McKinstry

Electrical Capacity Management for Electric Fleets

EV infrastructure (i.e. charging) is very, very expensive and has seen limited (if any) improvement in cost efficiency as the market scales. A large portion of the cost comes from the electrical capacity requirements. McKinstry is facing electrical capacity constraints as they build EV charging infrastructure – both for their own electrifying fleet and at customer facilities. This student team will work to build a proof-of-concept simulation using emerging electrical controls technology to manage electrical load, while still meeting fleet operational requirements and National Electrical Code (NEC). The primary outcomes this student team will work to accomplish are: - Create simulations of charging requirements for several common use cases. This will define how load needs to be managed and curtailed by charging hardware/software. This also will involve modeling the load of the building and any connected energy systems. This could be by building a simulation from scratch or using commercial tools like: https://www.ampcontrol.io/simulation-tool - After defining how chargers need to operate, build a charging system that can dynamically manage charging/building load. This will likely leverage commercially available products. The outcomes this student team will work to accomplish include: − Simulation of EV charging and energy requirements −Demonstration that energy requirements can be managed by charging hardware/software, while meeting National Electrical Code (NEC) requirements.