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There are great positive impacts that could be made every day by changing the way we use electricity. Luckily, if you have an Ohme EV charger at home, optimising your charging while contributing to a balanced and greener grid is easy.
Ohme’s chargers can communicate with the National Grid in real-time and adjust the power of your charger into your EV depending on times of high and low electricity demand.
All Ohme chargers feature built-in load balancing to automatically adjust their output alongside other home appliances. Demand on the grid is inevitably growing as EV ownership grows. Ohme’s smart technology allows us to adjust the power into your car, meeting your charging goals, while also helping to meet electricity demand and provide energy flexibility.
Energy flexibility refers to the ability to adjust supply and demand, so they always balance. On any typical day, there are highs and lows of electricity use across the UK. There can be morning peaks in demand (usually when people are getting to work, make a cup of tea, or have a shower) and other peaks can be in the evening (when people arrive from work, cook dinner, or turn on home appliances).
In the same way, not many people use a lot of electricity in the middle of the night – or indeed the middle of the day. These are, you’ve guessed it, the periods of low demand on the grid.
So we’ve learned that energy flexibility is about trying to shift some of the high demand into those periods of low demand. The challenge is how can we do that. It’s not realistic to cook your dinner at 3 am, but with Ohme’s smart charging technology, we can shift charging your car into those low demand periods, which then helps the overall balance of supply and demand.
Why does that matter? With more flexibility on the grid, it means that there won’t be a need to invest in generating and supplying more energy. Instead, we can just distribute the existing capacity in a smart way which will help everyone save a bit of money.
The Ohme server communicates with the electricity grid which allows you to charge when carbon intensity is at its lowest.
When the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and lots of renewable energy is being generated, Ohme can start charging to fill up your car with that excess energy that can’t otherwise be stored on the grid. When lots of households and businesses are using electricity at the same time, Ohme can stop charging so that fossil fuel generators don’t need to be fired up to keep up with demand.
Everyone benefits from that too. Increasing the use of renewable energy, not only makes for a cleaner electricity grid, but could also reduce costs for the energy suppliers. Creating a knock-on effect on your future bills too.
As we just mentioned, long term, the increased use of flexibility when charging your EV will help reduce the need for network reinforcement, which means lower energy bills for everyone, and a cleaner electricity grid.
Last winter, 1.6 million households participated in the National Grid System Operator’s new Demand Flexibility Service which encourages consumers to use less electricity when lots of households and businesses are using electricity at the same time. The service saw 3,300MWH of electricity saved – enough energy to power approximately 10 million homes across Great Britain.
As Ohme enters several exciting flexibility projects, drivers taking part can receive rewards of varying levels by doing something as simple as plugging in their cars and helping us learn the best ways to help balance the grid.
