New Zealand's first electric bus depot

OSCP-based load control for EV chargers
30 January 2023

NZ Bus is New Zealand’s largest urban public transport business and operator of metropolitan bus services, and operates New Zealand’s first electric bus depot , in Panmure, Auckland. The depot houses 35 electric buses with 18 chargers. As the depot was being developed, the local electric grid operator, Vector , was in the process of deploying a dynamic load-control system based on the OSCP protocol, and needed NZ Bus to integrate the bus depot’s chargers with this system in order to manage the overall health of the electrical grid.

At a high level Vector’s OSCP-based system would work like this:

  1. Vector sends grid constraint forecasts to NZ Bus every few minutes, informing NZ Bus the maximum amount of power it should use at the depot over the coming hours
  2. NZ Bus adapts the schedule of the depot’s chargers to stay within the grid constraints, such as reducing the power drawn by individual chargers
  3. NZ Bus reports back to Vector actual metered energy usage details to confirm the depot is meeting the grid constraints

Having worked with SolarNetwork Foundation on other projects, EVisi again recognised that the SolarNetwork platform would provide a solid foundation on which to address NZ Bus’s needs. They approached SolarNetwork Foundation to help develop new and enhanced features to meet the needs of the OSCP integration in the NZ Bus project.

The challenge

The result

SolarNetwork Foundation developed an OSCP “Flexibility Provider” feature for the SolarNetwork platform that provides the integration with Vector’s load control system. The OSCP messages are passed to EVisi, and EVisi uses already existing SolarNetwork API methods to control with the depot’s chargers as needed. A SolarNode deployed at the depot collects metered energy usage from on-site meters and then SolarNetwork automatically reports that usage back to Vector via the OSCP protocol.

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