As a Tesla owner, I am impressed by the company’s latest update to the vehicle app, which provides much more information about the vehicle’s battery, allowing you to not only set the charge level and intensity, but also to charge it using surplus domestically generated solar energy.
The option is called “Drive on sunshine”, and provides a feature for those of us who use solar panels and have additional batteries at home: until now, this was only possible manually, and although it was still reasonably convenient as it could be done from the app, it was relatively laborious: in winter, when the self-sufficiency levels of the house are generally below 50%, it is usual to simply program the charge from the time when the off-peak hours begin and charge the battery to the maximum permitted by the domestic installation, which in my case is 25 amperes. But as the days grow longer in spring and summer and I use my heat pump less, self-sufficiency is practically 100%, and it is common to find the battery fully charged during the day. But as said, taking advantage of the surplus instead of simply giving it to the grid has to be done manually, which involves not only controlling the time as well as regulating the charging intensity (if you charge at maximum intensity during the day, when you are using electricity , it is possible to exceed the limit of your installation).
Since the Tesla app allows the charging current to be changed at any time between the minimum, 5A, and the maximum allowed by the installation in one ampere intervals, it already offered control of the charging process, but it still had to be done manually. The additional home battery, for this purpose, is included in the system as an additional household appliance while it is being charged, which means that vehicle charging takes place when household consumption does not require all the energy generated by the solar panels or that the battery has already been fully charged.
Having a system that can do this automatically is convenient, especially considering that it is a feature that I use a lot. It’s a great feeling to be able to an EV in summer entirely with energy generated by your own solar panels and leaving home every day with a fully charged battery (or at 80%, which is the level we usually charge, except for long journeys).
Some chargers, such as Wallbox’s, incorporate intelligent features that allow charging to be set for when there is a surplus. Huawei’s FusionSolar line has an intelligent assistant, Emma (AI Energy Management Assistant), which performs advanced balancing functions to automatically optimize the charging of devices such as the car, the battery or the backup system (so you don’t run out of power if the supply is interrupted). I’ll probably end up trying it out as well, since both my inverter and my battery are also made by Huawei. In short, a series of advanced functions that can be monitored very easily from a smartphone — I keep SmartSolar open pretty much all the time — for people able to take advantage of the sun’s energy to reduce their dependence on the electricity grid, their bill, and of course their emissions.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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