Trial / Demo
As electric vehicle (EV) adoption continues to accelerate, understanding the impact of charging infrastructure on building energy performance is becoming increasingly important. EV charging can significantly affect electrical demand, peak loads, tariff selection, and decisions around on-site renewables and battery storage. In IESVE, EV charging can be modelled directly within Apache, allowing it to be incorporated into both design and compliance analyses.
Defining EV Charging Demand
The EV Charging tool, allows you to create multiple charging instances, each configured independently. These can represent different charger types, separate charger banks, or varying charging patterns across a site, and can be selected from a range of predefined charger types or created as custom chargers. This flexibility makes it easy to model anything from a small residential charging installation to large commercial charging facilities.
Availability, Sessions and Metering
Each charging instance is assigned an availability profile that determines when charging can occur, including session duration and maximum charging sessions per day. Apache automatically checks these settings and adjusts charging sessions if they extend beyond the available charging period, ensuring realistic operation.
EV charging demand is treated as process energy within the VE and is automatically included in Apache's energy balance and reporting. Where required, dedicated meters can be assigned, allowing EV charging demand to be tracked separately from other building loads.
Realistic Battery Charging Behaviour
Unlike simplified approaches that assume constant charging power, Apache includes a realistic battery charging curve that reflects how EVs behave in practice. This is automatically incorporated into the simulation, to produce representative load profiles and peak demand calculations. The charging curve and other inputs are used to generate detailed charging profiles automatically, removing the need to manually create complex schedules for individual chargers.
Simulation and Results
Once configured, EV charging demand is automatically included when Apache simulations are run, to assess its impact on whole-building energy performance.
Apache uses a precise evaluation mode to accurately capture short-duration charging events, that ensures charging energy is calculated correctly regardless of the simulation timestep. You can still choose reporting intervals to suit project needs: from detailed short timesteps that reveal charging peaks to hourly results that provide a broader overview of demand.
The results can be reviewed in VistaPro using the dedicated EV Charging energy variable, enabling analysis of charging behaviour throughout the year. If separate meters have been assigned, charging demand can also be reviewed independently at meter level.
Integrated Design and Compliance Reporting
Because EV charging is modelled as process energy, it flows seamlessly into both Design and Compliance reports. This provides a consistent approach to assessing the impact of EV infrastructure as part of whole-building energy analysis.
Watch the Video
Watch the full VE Tech Tip video below to see how EV charging can be configured, simulated and reported within IESVE, helping you to accurately assess the impact of EV infrastructure on building performance.
