Barcelona: Towards Zero-Emission Fleets
The Challenge
TMB is the public transport operator of the city of Barcelona. Over the last years, the organization has implemented an electrification plan for their bus fleet that is becoming more and more ambitious. These are some of the challenges TMB is facing:
- Lack of visibility over e-bus charging peak loads and costs.
- Unknown potential of the amount of e-buses a depot (or an on-street charging station) can serve.
- Limited power capacity at their depots to provide charging for the full e-bus fleet.
The Solution
- EV load modelling tool to generate historic and future load curves based on TMB’s real charging data.
- Charging costs and peak load tracking system for historic charging sessions.
- Simulation scenarios with 3-4x more e-buses with different combinations of chargers to understand the impact on the electrical installation, on their fleet operations (delays), and on their electricity bill.
- Assessment of the impact of Bia’s smart charging algorithms (versus unmanaged charging).
- Deployment of the Optimized EV charging platform on a subset of chargers of one of TMB’s depots (with up to 30 ebuses).
Making an impact
- 80% reduction of peak loads with Bia’s smart charging platform, allowing TMB to charge 5 times more buses without retrofitting the electrical installation. This results in more than 20.000 € of yearly power subscription savings for a 30 e-bus depot.
- A fully defined strategy for the installation of new on-street chargers to avoid delays.
80
%
reduction of peak loads
20,000
€
of yearly power subscription savings for a 30 e-bus depot
Lessons learnt
- Accurate monitoring of EV charging is key to cost-effectively manage a fleet.
- Smart charging becomes mandatory when a significant part of the fleet is electrified to ensure their daily operations.
- Incentivize e-bus charging when power capacity is available from other energy systems and from the grid (i.e. TMB benefits from additional power available between 1 and 4am from the subway system of the city).
- Interoperability across all charger brands is key for the electrification of fleets.
- Data management and simulations are key to efficiently plan the fleet (and charging infrastructure) growth.
