Siemens to build electric bus chargers in Nuremberg
Siemens Smart Infrastructure has received an order from Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft Nürnberg (VAG) to equip the newly acquired electric bus port with a medium-voltage connection and charging infrastructure.
The Siemens charging infrastructure will enable up to 20 buses to be charged simultaneously at the 39 parking spaces of the ‘eBus Port’ on the premises of the VAG depot in Schweinau. The charging system consists of 20 so-called Sicharge UC 200 charging centres. One centre can deliver up to 150 kW of power and thus supply two parking spaces with electrical energy.
According to Siemens, construction work has already begun, and the system is scheduled to go into operation in 2021. Among other things, Siemens will have to install medium-voltage switchgear and transformers for the grid connection, and low-voltage switchgear to distribute the electricity within the depot to the individual charging stations. “For depot charging, it is critical to integrate the charging processes into the existing infrastructure and workflows in the best possible way,” says Jean-Christoph Heyne, head of Future Grids at Siemens Smart Infrastructure.
“The depot will be the new home of our eBus fleet, which we’ll successively expand through the next years,” says Josef Hasler, CEO of VAG. “We are very pleased to be working with Siemens further to advance our e-mobility strategy for local public transportation. With the technology company’s experience in both grid and charging solutions, we can design the charging depot for maximum efficiency and ensure high availability for our eBus fleet”.
The background to the order is VAG’s planned electric bus offensive. VAG had already decided in 2017 to procure only electric buses from 2020, and the new vehicles are a move to electrify the entire bus fleet successively.
In the first step, the public transport operator plans to purchase a total of 52 purely electric buses by the end of 2022. VAG had already received a subsidy notice for this in November 2019. VAG expects to have converted half of its 160 bus fleet to zero-emission operation by 2030.
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