The project's approach seeks to support business growth, to inform the creation of appropriate institutions to bring sectors together and to do this in a way that stimulates affordable green growth. Specifically, this project sets out to demonstrate an induction charging solution that provides a convenient on-street charging solution for residents who want to move to electric vehicles but need somewhere to charge while freeing up the streets from trailing cables and additional infrastructure, and alleviate the high contention for parking bays near the limited infrastructure. The project will unlock the wireless technology from specific vehicle and pad pairing, allowing for deployment to public streets and enabling its use by multiple vehicles.
The project will provide benefits to transport practitioners by informing the design of business models and product service systems with a range of economic benefits:
To the supply industry for wireless/wired systems for small vehicle services
To EV manufacturers that would be able to reach users in residential areas that are currently unsuitable for EV adoption
To service providers that can coordinate the joint delivery of infrastructure and retrofit kits and manage the complex back office tasks associated with energy provision, that could win export business in much the same way that UK management and engineering companies do for conventional transport development projects.
Char.gy has a backpack charge point that attaches to lampposts and a satellite bollard charge point that utilise the power available in the lamppost giving the residents access to charging infrastructure outside their home without needing expensive additional infrastructure works. This project will take that solution and existing induction charging technology and modify it to be fitted aftermarket to electric vehicles across several vehicle manufacturers. The project will deploy the ground assemblies to residential streets in a London Borough - Redbridge, a regional city - Milton Keynes and towns in Buckinghamshire. WMG at the University of Warwick will be supplying parts of the induction charging and vehicle adaption solution. The Open University will identify and onboard local residents to the trial, engage with OEMs, facilitate the collection of data and disseminate the results of the project.
56,239
2019-01-01 to 2019-03-31
Feasibility Studies
"This project takes newly developed lamppost mounted on-street residential charge points and further enhances their usability and ease of deployment by leveraging the emerging induction charging technologies. The project, if successful, will allow residents without off-street parking to charge their electric vehicles in their usual parking bays outside their houses. The project seeks to overcome the challenges of induction pads on residential streets, of the lack of support from motor manufacturers for standardised induction charging enabled cars, of leveraging existing technologies to supply and pay for the electricity and to establish supply chains to mass produce the induction pads.
The key objectives of the feasibility stage are to:
• Understand the needs and concerns of interested parties (local residents, vehicle owners, interest groups)
• Investigate and select an induction charging partner, reviewing a range of candidate against our key criteria
• Explore short and medium-term options for after-market integration of pick-up coils into existing vehicles
• Understand and mitigate various technical complexities including physical coil installation for road surfaces, charge-point integration with car management system via induction coils and necessary changes to charge point and back-end software systems
• Develop a candidate solution architecture and business case for a further demonstrator phase using selected locations in the London Borough of Redbridge and other councils.
Our main area of focus is establishing a viable technical solution with an induction charging partner that provides candidate mechanism to mitigate identified complexities and risks that we can test thoroughly during a demonstrator stage."
20,832
2019-01-01 to 2019-03-31
Feasibility Studies
"This Feasibility Study will explore the use of wireless charging technology to support the introduction of electric public service vehicles in Milton Keynes. It will examine the culture of organisations which operate in the public service sectors, and the technical options which exist. Based on the findings, the study will develop application-specific business cases to support the roll-out of a city-wide wireless charging infrastructure. These applications will focus particularly on taxi/private-hire and on-demand bus services, although other applications such as light freight, grocery deliveries, healthcare, and waste collection services will also be considered.
A distinctive feature of the study will be an in-depth socio-technical examination of the cultures and business practices of the organisations which operate in the chosen areas of application. This will respond to the fact that the take-up of electric vehicles by the targetted service providers, to date, has been low and changing this situation will require a deep understanding of culture and business practice in addition to an understanding of the available technology.
The programme will embrace two key areas of technical innovation. First, the adoption of a novel wireless charging device will be explored. This device is currently being developed at the University of Warwick using the latest power electronics technologies to deliver very compact, high power, units which are ideal for small and medium-size vehicles. The second area of innovation will explore the potential for coupling wireless chargers to existing on-street cable-chargers. If successful, this approach will allow many more chargers to be installed across the city without requiring an equal number of new connections from the local electricity network operator."