Hi @evcharlie
We’re very excited about EV’s and a low carbon transportation future. Both I and co-founder @TrystanLea Leaf drive Nissan Leafs.
The reporting niche is an interesting idea. We have the capability to to monitor the energy consumption and post the data to Emoncms. It was be trivial in software to be able to determine the charge start and end time based on the power consumption. The tricky part would be making it billing grade and tamper proof. This main issues I see are:
- Our CT based monitors have not been approved for billing grade monitoring
- Out system usually uses WiFi to upload, which may or may not be reliable depending on the installed location and being at the mercy of the companies IT infrastructure. GSM would probably be a better upload method, this increases cost and complexity.
How long do you think the OLEV grant and associated reporting requirements will be around for? My concern if we spend the next 12 months developing a bespoke solution only for the OLEV grant and reporting to be stopped! I personally think the benefits of installing EV charger are strong enough without any grant, especially as costs reduce. Do you think that the OLEV grants been helping to keep prices of charging station installations artificially high?
Recently we have been involved in developing the OpenEVSE charging station and software to link the station to our energy monitoring platform to allow the charging station to modulate the charging rate based on the excess solar PV generation as well as logging data to Emoncms directly from the charging station. The OpenEVSE is fully tested to USA standards, we would really like to get it approved here in the UK for the OLEV grant. We’re yet to publicise the solar PV diversion features since it’s still in beta but almost ready for a stable release, see forum thread:
https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/integrations/openevse/
Are you familiar with the OLEV certification process? I’m happy to have a chat please send me a PM or call our office, the phone number is on our website https://megni.co.uk