Electric cars are increasingly present and have become a sustainable alternative to internal combustion vehicles. However, as they become more popular and their demand increases, questions arise and one of them is battery life and charging time. One answer is the charge balancing in their batteries. Do you know what it is? In this post we tell you.
What is load balancing?
Load balancing, or Dynamic Power Control, is the distribution of electrical energy from an electric car battery across the individual cells of the battery. This helps prevent overcharging, which could damage the battery and reduce its lifespan.
Some electric chargers, such as the Trydan, have built-in charge balancing. When a charging point has this feature, it means that it has the technology to monitor the overall power consumption of the entire site installation, not just the charging point, whether it is a home, a shopping centre or any other environment.
It is nothing more than a technological system that allows charging, using dynamic power management, several vehicles with a set of EV charging points simultaneously, taking into account, of course, the contracted power.
Why use charge balancing?
Electric vehicles usually require a lot of power to be able to charge their batteries. However, in large buildings, the contracted power is derived from the electrical equipment that consumes the most energy, such as lifts, electrical appliances, etc. Therefore, when an electric vehicle charges simultaneously, it can exceed the contracted power limit and endanger the supply to the entire building.
How many types of load balancing are there?
There are different types of dynamic power control.
Single power
This type of load balancing is available on charging points with 1 single connector and monitors the consumption of the house and the charging point as a whole. If the consumption is close to the maximum contracted limits, it reduces the power supplied to the car to avoid causing a power cut due to exceeding the contracted limits.
Load balancing between connectors
This system is similar to the previous one, but works with chargers with more than one connector. What it does is to distribute the energy available for the charging point (that which the home does not consume) between the 2 connectors of the charging point. This means that if a second vehicle is connected to the charging point, the first car that was charging will reduce its power by half.
Between recharging points
This system is somewhat more complex. It is intended for environments where multiple charging points are connected to the same grid and subject to the same upper consumption limit. It has the following characteristics:
- The charging points communicate with each other and send messages to each other to indicate how much energy each one is consuming.
- Autonomously, each charging point adjusts its own consumption, knowing the consumption of its “peers”.
- In this way, between all the charging points, it is ensured that the contracted upper limit is not exceeded.
In the installation in the picture below, there are several charging zones on different floors of a garage. On each floor, there are several recharging points and between the recharging points on the same floor, the power of 22kW cannot be exceeded. Therefore, on each floor we have a different load balancing system between charging points.
As you have seen, load balancing is very beneficial because it avoids overcharging and harnesses energy. Do you already have a recharging point with this system built in?