Transferium Deuterstraat – An energy management ecosystem
The implementation of a smart electric vehicle charging solution by Netherlands based provider GreenFlux in the park-and-ride Transferium Deuterstraat in the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch has been a key element in transforming the newly-built facility into what is potentially the greenest parking garage in the world. The deployment also provides a model for the growing number of such facilities in other cities in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere.
The park-and-ride facility Transferium Deuterstraat in the central Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, known as Den Bosch, has over the past four years been transformed into an ‘energy management ecosystem’ and one of the green buildings of the country.
The initiative, the Dutch demonstration of the EU CONNECT project, on new power conversion technologies for connecting buildings to the grid, was founded on the desire to create a complete energy management system solution. The aim was to integrate electric vehicle (EV) charging, renewables, building/ garage energy consumption and battery storage that was smart, scalable, and interoperable.
Thus, it has encompassed many distinct aspects, with the Transferium demonstration site integrating a vast amount of solar panels, a power converter, stationary battery storage, a high-power city bus charger and 26 charge points for electric vehicles. Buses, passenger vehicles and the Transferium itself can draw power either directly from the solar panels, the building grid, the stationary battery, or any combination of these, depending on demand and the state of charge of the battery.
During the day, EVs take energy from solar panels and when demand rises, additional power is taken from the stationary battery and eventually the grid.
A cloud-based smart energy management platform, provided by Dutch solution provider GreenFlux, acts as the ‘brain’ behind this ecosystem and ensures a balance between energy generation and demand.
Lennart Verheijen, Head of Innovation at GreenFlux, comments that when the project started in 2017, a lot of individual solutions were available for individual problems. However, while there were some initiatives to couple them together, these were not scalable due to the lack of interoperability of equipment from different suppliers.
“We decided to connect everything to the cloud environment in the CONNECT project and make each ‘talk’ to everything else. This helped us create an ecosystem that can be duplicated in other situations with different manufacturers and other topologies.”
CONNECTING THE TRANSFERIUM
The Transferium demonstration, one of four in the five-country CONNECT project, took three years to complete with multiple partners.
In addition to GreenFlux, others included the grid operator Enexis Netbeheer, which was responsible for the transformer station and grid connection, and charging solution provider Heliox, which installed and managed the DC fast charger – while the Technical University of Eindhoven worked on novel methods for power conversion.
The Transferium, which was built during the course of the project, is owned by the City Council of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which was another supportive partner, providing the location for the technology solution.
As an EU project, the demonstration was supported by the Horizon 2020 programme as well as from the Dutch funding authority Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO), in addition to the funding put in by the project partners.
A project on such a scale naturally comes with challenges, of which the biggest was enabling cooperation between the project partners and the many other parties involved in constructing the site.
Another more personal change for GreenFlux during the project was the divestment of its charge point operator business. Thus, the charge stations earlier operated by GreenFLux platform were later managed by Joulz.
A key milestone in the project was the first time all the components were seen to work with each other and the recognition that in the future any of them – meters, battery, solar panels or EV charge points – can be replaced with others simply on a plug-and-play basis.
“Individually nothing is unique – the solar panels are not unique, smart charging cars is not unique, nor is measuring energy or charging buses or batteries. But that these elements work together, under one umbrella and in one ecosystem is the unique part.”
POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS
Among some key outcomes of the project is a reduction in the load on the grid connection by a significant 71%. Simultaneously, with the smart charging technologies developed in this project, it was possible to install ten times more charge points while still achieving this peak demand reduction. As such, the Transferium is potentially one of the most futureproof and scalable sites in the Netherlands.
With the grid in the area already overloaded and thus a challenge for the operator, smart energy management also proved key in simplifying and lowering the costs of the connection.
Another key result is that the technologies are both scalable and replicable elsewhere, enabled by the plug-and-play capability.
GreenFlux for example employs parts of the technology, which has achieved a technology readiness level around seven – which means “mature, reliable, and fast” – and is introducing them into the market.
“We have described how everything should work and, for instance, we work with different meters and manufacturers than were used in the project and we can work with any EV charge station manufacturer. However, we perform building optimisation with the same techniques that we developed for the Transferium and are now deploying the solution commercially at several locations in several countries.”
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