ELECTRIC VEHICLES – BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES FOR THE PARKING INDUSTRY
Why the electric car was slept until now?
There is a documentary film from 2006 that refers to the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery of electric vehicles (EV) in the early 90s.
Fortunately for the worldwide environment, today, the situation is totally different.
Our days will mark a before and an after and will be remembered in the future as a period of changes in many aspects that affect our daily life.
The models that were created years ago now need to be changed to adapt to the reality of the modern world. One of these models that have changed is transport.
Electric vehicle and recharging stations models
There are two basic reasons why transport requires a considerable change. The first reason is energy. The energetic requirements are growing every day, and the sources are limited. We need to convert our current system into more energy efficiency systems.
The second reason is protect our environment. Current pollution levels are harmful for the health of living beings and the actual levels of CO2 emissions cause the Global warming.
The electric car is the solution to the problems with energy and environmental protection.
Most car manufacturers are currently working on developing electric cars. During the coming months and years there will exist a broad range of all kinds of models.
The EV is a reality, but in order for it to succeed, it is essential to make a clear, energetic commitment to create the necessary infrastructures.
How, when and where to charge the batteries?
The market segmentation for EV has different models: full electric vehicles and hybrid plug-in models. Each of those models has different batteries capacities represented in kWh.
For example, the full electric car batteries can store around 30-40 kWh energy so it can drive along 120-150km.
There actually exist two standards methods to recharge the batteries:
Standard recharging (230Vac-16A - 3.6kW) on which takes around 6-8h to fully recharge the battery and Fast recharging (400Vac - 63A - 42kW) which will takes 20-30min.
Recharging the EV in the car park. Models with 1 or 2 outlets.
However, the most common use for current grids should be the standard recharge, since the fast recharge requires a large amount of energy in a very short time, and current power grids are not prepared to support the possible simultaneity of fast recharges.
That means that the EV will necessary have to be parked for many hours while it is being charged. A city-centre car park, on the road, at the shopping centre, in the garage at home, etc., everywhere we have electricity and we can park is a proper place to recharge our batteries.
The car parks will place an important role on the new electric vehicles industry
New business opportunities have just been open in front of us with the necessity of recharging the cars during a large period of time.
The recharging stations for EV are now the tools that can bring new parking users, new rates to be applied, new services to be provided, etc…
Additionally, the parking operators/owners will also obtain other benefits by reserving spaces for electric vehicles at their car park such as: reduction of dirtiness in floor and walls; noise reduction; heat reduction, pollution reduction so less ventilation activity.
However, due to the lack of energy power infrastructure in most of the cases, the recharging stations cannot only just be a simple “plug”, and it is necessary to control, to measure and to make an intelligent recharging to avoid the collapse of existing electric equipment and to make the users pay for the energy consumption they use.
In order to meet these challenges, CIRCONTROL has conducted intensive R&D&I to develop an intelligent system for recharging EV which is capable to charge the user for the energy consumption they use by means of standalone or networked stations which allows payment through RFID prepayment cards or post payment at the existing car park pay stations.
The intelligent recharging stations Circarlife allows schedule load, recharging control based on kWh, expiration time on the user cards and energy quality metering with harmonic filtering and balance loading. In addition, built in electrical safety protection self reclosing and protection system against electrical theft are added features of those recharging posts.
Efficiency at the car parks
It is expected to achieve a percentage of approximately 3-4% of EV from the total actual cars in European countries until 2014. That means that a car park with 500 bays will need to allocate at least a quarter of this percentage to offer service to this new kind of user, which would means around 5-10 bays to EV.
To provide the electricity to recharge those batteries, it might be necessary to increase the actual parking energy power to prevent an over runs of the circuit breakers. Then, there exist two options, either suffer this situation, or to start practicing the possibilities that efficiency solutions can bring in terms of energy and cost saving.
CIRCONTROL is worldwide leader in providing efficiency solutions for car parks that reduces the energy consumption by reducing lighting consumption, ventilation activity and energy management by means of having a better service to the user.
For instance, the parking guidance systems which integrates LED lighting reduces energy consumption up to 60% instead of fluorescent lighting, it saves labor cost by using same installation for lighting and guidance system; by controlling the traffic flow, level filling up and ventilation activation can also be controlled.
Efficiency at the car park using LED lighting and parking guidance system
The solutions Cirpark and LEDpark from Circotnrol provides instant information of parking availability spaces and a great comfort and feeling of a modern parking, with the chance of using the unwasted energy to recharge the batteries of the electric vehicles at the car parks of the future.
Nowadays, representative business cases with efficiency solutions for car parks on where payment systems are linked with the electric recharging stations and parking guidance systems can be seek in more than 135 car parks around the world in 4 continents.
