Peak Shaving is a Power Management setting that helps lower the peak usage of your building.
It's basically the same as Load Balancing, where the maximum current of a group is respected. But with Peak Shaving, you basically lower the maximum current of that group.
In some countries like Belgium, there's a tax for your peak usage, so this may come in handy.
Using Peak Shaving
Power Management settings are set per location, so you find them in the location settings, not in the charger settings. Peak Shaving needs a meter and the Smart license.
App
App
Go to Overview > Energy mode, press Peak Shaving and set the Maximum power.
Web portal
Web portal
Go to Locations, open the location and go to Energy > Power management. Press on the main fuse, open Advanced solar settings and switch on Peak shaving. Set Maximum usage (kW) and, under Apply the limit, choose Every moment or Per quarter hour (capacity tariff).
How does Peak Shaving work?
So the goal is to prevent your building from using too much power at once. We need to know 2 things:
What's the maximum power you want to use?
How much power are you using besides the charger?
To know the second item, there must be a meter installed at the main fuse of your building. This way, we can constantly monitor your power consumption and adjust the charging speed accordingly.
When you use more power in your building, we charge slower. If more power becomes available, we can charge faster.
Example
Let's take the scenario from our Load Balancing article.
Your house's maximum power consumption (main fuse): 25A
Your car's maximum charging speed (car limit): 16A
Your car's minimum charging speed: 6A
So the scenario looks like this:
If we start charging without peak shaving, we will just stay below the 25A maximum of your building's main fuse. In fact, we are just doing Dynamic Load Balancing. This is how that looks:
But let's say you only want to consume a maximum peak of 18A. This maximum is the peak limit (yellow). In the app and the web portal you set this limit as a maximum power in kW; this example uses amps, like the Load Balancing article.
You can see the charger will always try to keep your building below the yellow line. Because the minimum charging speed of your car is 6A, this sometimes means we have to stop charging entirely.
But at 8:30, you are still consuming 20A, so past the limit of 18A. We cannot prevent this, as the charger has already stopped charging. This may happen when all other devices in your building combined are simply using 20A. The charger cannot affect this. In this case, you may want to look at a home battery system or V2G solution.