Turkey’s energy regulator has scrapped restrictions on electricity storage systems built into electric vehicle charging stations, allowing sites to offer higher-power charging without upgrading their grid connections.
The Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) said storage facilities integrated with charging stations can now be installed with a higher charging output than the station’s contracted capacity.
Under the previous rules, the installed power of an integrated storage facility was capped at the contracted capacity of the consumption site. The regulator said this had limited the effective use of storage investments, particularly at high-power charging stations.
The new rules allow operators who want to install storage with a discharge capacity above their contracted capacity, and to supply their charging units from it, to do so.
To protect the grid, operators will be required to install automatic power control and cut-off systems that prevent energy from being fed back into the network and stop consumption from exceeding the existing contracted capacity.
The EPDK said storage-equipped charging stations could offer an alternative to costly grid investment at every location. This is particularly the case where new transformers and connections are expensive, where peak charging demand is high or where queues form.
It said storage could help keep the power drawn from the grid within contracted limits during short periods of high demand, while allowing stations to install higher-capacity charging equipment. It could also make more efficient use of the existing distribution infrastructure.
The regulator gave the example of a site where the contracted capacity is not enough to meet the peak demand of a high-power station. There, a storage system could take energy from the grid during quiet periods and use it to support charging when demand rises, covering the power needed when several vehicles charge at high speed at the same time.
The EPDK said demand for high-power charging was growing as electric vehicles become more widespread, particularly on motorways, at service areas, at fuel stations and in busy commercial areas. Providing the grid capacity for such sites could in some locations require new network and transformer investment.
The regulator said it expected the change to give charging network operators greater flexibility, allowing them to weigh a site’s grid connection capacity, investment costs and charging demand when choosing between increasing grid capacity and investing in storage.
It added that this would make it possible to install fast, high-power charging in more locations, and would encourage the combined use of charging infrastructure and storage technology.
