FEVER @ ‘'Powering Net Zero' Week, Glasgow
The Powering Net Zero Week 2023 was held in Glasgow from 14-17 November. The event had three conferences, including Renewable Power Generation (RPG), Energy Storage, and EVI: Charging Ahead, where attendees learned and discussed the most relevant challenges for the UK to meet net zero. A team from the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton attended this event and presented their findings from the FEVER project through oral presentations and a poster.
During the EVI Charging Ahead conference, a number of important sessions were held by several leading charging infrastructure networks, including Connected Kerb, BP Plus, and GridServe, highlighting the current progress and future expansion of their networks in the UK to meet the increasing demand for charging electric vehicles. The discussions also covered some of the challenges and barriers the charging networks face to expand in the UK. Obtaining a suitable electrical grid connection remains one of the main issues, including delays, long lead times to application outcome, and inability to ultimately achieve the required power rating of connection from the grid. The potential introduction of a smart charging scheme has been discussed to avoid concentrated peak demand periods and improve network forecasts. The development of microgrids has been proposed by Schneider Electric to overcome the limitations of grid infrastructure, obtaining a decentralised expansion, and increasing the penetration of renewables were mentioned as advantages of this strategy.
The team’s poster, titled “Off-grid charging of electric aircraft facilitated by renewables coupled with energy storage”, presented a methodology for optimising the sizing of a FEVER charging system for a flight school electric aircraft, being an off-grid charging system as a solution to overcome grid connection concerns and costs. Many airfields do not have a suitable electric grid connection to enable charging of electric aircraft and increasing the size of the grid connections is often time-consuming, expensive, and approval is not guaranteed. Being 100% powered by renewables, the FEVER system presented for charging electric aircraft aligns with the UK’s Jet Zero strategy[1] target for a greener ground-based infrastructure to achieve net zero aviation by 2050.
A further FEVER paper, “Optimal sizing of stand-alone energy systems incorporating battery capacity fading”, was presented in the EVI section of the Power Net Zero 2023 event. The research introduced an off-grid microgrid sizing scheme for charging electric vehicles only by renewable generation and incorporating battery degradation characteristics within the accompanying energy storage system. A new approach was also proposed in this paper for tackling the nonlinearities of battery degradation characteristics and obtaining a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of the problem. The main discussions for this presentation were about experimental tests for validation of modelled battery degradation, the problem formulation, and solving the problem.
Other EVI Charging Ahead[2] conference sessions covered the latest innovations in charging heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), vehicle-to-grid (V2G), charging accessibility and the importance of regulation and standards for electric vehicle charging installation.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jet-zero-strategy-delivering-net-zero-aviation-by-2050
[2] https://electricvehicles.theiet.org/