A new blockchain-based electric vehicle charging pilot SWTCH on

With several project partners and a focus on multi-tenant buildings, the SWTCH Energy initiative aims to reduce the cost of electric vehicle charging transactions and improve grid efficiency

For the next three years, a couple of office buildings in downtown Toronto will be a test bed for two unique technologies: one that turns electric vehicles into a power source for residents, and another that tracks the consumption of energy and billing with cutting-edge tools. blockchain technology.

While it sounds futuristic, this scenario could soon become common once electric vehicle numbers in Canada reach critical mass.

“At the end of the day, it’s really making energy more flexible,” says Carter Li, CEO and co-founder of SWTCH Energy, in an interview with Electric range Canada. “The ultimate goal is to use batteries and electric vehicles as a tool to make our grid more efficient, make it cheaper and reduce greenhouse gases.”

Batteries on wheels

This demonstration – a partnership between SWTCH, which manufactures the charging platform, and Opus One Solutions, a software developer for intelligent energy – highlights some of the possibilities that will come with widespread electrification of transportation. All it takes is the realization that electric vehicles are not just cars, but batteries on wheels with the potential for a range of useful applications when not being driven to provide power and supplement the energy grid.

In this case, building owners and property managers are realizing that they can use building energy management systems and bidirectional vehicle-to-building (V2B) charging to tap into the underutilized potential found in their parking lots.

Actions that companies or multi-tenant buildings take “behind the meter”, i.e. electricity generation or consumption actions taken within the building – can translate into a significant difference in energy efficiency and lower emissions if they are done with the right supports and infrastructure, explains Li, whose company aims its services at multi-tenant buildings or businesses that want V2B solutions behind the scenes.

For Opus One, which provides energy management software and solutions to utilities and other distributed energy resource managers, the project represents an opportunity to “expand our transactive energy platform into the world of electric vehicles and to enable decarbonisation in the electric vehicle sector. transportation, ”says Hari Subramaniam, head of strategic growth with Opus One.

Make the case

SWTCH test fields are located at the PwC and IBI towers in downtown Toronto. There they are installing “transactive energy networks” to facilitate two-way charging between the connected vehicles and the building. The pilot project, which is the first blockchain-based V2B program in Ontario, will run until 2023.

SWTCH and Opus One are receiving additional technical support from a team at the University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science. Natural Resources Canada also invested $ 1 million in the project.

The premise of the program is simple: when a vehicle is plugged into the power socket and draws energy through the building’s facilities, the car owner will be charged, as he would at any other charging point, via the SWTCH app. When the equation changes, and it is the building that draws power from the vehicles rather than the grid – say during peak demand periods when tariffs are high – the vehicle owner will be credited based on the competitive price of electricity in that moment.

Vehicle owners can choose to agree to pick up their electric vehicles and negotiate their rate per kilowatt hour in advance. And this is where the blockchain becomes a must.

“These kinds of transactions that take place inside a building are not monitored or recorded by a utility because the utilities have no visibility inside a building,” Li says. “If there are no third-party sources like utilities to verify, it’s hard for customers to know [charge or credit] is it true or not. This is where blockchain comes in. It is like an automated ledger system that keeps track of all transactions. There is no way to fake those numbers. “

An autonomous energy source

While the idea that all buildings are completely energy self-sufficient could be a reach, Li is confident that with the right best practices many multi-tenant buildings could offset their costs.

“Many of these buildings are looking into the concept of buying electricity at night when it’s really cheap, storing it and selling it to their residents at a higher price, but still less than the price of utilities during the day,” he explains. There.

And in addition to electric vehicle drivers who can sell power from their vehicle to the building, tenants may also have the ability to purchase power from the building, which generates its own and stores it in fleet vehicles.

Some buildings already have Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) or are actively seeking to acquire them. The most common DER, at least in urban centers, are solar panels on roofs. And while having a solar garden makes sense on sunny days, there will inevitably be downtime and an energy gap will need to be bridged.

“When you have batteries coupled with renewable energy, at times when there is a lot of energy it is stored and then it can be used,” Li says. “It becomes a kind of buffer to standardize all these renewable resources that are becoming more widespread”.

Moving from idea to reality

The blockchain smart charging program marks one of the first real-world applications of a largely theoretical technology. It is the hope of SWTCH and Opus that the data gathered by this project will help them reinforce the argument that other companies are adopting the same or similar models to give a net advantage to everyone from building residents to public services.

“There is a lot of energy that is created inside the buildings themselves, but it doesn’t belong to the grid. The idea is that the people who live in these buildings can use the energy, “Li says.

“You’ll have an abundance of spare battery space that’s just sitting there – most people only drive their vehicles 10 percent of the time. You use these electric vehicles to reduce the maximum power requirement. There are all of these. things you can use to make the network more stable. “