Transferium Deuterstraat – An energy management ecosystem
The implementation of a smart electric vehicle charging solution by Netherlands-based provider GreenFlux in the park-and-ride Transferium Deuterstraat in the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch has been a key element in transforming the newly-built facility into what is potentially the greenest parking garage in the world. The deployment also provides a model for the growing number of such facilities in other cities in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere.
This feature article was originally published in The Global Power & Energy Elites 2022
The park-and-ride facility Transferium Deuterstraat in the central Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, known as Den Bosch, has over the past four years been transformed into an ‘energy management ecosystem’ and one of the green buildings of the country.
The initiative, the Dutch demonstration of the EU CONNECT project, on new power conversion technologies for connecting buildings to the grid, was founded on the desire to create a complete energy management system solution. The aim was to integrate electric vehicle (EV) charging, renewables, building/ garage energy consumption and battery storage that was smart, scalable, and interoperable.
Thus, it has encompassed many distinct aspects, with the Transferium demonstration site integrating a vast amount of solar panels, a power converter, stationary battery storage, a high-power city bus charger and 26 charge points for electric vehicles. Buses, passenger vehicles and the Transferium itself can draw power either directly from the solar panels, the building grid, the stationary battery, or any combination of these, depending on demand and the state of charge of the battery.
During the day, EVs take energy from solar panels and when demand rises, additional power is taken from the stationary battery and eventually the grid.
A cloud-based smart energy management platform, provided by Dutch solution provider GreenFlux, acts as the ‘brain’ behind this ecosystem and ensures a balance between energy generation and demand.
Lennart Verheijen, Head of Innovation at GreenFlux, comments that when the project started in 2017, a lot of individual solutions were available for individual problems. However, while there were some initiatives to couple them together, these were not scalable due to the lack of interoperability of equipment from different suppliers.
“We decided to connect everything to the cloud environment in the CONNECT project and make each ‘talk’ to everything else. This helped us create an ecosystem that can be duplicated in other situations with different manufacturers and other topologies.”
Read the full project feature here
