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The Mobility House, in collaboration with partners including AlphaStruxure and Schneider Electric, has completed a microgrid-based infrastructure project that can charge electric buses without relying on the local utility.
The Brookville Smart Energy Bus Depot in Montgomery County, Maryland incorporates solar canopies, natural gas generators, battery storage, microgrid controls and chargers to support 70 electric buses. The Mobility House’s smart charging and energy management system, ChargePilot, coordinates charging with the microgrid by optimizing the buses’ charging schedules based on route blocks and energy demands to ensure vehicle readiness.
The 6.5 MW microgrid features 1.6 MW of solar PV, three 633 kW generators and 3 MW of battery storage. Charging from its onsite power supply gives the county freedom to “island” from the grid, which not only ensures continuous fleet operation in the event of grid failures, but enables the agency to coordinate bus charging schedules to take advantage of utility time-of-use rates.
The ChargePilot system intelligently coordinates with the microgrid’s 4.14 MW charging capacity to source onsite power at optimal times, and also ensures that EV charging responds to load balancing and peak shaving commands from the microgrid controller.
“The Brookville Smart Energy Bus Depot is an achievement not only for resilient public transportation but also in demonstrating the power of integrated technologies to provide sustainable community resources,” said The Mobility House US Managing Director Gregor Hintler. “We offer our ChargePilot system as the link between onsite renewable energy generation and EV consumption.”
“This project serves as a national model for municipalities and private fleet owners across the county to efficiently deploy the charging infrastructure and distributed energy resources that the energy transition requires,” said Juan Macias, CEO of AlphaStruxure. “Thanks to a turnkey Energy as a Service approach, we’ve delivered an integrated bus fleet solution with a resilient energy supply and without upfront costs or financial risks for the county. The Mobility House plays an instrumental role as the interface between the microgrid and vehicles, while reducing operating costs to help make this Energy as a Service model a success.”
Source: The Mobility House
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