Stuttgart Airport has purchased an electric vehicle charging system from Mahle startup chargeBIG for employee and vehicle fleet parking areas.

The customer said it was making best use of its existing infrastructure rather than needing to invest extensively in network expansion.

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Mahle said chargeBIG wants to decrease bottlenecks in the power supply and enable rapid development of an extensive charging infrastructure.

The basic idea is a centralised, scalable charging infrastructure for short-term parking lot users and fleet operators.

"The bottlenecks in the charging process are caused by spikes in power delivery rather than the energy that is actually available. We use intelligent load distribution to take advantage of this situation," said Sebastian Ewert, head of project management Europe at Mahle and chargeBIG.

The installation of the 110 airport charging points is under way with partner Eliso.

External area and parking facilities are done and charging points are currently being fitted to wall and column mountings on the apron.

The system uses single-phase AC destination charging with charging outputs of between 2.3 and 7.2 kilowatts and consists of a central, intelligent control unit with permanently mounted cables and connector plugs instead of charging columns. There is no need to invest in expanding the network connection, resulting in substantial cost and time savings during the development of the charging infrastructure.

The  central control unit distributes the available charging capacity across the parked vehicles using dynamic, phase-specific load management. This prevents unbalanced loads in the power supply.

The system responds flexibly to other consumers on the network and uses the electric vehicles as a controllable load. This ensures optimal use of available power supply.

The system also is more convenient to install and maintain than alternative systems because the charging points can be monitored via the central electronics.

The charging points are also switched off when not in use – a safety feature.

Mahle said the system suited ideally for around 20 to 100 parking spaces and is infinitely scalable. It is recommended for locations with a large number of electric vehicles which are parked for long periods of time, such as businesses, airports, and park and ride schemes.