SolarCharge is a platform for local businesses and community organisations to share excess solar energy with their employees, customers and wider community through smart EV charging.
How local rooftop solar can charge your EV, cheaply
Drive on sunshine.
Rooftop solar often makes more power than the site needs
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When a business or community organisation installs rooftop solar, the panels sometimes generate far more electricity than the site can use. That extra power gets exported to the grid — or if the grid won't take it, it simply goes to waste.
SolarCharge turns that excess into cheap EV charging
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Instead of that power going to waste, the site offers it to you — to charge your plug-in EV, at a price well below other public chargers.
How it works - for EV drivers
When a local business or community organisation installs solar panels on the roof of their building, those solar panels will sometimes generate more electricity than the site owner can use - sometimes much more!
When this happens, the site owner exports that excess electricity to the grid, or if the grid won’t accept the electricity, it goes to waste.
SolarCharge allows these local organisations to offer that electricity to you to charge your plug-in EV, at a price that’s much lower than other public EV chargers.
These smart EV chargers track how much excess electricity the host site is generating and turns the charge that’s going into your plug-in EV up or down to match it. If clouds roll in or the site needs a lot of electricity for a period of time, the charger can stop charging until there’s plenty of solar power being generated again.
The sun doesn’t always shine, but when it does, you’re lightening the load of your EV charging on both your wallet and the national grid!
And because we know that sometimes you just need to get where you’re going, there is also the option to charge from the grid like other public chargers.
SolarCharge makes EV charging look like seasonal produce - cheap when it’s abundant, more expensive when it’s not.
Benefits
For host sites
Improved onsite utilisation of solar energy
Faster payback periods of clean energy assets
Provide EV charging for customers and employees
Contribute to community resilience
For EV drivers
More low cost charging options away from home
Share in the abundance of solar energy (even if you don’t have it at home)
Greater energy security through V2L (and eventually V2H) technology
For the grid
Additional charging infrastructure available
Reduced pressure from excess solar during the day
Reduced pressure from EV charging at night
Enhanced community resilience