Mätning och Styrning Eleffekt Trollhättan Living Lab (2026)

Mätning och styrning av eleffekt i en del av Trollhättan — Erfarenheter från Living Lab. An 18-page experience report on a real smart-EV-charging load-control pilot (“Living Lab”) run in a mixed industrial/residential area of Trollhättan. This is the full report behind Source - Energikontor Vast Smart Laddning Trollhattan (web), which summarises it.

Producers: Innovatum Science Park, Trollhättan Energi and Kraftstaden Fastigheter, with support from Fyrbodals kommunalförbund and Högskolan Väst

Funding: co-financed by Energimyndigheten through the research and innovation programme Framtidens elsystem, part of the “Fyrbodal för framtidens flex” initiative

Summary

The project tests whether demand flexibility can raise usable grid capacity in an industrial area of Trollhättan without large grid investment. The test area — a “ministad” (“mini-town”) the report considers representative of many Swedish municipalities and industrial areas — combines industry, homes, schools, sports facilities and services near about 5,000 people, with about 3,000 vehicle movements a day, over 1,500 smart meters (15-minute resolution for several years) and about 30 monitoring stations. Annual energy use exceeds 40 GWh and peak demand exceeds 10 MW. On Tuesday 16 January 2024, 07:00–13:00, a cold day when temperature fell from −10°C to −22°C, the area’s total subscribed (economic, not technical) capacity was exceeded — no outage resulted, but it illustrated the risk of overtrassering fees. EV charging demand already exceeds 4 MW with over 100 charge points, expected to grow with electrification.

Method: charging was controlled via open APIs (not OCPP) developed with Ngenic, initially using Zaptec chargers. Energy meters were connected via the HAN port for 10-second-resolution real-time data. Testing ran in three escalating loops:

Key claims

1. Peak reduced by at least 10%, the project’s stated target, achieved through smart control and flexibility; individual charging sessions were reduced by over 80% in some cases, though scaling this to a full rollout needs adaptation per industrial area.
2. Charging control works without hurting the user experience. No EV owner reported negative feedback; charging always completed as needed, since the infrastructure is not fast-charging and users have no expectation of full power throughout a session.
3. 99.9% of controllable resources were successfully controlled, but full power in the area could not be reduced to zero if control at the feed-in point was to be kept, because some car models abort the session entirely at 0 A rather than pausing.
4. Business models and conditional agreements for dynamic power allocation remain limited. Demand for flexibility among customers has so far been too low to establish a functioning market-based flexibility market in the area, though the report expects growing interest over the next five years; a local flexibility market is assessed as currently economically challenging to establish, and the coming power-based network tariff component is expected to push that need out somewhat further.
5. An estimated 20–40% potential increase in the number of chargers the area could support, from coordinating dependent charging clusters so their combined grid impact is limited.
6. Older chargers without open interfaces or OCPP support could not be included in the control scheme, underlining the importance of standardised technology and open APIs as a procurement requirement, not an afterthought.
7. System benefit is real but not yet market-priced: deferred or avoided new distribution substations and grid build-out, property owners able to add charge points within an existing subscription, and better DSO control of capacity utilisation.

Actor roles and outcomes (Table 2)

Limitations and challenges (stated by the report)

• Installation problems occurred (a wiring fault in loop 1 meant no power could be measured at one property until corrected).
• Only meters with open HAN ports could be connected easily; larger meters needed special equipment and more extensive handling, complicating real-time measurement and ongoing control.
• Car models varied significantly in behaviour at zero power and at power restoration, which the report attributes to vehicle logic rather than the charging infrastructure.
• Many participating companies had limited knowledge of flexibility and were reluctant to let control touch resources tied to production or operations, so testing in practice focused on EV charging rather than business processes.
• Substantial outreach (breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, information sessions) was needed to build understanding and participation.
• The report explicitly frames current willingness-to-pay/demand for flexibility as too low, at this stage, to support a market-based local flexibility market in the area.

Relevance to wiki topics