Heriot Watt University and City of Edinburgh Council wanted to establish a shared wireless charging hub as part of a technology demonstration project. The Heriot Watt campus was selected for the hub because of its proximity to locations in which the council vehicles were operating during the day.

The challenge

Unfortunately, the best location for the hub on campus was power constrained. This meant the wireless chargers would have had to run at half power doubling the amount of time vans would have to take for charging.

The solution

FPS designed, specified, installed, and commissioned a battery system. The battery would charge during times of low power consumption at the site. The battery was also integrated into the wireless charging equipment. When this was activated, the battery would discharge, reducing the amount of electric load required.

Impact

The solution was successfully deployed and allowed power output from the wireless charging equipment to be doubled without requiring a costly and time-consuming grid upgrade. The impact of doubling the charging power was to reduce time taken to reach 80% of charge to about three hours from ten hours. The only other way of achieving this would have been to request a connection upgrade to the site which could have cost between £15-20k and taken nine months.