Power management company Eaton is launching a suite of hardware, software and services that can transform buildings into energy hubs that extract benefit from on-site renewable generation.

Its buildings-as-a-grid approach to energy transition and electric vehicle charging has been enhanced following the recent acquisition of Switzerland- based Green Motion, a designer and manufacturer of electric vehicle charging hardware and related software. 

Eaton has taken an everything-as-a-grid approach to the energy transition to help users accelerate decarbonisation, boost resilience, reduce energy costs and create revenue streams. For building owners, by managing the building energy system as a grid, Eaton can transform facilities into energy hubs that manage existing electrical infrastructure and plan for future energy needs. This is what is meant by buildings-as-a-grid.

If building owners instead choose an ad hoc approach bolting on EV chargers to existing infrastructure, they risk encountering power management difficulties and grid upgrade costs when they need to increase capacity to meet demand. This could happen quickly as the switch to EVs gathers momentum: EV sales in Europe grew by more than 140% in 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, and the number of EVs globally is expected to jump from 8.5 million in 2020 to 116 million in 2030.

The buildings-as-a-grid approach constitutes a comprehensive and integrated energy transition offer for building owners and comprises three systems: EV charging, energy management and power distribution. Together these allow building owners to monitor and optimise the energy performance of their building and securely control energy assets.

This is what the three systems do:

• EV charging: this is grid-connected EV charging hardware and software that provides service for EV charging users, as well as supporting dynamic charging and pricing;
• Energy management: this improves the resilience of a building’s electrical infrastructure and supports growing requirements for EV charging capacity in the building by providing demand-side flexibility. This is achieved with energy management software that manages energy flows among flexible energy assets that could include EV chargers, energy storage systems, solar inverters and physical controls for heat pumps and boilers. 
• Power distribution: manages electrical power distribution and protection.

Eaton’s Europe wide network of support, field service and application engineers and partners can help building owners not only design and optimise their on-site electrical systems to integrate EV charging points but also operate and maintain their system.

Building owners and operators are facing a growing need to monitor and optimise their energy consumption as they add more electrical loads such as EVs as well as new sources of on-site generation and even storage. The energy management software automatically optimises the control of connected assets according to different user-defined goals, including reducing electricity bills and carbon footprint and increasing consumption of renewables. 

The combination of energy storage and energy management software offers multiple benefits: it can be added without the costly civil engineering works often associated with grid upgrades and it allows users to store off-peak energy and any self-generated renewable power they can make available from sources such as on-site solar photovoltaic (PV) generation. Stored low-cost power can be used at times of expensive peak demand, saving money and benefitting the environment because it enables what’s known as peak shaving, that is reducing the load on the grid to prevent it being switched to carbon-intensive fossil fuel power, which may be all that is available when demand is at its heaviest.

The energy management software is the glue of the system from power generation sources to EV charging and buildings loads or energy storage. It helps building owners monitor the energy performance of their buildings and securely control energy assets according to financial or business-driven needs, objectives and sustainability goals.

Eaton’s acquisition of Green Motion has yielded a range of EV chargers, together with billing and management software that will provide building owners with a suite of options to fulfil their specific EV charging requirements within ecosystems that Eaton will engineer to meet their needs. This includes managing EV chargers, balancing the load to ensure a smooth experience, enabling billing and customer authentication, and generating revenues.

For businesses, workplaces and residential developments such as apartment blocks, where multi-user EV charging must be balanced to distribute power load efficiently, the approach is said to be pragmatic, cyber-secure, flexible and scalable.

“With the acquisition of Green Motion, no other company on the market has such as a comprehensive and integrated energy transition offer for building owners,” said Fabrice Roudet, head of energy storage and EV charging at Eaton. “Our buildings-as-a-grid approach helps building owners to integrate on-site renewables and address challenges related to the electrification of transport and heat. Additionally, it enables building owners to play an important role in facilitating and optimising the transition to a high renewable energy system.”

He said the electrification of transport and heat would place ever growing demands on distribution networks as more loads were added at the edge. Bloomberg NEF modelling shows the cost of grid upgrades to cope with mass electrification can be reduced when electricity generated and stored behind the meter can also be used to support local grids.

“For this to work, governments and regulators must urgently enable the deep and transparent flexibility markets needed to unlock private investment,” he said.

Francois Randin, CEO of Green Motion, added: “Eaton and Green Motion form an ideal partnership capable of meeting the challenges presented by the rapid adoption of EVs. Green Motion has proven industry leading EV charging points and operating software. Together with Eaton, building owners can now be assured that they can meet the challenge presented by electric vehicle adoption in a pragmatic and flexible way.”

Eaton’s 2020 revenues were $17.9bn, and it sells products in more than 175 countries. It has approximately 92,000 employees.

Based in Switzerland, Green Motion has been pioneering the design and production of charging systems for electric vehicles since 2009. It manufactures charging stations, designs management software for charging networks, operates charging stations and serves as an electric mobility service provider.