Energy

The coming loads that will be placed upon local substations by large groupings of Level 3 EV chargers, plus issues being brought about by Distributed Energy Resources (DER), renewables and more, demand that data from individual homes, vehicles, charging stations and other key elements be made available to utilities. Getting access to the flood of data from so many disparate sources is a daunting challenge. Terbine is solving this problem by giving automakers, fleet operators and individual consumers something that they cannot easily solve on their own – removing the ‘Range Anxiety’ issue that has thus far been solved by only one automaker (which itself has not thus far involved utilities in its ‘data conversations’ which hasn’t been a real issue given the relatively low percentage of total vehicles represented). However with Big Battery Electric Vehicles (BBEV’s) coming onto the market imminently, and the associated MegaWatt Chargers presumptively to be installed in groupings, the loads will be very substantial. 

TerbineLink includes in its design and implementation the concept of giving utilities realtime predictive information about BBEV’s and other BEV’s approaching charging stations. This can be applied to load-balancing and with enough time to avoid overload situations. Furthermore, TerbineLink will be ‘talking’ with charging stations at sites belonging to many different constituents ranging from local governments to small businesses to apartment complexes to home garages. This realtime access to load data, and when customers are about to discharge their large batteries ala DER can be extremely useful to grid operators. Utilities of all sizes are encouraged to contact Terbine to discuss possible applications and participation in the TerbineLink system. Where a utility is building its own large charging network, TerbineLink can be provided as a ‘white label’ to facilitate and operate an intelligent data-handling layer tailored to DER operations.