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Intertrust Helps Figure Out The Most Efficient Locations For Public EV Charging Hotspots

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One of the biggest hurdles facing mass adoption of electric vehicles is the perceived lack of accessible charging infrastructure, say leaders with Intertrust Technologies.

Electric vehicle (EV) owners may have a charger in their garage. But many EV owners rely solely on publicly available EV chargers. And even those with garage chargers may need a boost while they’re out and about.

Distribution service operators (the people in charge of networks that provide the power to charge electric vehicles) have no way of predicting the best places to put EV charging hotspots. If only they had access to data for such a task.

Enter Intertrust, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

The company’s platform allows utilities and governments to securely share grid data with third parties. This way, when planning for distributed energy resources such as EV charging stations or solar panels, planners can determine if the grid can support such resources and learn about associated costs or upgrades.

Intertrust is putting its technology to use in Ohio.

Clean Fuels Ohio, part of a statewide initiative dedicated to advancing the adoption of electric vehicles in the state, is using the Intertrust Platform to plan Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) stations along the I-80 corridor in Ohio.

The work is part of the I-80 Mid-America Alternative Fuel Corridor project, led by Argonne National Laboratory and Illinois Department of Transportation, and spans the length of I-80 from New Jersey through Iowa, to the border at Omaha, Nebraska.

“For cities to effectively plan the installation of networks of EV charging stations, they need access to a number of data sources,” explains Jenna Ellingson, project manager with Clean Fuels Ohio.

“These can be most easily consumed via a map-based visual interface that shows city planners such information as clustered parking spots that have easier access to the grid assets needed to support EV charging stations (electrical distribution lines, transformers, etc.), locations of installed EV charging stations, their operational status, nearby buildings, traffic and charging patterns of plug-in vehicles, demographic data and other information.

“Intertrust Platform allows these multiple data sources to be easily accessed and ensures that only municipal planners and other stakeholders with proper permissions can access them.”

By being able to quickly access information, planners and installers can speed up their work and avoid potentially high “soft costs” (such as permitting, marketing, negotiations with land/building owners), says Chris Kalima, Intertrust’s vice president of product management.

“In many cases, utilities keep grid data in separate physical locations and formats,” Kalima says.

“If the utility is not using an Intertrust Platform supported application, this can cause delays as the utility has to determine where the data is located, query the data and make sure they can securely and legally share the data with the requestor. There have been reports that this could take up to a month or so, contributing to high soft costs and even some EV charging station locations being abandoned.” 

For the EV owner and driver, all of technology means a smoother ride.

Reducing costs and time to plan the installation of EV charging stations leads to a quicker roll out of stations, giving drivers an increasing number of choices of where to charge, Kalima says.

Ellingson says Clean Fuels Ohio will use the Intertrust Platform and incorporated datasets to inform the planning of DCFC stations along the I-80 corridor in Ohio.

“The future charging stations will be accessible to individual motorists, municipalities, fleet adopters, and other end-users both in the areas surrounding the I-80 corridor and users traversing the corridor,” Ellingson says.

“This will help I-80 from New Jersey through Iowa become designated as ‘corridor-ready’ by the Department of Transportation, meaning fleets and individual motorists using EVs will have accessible charging along the entire length of the corridor.”

Kalima says Intertrust is working with a number of other companies in the United States on similar projects. But for now, he can only refer to Ohio, along with ongoing work with an international energy company based in Germany (see a case study here).

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