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Site inspections and recommendation of solutions to provide electric vehicle charging infrastructure

Electric Vehicle Chargers

SSE required UK-wide site inspections of their commercial and industrial buildings to determine the number of electric vehicle chargers which could be incorporated into the car park areas using the existing spare capacity.

The active design included for new 7.2 kW dual chargers with new infrastructure and new dual bay charger stations. The passive design incorporated infrastructure to be installed for future charging bays where SSE may expand its charging capacity to include its full commercial fleet.

We collated buildings load profiles by reviewing half hourly meter readings, gathering information via data loggers, and determining the capacity available per site via the incoming cable head. We worked with SSE's preferred electric vehicle charger supplier to design standard and bespoke solutions for the sites.

Sites presented design constraints and challenges where building layouts were different. Each site’s capacity needed to be fully understood so that design intent was future-proofed.

Solutions included utilisation of the existing street lighting columns to: include new chargers, increase numbers of chargers to existing photovoltaic parking canopies, and include new ground mounted dual connection charging points at existing parking bays.

To future-proof designs, ensuring further charging points could be added later, we reduced design risk by utilising our in-house civil engineering team to determine the easiest method to integrate into existing roadways and pathways.

We worked with SSE to determine the roadmap to achieving charge capacity for the future commercial fleet, working with SSE's research and development division to explore the feasibility of installing direct current converters from the high voltage network with new cabling to each outlet - removing the need for installing individual rectification units to each charging station which would reduce losses in the charging infrastructure.

Key info

Client

SSE

Status

Complete

Design

Building services engineering

Sector

Utilities and energy

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