Staff of State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company inspect charging piles in Nanping service area of Nanchuan District-Wansheng District expressway in southwest China's Chongqing. (Photo by Wuli)
BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua) -- State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company has been promoting the construction of charging infrastructure for new energy vehicles (NEVs) in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality in recent years.
Chongqing is an important producer and consumer of NEVs in China. At present, the total number of NEVs in Chongqing has exceeded 300,000.
State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company has built a total of 3,434 charging piles in the municipality, including 572 charging piles covering 90 percent of the city's expressways.
In order to ensure the efficient and safe operation of charging piles, the company launched a smart operation and maintenance system for charging facilities in 2022. The system can quickly detect 15 types of faults such as charging failure in a smart way and from remote distance, and automatically generate alarms within 15 seconds. Compared with regular manual inspections to find faults and then handle them, the system has a 60.2 percent higher alarm timeliness rate.
As of July 20, the system has been connected to 572 charging stations and 2,927 charging piles, with the accuracy rate of fault identification reaching 90-odd percent and the average number of monthly manual inspections dropping from 4,535 to 916.
In terms of applications, State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company has built a pilot station integrating the five major functions of solar power, energy storage, charging, problem detection, and battery swap, and tried vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology that exports energy from NEVs to electricity grid and sends it back to the vehicles.
The company is actively developing charging infrastructure in rural areas. It has built 222 charging stations and 894 public charging piles in rural areas as of July, and plans to add 24 charging stations and 84 public charging piles in rural areas by the end of 2023, according to an executive of the company. (Edited by Su Dan with Xinhua Silk Road, sudan@xinhua.org)
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