EverCharge & Schneider Electric Partner To Deliver Multi-Tenant Charging Solutions

January 23rd, 2016 by Kyle Field

Installing and managing electric vehicle (EV) charging for multi-tenant buildings continues to be an opportunity. A new global collaboration between two giants in the industry — Schneider Electric and EverCharge — aims directly at that pain point. The collaboration bundles Schneider Electric’s mastery in energy management and automation with EverCharge’s intelligent, scalable, fully managed electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions to develop a newer, smarter solution, and from what has been revealed so far, it looks promising.

Pierre Sacré, director of Electric Vehicle Solutions at Schneider Electric North America, shares:

“With most charging done at home and rapid urbanization happening globally, having EV charging in apartments and condominiums is critical to the continued success of EV adoption. This collaborative solution effectively resolves building concerns and challenges with smart energy management and automation capabilities.”

The specific opportunity takes the Schneider Electric EVlink Home EV Charger with EverCharge’s SmartPower technology to solve the challenge. Intriguing, but not enough to close the sale. The press release breaks out the exciting details:

“With this collaboration, EverCharge will integrate Schneider Electric’s EVlink™ Home EV Charger with EverCharge’s SmartPower™ technology, which can rapidly charge multiple vehicles and increase building charging capacity up to ten times without requiring costly infrastructure upgrades. When SmartPower senses extra power is available or that the rated capacity is reached, the system allocates power to vehicles according to their needs, maximizing building infrastructure usage while reducing deployment costs. In addition to the integration of each company’s technology, Schneider Electric will also work with EverCharge to expand its customer base to markets outside of the US.”

Many people don’t realize how much of an impact adding an EV can have on the load put on infrastructure. For my home here in California, each of our EVs use as much power per day as our house, so adding 2 EVs tripled our electricity consumption (which we then offset with solar). In a single-family home, that is usually manageable, but scale that up to a multi-tenant building and the increase in energy usage in a much smaller real estate footprint can quickly spiral out of control.

Applying the proposed solution to a multi-tenant building means that the EverCharge / Schneider Electric system will dynamically maximize the amount of power being pushed to the EVs in the network, without requiring incremental utility-scale infrastructure (such as transformers, transmission lines, service lines, etc). In many multi-tenant buildings, this can be the key differentiator that gets the project a green light.

In a curious twist to the news, the official blog post announcing this new development includes a picture of a Tesla charging. I reached out to EverCharge about the image and found that it was not just a strange coincidence but that there’s more to the story:

“We actually provide two kinds of charging cables, the standard J1772 or a tesla plug if our member requests one.”

The decision to add Tesla charging to multi-tenant buildings is great news. With the Tesla Model 3 on the horizon, Tesla Model S CPO prices dropping, and more people moving back to city centers, one would expect to start seeing more Teslas looking for overnight charging in multi-tenant dwellings.

Images by EverCharge & Schneider Electric









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