The trial will initially take place in the Western Power Distribution (WPD) network areas in the South West, South Wales, West and East Midlands. Electric Nation will recruit between 500 and 700 people buying or leasing new electric vehicles (EVs) to take part in the largest trial of its kind.
The findings will help electricity network operators manage the effect of the additional load caused by charging EVs on the local electricity network.
Electric Nation is the customer-facing brand of CarConnect – a WPD and Network Innovation Allowance funded project.
The scheme will be launched at the 2016 Low Carbon Networks and Innovation conference in Manchester this week.
WPD innovation and low carbon networks engineer Ben Godfrey said: “The Electric Nation project will provide the data, and the real-life experience, to enable us to introduce smart charging to manage potential capacity issues due to clusters of EVs charging at peak times.
“This is predicted to save around £2.2 billion, as well as helping to avoid disruption to customers.”
Sales of electric vehicles in the UK are rising and there’s an increasing range of models to choose from, with larger batteries and faster charging times – all of which is helping to reduce emissions and to lower running costs for owners.
The UK electricity grid has sufficient capacity to deliver power to electric vehicles, however if clusters of EVs develop in local areas and they’re all charged at peak times then some local electricity networks may become overloaded.
The previous My Electric Avenue project tested monitoring and control technology by recruiting clusters of EV users; all people in a cluster were fed by the same local electricity substation feeder, and just one type of electric vehicle was involved in the project.
The results of the project’s modelling showed that across Britain 32 per cent of supply cables (312,000 in all) will require intervention when 40-70 per cent of customers have EVs.
Intervention using smart technology, rather than digging up the roads to install new cables, has been predicted to give an economic saving of around £2.2 billion by 2050.