As Government and business fleets across Australia make the inevitable switch to electric vehicles, a major roadblock is emerging. How do you charge dozens, or even hundreds, of vehicles at once without needing multi-million dollar grid upgrades?
Two Australian tech suppliers, SwitchDin and EV-NRG, are tackling this challenge head-on, partnering to deliver a solution they claim is the best in class for deploying fast, reliable EV charging for large-scale fleets.
With government targets pushing for 75% of new Commonwealth fleet purchases to be low-emission this year, the race for smart charging infrastructure is officially on.
“Together SwitchDin and EV-NRG have developed the fastest and most reliable charging solution requiring minimal network connection upgrades to ensure fleets can make their transition to EVs quickly and safely,”
Chris Hewitt, Chief Sales Officer at EV-NRG.
The partnership has already demonstrated its capability with one of Australia’s largest fuel suppliers, Viva Energy. The project combined SwitchDin’s intelligent energy management with EV-NRG’s powerful hardware.
Here’s how the technology breaks down.
The hardware: ultrafast charging
EV-NRG provides the state-of-the-art i-charging equipment, including the ‘blueberry’ chargers that can deliver up to 500kW of power, charging a typical EV from 10% to 80% in under 20 minutes.
The software: smart energy management
This is where SwitchDin’s Virtual Energy Function (VEF) platform comes in. The cloud-based system acts as the brains, continuously monitoring the site’s available energy and dynamically allocating power from the grid, on-site solar, and battery storage systems to where it’s needed most.
This intelligent distribution is the key to avoiding costly and time-consuming network upgrades, a major pain point for fleet operators.
The real test for EV adoption is in the fleet depot environment, where the demand for power is immense.
“In the depot environment we will see some of our country’s largest charging sites with 10-100+ plugs. Integrating many megawatts of chargers into the grid requires technology like SwitchDin’s VEF platform to cleverly allocate and distribute power where it’s needed most,”
Chris Hewitt, Chief Sales Officer at EV-NRG.
Rob Sherwood, SwitchDin Chief Product Officer, elaborated on how their system smooths the relationship with the energy providers.
“The architecture SwitchDin developed to support this take-up gives the Distribution Network Service Provider (DNSP) the telemetry to dynamically allocate underused power capacity to the EV charging site.
Rob Sherwood, SwitchDin Chief Product Officer,
Sherwood also noted the commercial benefits, stating the platform enables sites “to maximise the ROI on their energy resources through accessing reduced time-to-market with reduced time-to-revenue.”
By removing these critical bottlenecks, the partnership aims to fast-track the rollout of the essential charging infrastructure needed to support Australia’s EV revolution.
For more information, head to https://www.switchdin.com/ and https://www.ev-nrg.com.au/
