EnergyAustralia, Planet Ark Power partner on smart charging

Andrew Theodore from Planet Ark Power and Jack Kotlyar from EnergyAustralia
Andrew Theodore from Planet Ark Power and Jack Kotlyar from EnergyAustralia

Power company EnergyAustralia and Planet Ark Power (PAP) are partnering to provide safe, reliable, and affordable smart energy charging solutions for the Australian transport industry.

This will see electrification projects EnergyAustralia undertakes with PAP have onsite solar and battery and charging, enabled by PAP’s eleXsys energy management platform. The eleXsys platform will help reduce grid connection costs and maximise the value of the solar, battery and charging energy.

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By working together, EnergyAustralia and PAP will support the transport industry’s electrification by reducing grid connection complexities, lowering demand charges and achieving faster charging.

EnergyAustralia head of nextgen Jack Kotlyar said, “We want to be the one place our customers can come for all their electric vehicle charging infrastructure and decarbonisation requirements. Our partnership with PAP will help ensure customers get an end-to-end charging and energy infrastructure solution that is safe, reliable, and affordable. 

“As we support our customers moving from diesel and petrol to electric vehicles through depot charging solutions, we know that often customers have multiple sites in need of charging infrastructure, each requiring its own set of solar, battery and charging set up.

“With Planet Ark Power, EnergyAustralia will optimise the solar to ensure our customers obtain improved returns whether the solar is going to charger, battery or being exported to the grid. Chargers that are being used for the fleet, can also be opened to the public, providing a new income stream for our customers.

“One of the biggest challenges for energy network operators transitioning to clean energy is managing fluctuating volatility and grid instability. PAP’s eleXsys technology allows us to stabilise the grid connection to these sites helping us provide ongoing safe and stable energy to our customers,” Kotlyar said.

Distributed energy can be one of the most efficient forms of energy generation and storage. PAP’s energy management technology not only assists with voltage regulation but is built to enable microgrids so that other people can share in that renewable energy. PAP’s technology will help EnergyAustralia convert each of these depots into microgrids maximising the use of renewable energy generated and stored.

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“We are excited to be part of this journey with EnergyAustralia, as it accelerates the clean energy transformation in transport,” Planet Ark Power CEO Peter Newland said.

In June this year, PAP partnered with South Australia’s Commercial Retail Group to launch its first electric vehicle charging hub at the Pasadena Shopping Centre. It will be operational in early 2023 and the first and largest of its kind in the state. The project, worth $3 million, has been partly funded by the South Australian Government as part of its Electric Vehicle Smart Charging Trial.

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