Project Summary
Isles of Scilly Community Venture will create an opensource, dynamic charge management system for rural sustainable mobility hubs, integrating community car sharing, microgeneration and vehicle charging in order to minimise operating costs. The idea is to make rural mobility hubs more financially viable for delivery by local government, the third sector and community groups, helping
to ensure that rural areas are not left behind in the transition to sustainable transport.
Project Achievements
The project successfully developed a prototype open source dynamic charge management system and integrated with a range of micro-generation and shared mobility infrastructure from a variety of different hardware vendors. The effectiveness of this prototype system was demonstrated both in a lab environment using historical data from various different rural mobility hubs, as well as in a real-world test deployment across a number of different rural mobility hubs on the Isles of Scilly.
Conclusions
The combination of short term trials on real-world infrastructure and modelled outcomes using longer term (12 months+) of real-world measured data showed the potential for a 50-90% reduction in electricity costs at various archetypal rural shared mobility hubs over the course of a full calendar year. Modelling also demonstrated that where larger solar arrays (10kWp+) are present or where cost-effective export tariffs can be secured, the operational cost pressure of electricity can be further reduced into negative territory.
Next Steps
The next steps for this project are to continue technical development and integration of a wider variety of rural mobility hub hardware, to develop collaborations and partnerships with the e-mobility supply chain, to enhance the innovation within the system through academic collaborations, to conduct a wider range of real-world testing, and ultimately to bring a finished product to market that can deliver the benefits observed in this trial to community mobility hub operators more widely.
