The Mobility House North America has unveiled a new vehicle-to-grid integration platform for utilities. Cascade EV Aggregator is an EV load aggregation tool that enables charging and discharging optimization across a variety of charger and vehicle asset classes, from home chargers to electric school bus fleets.

“Electric vehicle batteries can play a substantial role in meeting the tremendous challenge of load growth on the electrical grid,” said Greg Hintler, CEO of The Mobility House North America. “The Mobility House is committed to developing the technology that harmonizes EV charging with reliable grid operations.”

A recent report from BNEF forecasted that total EV battery capacity in the US will reach 4 TWh in the next ten years, which would make them the largest Distributed Energy Resource (DER) if aggregated and optimized.

The Mobility House’s Cascade is designed to optimize charging flexibility. A charge management system (CMS) such as The Mobility House’s ChargePilot manages charging optimization for a fleet operator, but Cascade can work with each CMS at thousands of sites to create flexibility for the distribution grid.

Cascade EV Aggregator enables EVs to serve as energy storage assets and provide energy services such as demand response, dynamic rate optimization and grid constraint management. The platform can manage both unidirectional smart charging to incentivize load shifting (V1G) and bidirectional vehicle-to-grid (V2G) chargers exporting power from EV batteries to the grid. Cascade receives real-time signals from utilities or market programs and engages EV fleet charge management systems and residential chargers across a service area.

Cascade is being used to enable V2G features for school bus fleets currently being deployed in California, Massachusetts and New York.

“The electric school buses in our fleet work hard every day to get students to school safely,” said Ernest Epley, Transportation Director, Fremont Unified School District. “And now as a part of The Mobility House’s Cascade Aggregator they can earn revenue for the district supporting the energy grid while they are parked at the depot.”

Source: The Mobility House