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BMW Group Technology Office USA and Tendril to demonstrate electric vehicle and smart energy home integration

tendril
Tendril Connect consists of an integrated suite of utility and consumer applications and APIs. Click to enlarge.

Tendril, provider of a cloud-based energy management platform, and the BMW Group Technology Office USA are partnering to build out a demonstration smart energy home in Mountain View, Calif. to prepare for the roll-out and integration of the new BMW ActiveE electric vehicle (EV).

The BMW Group Technology Office USA will use its smart energy home demonstration facility, powered by Tendril, to help refine the charging and monitoring of the ActiveE. Tendril’s cloud-based energy management platform, Tendril Connect, will provide the connectivity to integrate the EV charging station into the home, to local utilities and energy service providers, as well as to BMW. Tendril Energize, a suite of applications including a home energy management web portal, will provide control and monitoring of the charging station.

(Tendril will demonstrate how its cloud platform integrates the BMW ActiveE with the home area network to provide orchestrated and prioritized charging at DistribuTECH taking place 24-26 January in San Antonio, Texas.)

For utilities and energy service providers, Tendril Connect delivers insight into the location of EVs on the grid distribution network so that they can proactively manage hot spots of growth in energy consumption. Utilities also benefit from the ability to communicate with EV owners regarding planned Demand Response (DR) and Direct Load Control (LC) events. The platform also establishes EVs as another manageable load in addition to other components of the home, such as water heaters and smart appliances.

Tendril Connect and Tendril Energize were purpose-built to help utilities, consumers and third party partners adapt and manage the changes coming in the energy industry, including those necessary for the roll-out of electric vehicles. I’m confident our technology will provide the best possible experience to ensure users can easily make the best decisions related to monitoring, understanding and managing their EVs’ energy consumption and that utilities can optimize the grid.

—Adrian Tuck, CEO at Tendril

BMW’s smart energy home will include smart thermostats provided by Tendril, a solar panel installation, home appliances, residential lighting and other smart devices. All of these will be centrally managed by Tendril Connect and accessible via Tendril Energize. BMW and Tendril will integrate a battery charging station, to help manage the intermittent energy produced by the solar panel and to mitigate the home’s impact during periods of peak electricity demand.

Tendril Connect provides the open standards-based communications, extensibility and security necessary to support billions of networked devices. Built from the ground up to handle “big data”, it applies behavioral science expertise and analytics to generate the intelligence from connected devices needed to support the emerging marketplace of new services. It is licensed by 35 customers including top global energy service providers; manufacturers of smart applications and devices, including Whirlpool Corporation; energy leaders, including Siemens Energy; and, nearly all the leading smart meter communications vendors. Highlights of the Connect platform include:

  • Software as a Service (SAAS) model run in a secure SAS 70 audited network operations center (NOC);
  • Open APIs enabling extensibility and third-party application integration;
  • Open standards-based approach supporting freedom of choice with interchangeable technology;
  • Multi-operating system platform supports Windows XP, Linux (Red Hat) and Mac OS X;
  • Mobile device client support for Java-enabled platforms;
  • Horizontally scalable architecture providing high-availability infrastructure and reduced total cost of ownership;
  • Event-driven architecture for real-time data capture, increased processing capacity and efficient throughput;
  • Multi-tier security through standards-based authentication, authorization, and encryption; and
  • High availability through automated failover via redundant or replicated service instances.

Tendril Energize is an application suite that leverages proven behavioral models, so that utilities and ecosystem product and service providers can persistently engage consumers with Energy Efficiency, DR (demand response), and LC (load control) programs to balance loads and optimize generation costs. The company has seen increased demand for its platform and applications, as utilities and energy ecosystem partners look to drive consumer engagement in home energy management.

Comments

A D

It's now the time to recharge these bevs( battery electric vehicles) with solar power. I don't want anyone just plugging the bev and consume nat gas or coal, this is bad for the biosphere. Just make the fill'up with free non-polluting solar power. It is nice in a conversation to say to whoever that you run your car with solar power and that you resale the excess power to the utility.

mahonj

I really wouldn't mix the two.
If you want solar, go ahead.
If you have excess, feed it back into the grid.

If you want an EV, go ahead - and charge it with whatever power you have in the wall socket.

[ If you are like most people, you will work during the day and bring your car with you, far from your EV cells. So you have to sell the power to the grid.
When you get home, it is evening and there is little or no solar, so you have to charge from the grid. ]

At the weekend, you could charge directly from PV, but it all seems a little decoupled to me.

Arne

mahonj,

Indeed, it can be decoupled. The penetration of PV and other variable renewable sources is still relatively low and will remain so for the forseeable future. The grid will always be able to accept your solar power and throttle back a fossil plant. Mission accomplished.

Thre is no need to charge your car at exactly the same time as your pv panels produce power. Would this be necessary, it could be done relatively simple. The basic technology is all there. It is just a matter of information exchange between your PV system and your car.

Anyway, the best option of course is letting the grid operator throttle the charging of EV's.

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