Industry Advisors witness EV charging at 1st FEVER Demonstrator Site

During our Q10 FEVER consortium meeting at the Utilita Bowl, Southampton, on 26th March 2025, members of the FEVER Industrial Advisory Board, namely Hugh Brennan (UK Managing Director, Hive Energy) and Dr Nick Head (Head of Sustainability, XPO Logistics) visited the Wide Lane containerised demonstrator and witnessed this fully off-grid system charging an electric van.

Figure 1: Hugh (left) and Nick (right) witnessing EV charging at the Wide Lane Demonstrator

The Wide Lane Demonstrator, the first step ‘out of the laboratory’ of the FEVER concept, comes at the halfway point of the overall 5 year FEVER research project. It utilises roof mounted solar pv panels, a small horizontal axis wind turbine, an internal hybrid energy storage system, 4G based remote monitoring control and communication system, and a bank of switched internal load resistors to emulate the EV recharging demand.

For this demonstration the School of Engineering’s electric van was directly used to evidence EV charging, via a temporary (7kW rated) EV ‘wall’ charger supplied from the demonstrator’s hybrid energy storage system (HESS). The HESS is being continuously charged by available solar pv and wind energy generation on the container, and in turn will supply any EV charging load (or emulated load via the resistive load bank).

The lessons learned from this 1st FEVER demonstrator are key to understanding the related research challenges of designing, rating, operating, monitoring and maintaining off-grid EV charging stations, critical for the planned future full-scale FEVER demonstrator charging stations.

Hugh and Nick were joined at the Wide Lane demonstrator by some members of the wider FEVER researcher team (Figure 2) and thankfully were only soaked in sunshine during this visit!

Figure 2: Some of the FEVER Research Team at the Wide Lane Demonstrator