An Ottawa-based artificial intelligence company says its EV charging management platform can help utilities manage rising electricity demand by using flexible charging to provide grid capacity, limiting the need for costly infrastructure.

“When just 33% of Canada’s current one million EVs get on the platform, it offers grids across the country approximately 2.5 gigawatts of power capacity and 20 gigawatt-hours of storage capacity—which is enough to power the entire British Columbia grid for two hours alone,” Devashish Paul, CEO and founder of BluWave-ai, said in a release.

“This turns a potential grid liability into a massive, distributed battery that can be dispatched whenever the system is under stress.”

BluWave’s EV Everywhere platform is a smartphone app that helps EV owners manage their vehicle charging habits. It launched in 2022 as a pilot in Ottawa, in collaboration with Hydro Ottawa, co-funded by Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator and supported by the Ontario Energy Board.

EV owners can use the app to pause and resume charging sessions and access insights into their charging habits, while receiving recommendations to maximize grid benefits, such as charging when renewable energy is available or when overall electricity demand is lower, Hydro Ottawa explains.

On the other side of the charger, the platform supports utility operations using “grid-aware” modelling. It issues “grid smart events” that use predictive technology to anticipate periods of high electricity demand and automatically pause EV charging. EV owners are notified during these events and can opt out.

Now, with two years of deployment under its belt, BluWave released findings about the app’s performance. The release claims that EV Everywhere offers grid stability benefits without new infrastructure and is roughly “55 times more capital-efficient than deploying equivalent utility-scale battery storage,” with the potential to defer infrastructure costs at a value of C$2.3 million to $7.9 million per 1,000 EVs, depending on local grid conditions.

The system also reduced peak demand by up to 32% by managing the surge of EVs that would otherwise start charging all at the same time, like when low overnight rate periods begin in Ontario.

Consumers were largely receptive to the platform’s demand management efforts, with only 4% opting out of the smart grid events.

Thomas Triplet, BluWave’s vice president of technology, said the outcomes show that utilities should prioritize managing EV charging as the primary alternative to installing more infrastructure “due to its superior capital efficiency relative to battery storage.”

He said integrating EV Everywhere with the company’s energy storage optimizer allows EVs and battery energy storage systems to be pooled into a single energy storage resource available to utilities and system operators, reducing peak EV charging demand by up to 35% and by an average of 21.7%.