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Un punto de recarga dotado de inteligenciaartificial

Una de las mayores preocupaciones de la sociedad es que sucederá en el futuro cuandomillones de coches eléctricos conecten sus baterías a la red eléctrica. Un escenario quemuchos han querido dibujar como un desastre para el sistema eléctrico, pero que está amuchos años de ser una realidad.

Las compañías eléctricas y los fabricantes de puntos de recarga ya trabajan en anticiparse aestos picos de demanda. La norteamericana General Electric está realizando un interesanteexperimento en una de las ciudades más pobladas del mundo, Nueva York, donde lapenetración del coche eléctrico y la elevada densidad la convierten en un lugar ideal paraprobar soluciones de futuro.

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Según los expertos, el problema no es dar servicio a millones de coches. Algo que ya puedehacerse en estos momentos. El problema es dar servicio a millones de coches al mismotiempo, y en horas donde la demanda general es elevada.

Para ello GE ha creado un punto de recarga capaz de comunicarse tanto con el coche, comocon la red eléctrica. Un cargador dotado de inteligencia artificial capaz de aprender denuestros hábitos de recarga, e incrementar y reducir la potencia de carga según el estado dela red eléctrica.

El objetivo según los desarrolladores es lograr extender la carga del coche a lo largo de lashoras donde la demanda general sea menos elevada. Para ello el sistema tendrá en cuentafactores como el clima, los periodos vacacionales, los días laborables y fin de semana.Todo con la idea de lograr una red eléctrica lo más eficiente posible.

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Pero una cosa es la teoría, y otra la práctica. Para poner a prueba su tecnología GE ha

entregado cinco cargadores a la empresa de reparto FedEx, que usará para recargar lasbaterías de cinco furgonetas eléctricas. La elección de una empresa de reparto no es casual.Uno de los puntos débiles de estos cargadores es que no saben cuanta carga tiene labatería del coche, lo que convierte a las furgonetas eléctricas y sus rutas fijas una formaperfecta de empezar.

El objetivo de todo esto es lograr ahorrar en costos de producción eléctrica escalando estaproducción a las necesidades reales. Esto según los responsables del proyecto permitirá que 100 puntos de recarga, logren un ahorro estimado de unos 10.000 dólares cada mes encostes. A esto se sumará la posibilidad de los coches de trabajar de forma bi-direccional,devolviendo pequeñas cantidades de energía a la red en las horas punta.

Algo que aumentará el nivel de ahorro tanto a la red, como al usuario, que se beneficiará devender energía en horas donde la electricidad es más costosa captada en horas donde es máseconómicas.

GE Uses AI to Charge Electric Cars Without Running Up the Bill

By Jordan Golson 

Optimistic government officials and automakers want to put millions of electric cars onAmerican roads in the next decade. There are a lot of issues to be solved to make thathappen (limited range, insufficient infrastructure, high costs, to name the big three), but ifwe ever get there, we’ll be faced with a new problem: How to ensure the country’s agingelectrical grid can handle the added strain of charging millions of cars every day. We’ve gota while before that becomes a real issue, but it’s something electric companies and theirsuppliers are already thinking about.

It’s a complicated problem, which is why General Electric, teaming up with Con Edisonand researchers Columbia University’s Center for Computational Learning, has picked outone element of the puzzle to address first: How to run EV chargers in New York Citybuildings without also running up a ginormous bill.

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It turns out that in NYC, very large buildings, which often include parking garages and EVchargers, are billed on both their total energy usage and their peak usage, the maximumamount of power used in a 15-minute window during a month. The rationale here is that

when a building requires a bunch of extra energy, even for just a few minutes a day, thepower company has to deal with the cost of increasing its generating capacity to cover it.

So anything a building can do to spread out its energy demands is financially helpful. To dothat, the team at GE has created an electric car charging station that uses artificialintelligence and machine learning to estimate exactly how much electricity it needs topump out, and when—and then provide only that much.

The goal is to “spread out the charging and put it into the most opportune times of the day,”explains Matt Nielsen, a principal scientist at GE’s Global Research Center. The systemwatches how the building uses energy and forecasts what use over the next 24 hours will

be, taking into account things like holidays, weather, day of the week, and more. Itconsiders the future state of the parking garage, including how many cars will need to beplugged in and when, coming up with an intelligent charge scheduling system designed tokeep peak usage rates low. The chargers will modify the amount of juice sent to the carsdepending on all these factors, sometimes dropping the rate down to zero if necessary. Ofcourse, humans can override this if they need their car charged posthaste.

GE researcher Matt Nielsen (standing) studying data with a fellow EV research teammember in GE’s Grid Technologies Lab.

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Unsurprisingly, GE hasn’t decided to roll out its new idea to all of New York City at once.

To start, it’s providing five charging stations at a FedEx depot in New York for five electricdelivery trucks, along with a separate pilot program at the GE Research Centerheadquarters in upstate New York. The big weakness of GE’s machine learning technology,named Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), is that it can’t talk to cars todetermine their current battery state or how much electricity they need, which kind ofmakes this whole idea a non-starter. That’s why FedEx is a good partner: Its trucks aretracked and follow standard routes, which makes it way easier to estimate how muchenergy a charger needs to crank out.

From this pilot program, GE plans to take the lessons learned and apply them to muchlarger charging setups. Based on computer simulations, it estimates a building that offers

charging for 100 EVs could save more than $10,000 per month in electric bills. Beyondthat, it’s also working on technology that could let electric cars return power from theirbatteries back to the energy grid during times of peak loads, and then recharging when thegrid again has excess power.

“We thought vehicles would require a lot of energy, so time duration of charging would bea lot longer,” Nielsen says. But, there’s actually a lot more flexibility with when a vehicleneeds to be charged, allowing GE to build smarter systems to limit impact to electricitybills or the local power grid.

The company aims to extend this area of research to other types of high-energy loads like

data centers, HVAC systems, lighting, and more. In many buildings, electricity usage isextremely spiky in nature, “but if you understand and can forecast when those spikeshappen, you can adjust other loads to accommodate.”