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Germany
Spurring a Clean Energy Revolution in Germany with Grid-optimized Charging
Electric vehicle (EV) adoption is increasing fast in Germany, the fourth largest auto market in the world. If EV charging loads on a specific feeder grow faster than anticipated, the distribution transformer that serves that load can quickly become overloaded. As a result, industry participants are eager to implement grid optimized charging. There are pioneering research and joint projects involving utilities and IT service providers to take on this challenge. One example is a low voltage monitoring project from MITNETZ STROM, the largest regional distribution system operator (DSO) in eastern Germany, and Robotron, a leading provider of software for connectivity and condition monitoring in cooperation with Moxa. Their goal: to get visibility into feeders and EV penetration trends.
Summary
Challenges
- The project sought to improve transparency for low voltage monitoring due to increasing EV charging demands.
- Previously, the distribution system operator (DSO) could not monitor daily behavior of single feeder lines, which meant that the company lacked reference data and faced challenges in identifying necessary component upgrades.
- Equipping each station with monitoring hardware and software would cost millions. The operator needed a cost efficient method of recording all relevant measured variables to guarantee network stability.
Solutions
- Robotron and Moxa are IIoT partners. They provide a joint solution with out of the box cloud connectivity.
- Robotron uses Azure IoT Hub to ingest sensor data collected by a Moxa gateway and processed by Robotron's RoboGate software at the edge. A dashboard provides easy to interpret charts for the last 8 and last 72 hours.
- Moxa's IIoT gateways enable zero touch provisioning, ensuring that authorized devices are connected to the correct system, simplifying integration and device deployment.
Results
- The DSO now has the information they need to improve maintenance and operational efficiency.
- The solutions can be rolled out easily to other parts of the company's grid. Robotron is expanding the deployment to 65 sites, which will provide another 600,000 data points.
- Viva la green revolution! The future of energy management is taking shape in Germany.