAC – Smart Charging tool

What is it?

SMAC is a tool that provides smart grid integration and demand management services for slow, medium, fast and ultrafast charging. The objective is to minimise the grid impact associated with the massive deployment of charging infrastructure, therefore facilitating its roll out.

The main objective of the SMAC service is to provide Charge Points Operators (CPOs) the ability to implement smart charging strategies over their charging points, giving them the possibility to outsource the calculation of optimum profiles to a third-party service provider (the Smart Charging Service Provider actor – SCSP).

SMAC is conceived as a service integrated in the interoperability platform INCAR. As smart charging services will be part of the INCAR platform, the INCAR backend will centralise the communication of the smart charging inputs between the final users (EV drivers and CPOs) and SMAC, allowing the customer to have the same service independently of their service provider.

Based on several inputs provided by the user, the tool will calculate the optimum charging profile, which represents the amount of power that should be delivered to a given charging session at a given moment. The set of relevant smart charging inputs will be defined by the EV driver through the mobile app and include EV battery capacity, current State of Charge (SoC), expected departure time etc.

With a system that provides smart charging operations, CPOs will be able to manage efficiently the power provided to the electric vehicles in their charging stations, as well as performing vehicle to grid (V2G) operations when needed. SMAC allows an intelligent and dynamic management of demand, allowing CPOs to manage in a more efficient and economical way the energy supplied at their charging points and by, at the same time, improving the service to the end-user.

Where?

SMAC will be demonstrated in Barcelona Metropolitan Area, Budapest, Rome, and Turku.

For whom?

The smart charging tool features provide benefits to CPOs and EV drivers (end users) throughout Europe.

Timeline

At this moment, SMAC is in the final phase of development: Integration and testing in pilot sites

What’s new with SMAC?

SMAC implementation is finalised. The product is now entering the piloting phase and will be deployed and integrated with demo partner systems, thus demonstrating all its features in the real environment.

Different use cases are being tested, depending on the assets involved in each pilot: whether it’s batteries, local renewable energy production, V2G, etc.

The tested use cases include:

Dynamic load balancing
Capacity requirements reduction
Energy cost-driven smart charging by optimal management of the local storage and charge points in a coordinated manner
Active participation in smart grid management (flexibility management) etc.

In order to improve the tool and adapt it to the actor’s needs, the Stakeholders Advisory Group has provided feedback and comments about SMAC.