Watch: Wallbox unveils new commercial energy management system

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In an effort to maximize the use of renewable energy in commercial buildings, Wallbox has launched a new product, Sirius, an energy management system.

Sirius is capable of managing various energy sources and will automatically choose the greenest or cheapest one available to meet the building’s demand, while simultaneously storing energy surpluses in EVs or battery walls plugged to the system.

Weather related generation/demand imbalances have proven to be one of the biggest challenges of large-scale use of renewables, specifically solar, yet in a six-month beta test at Wallbox headquarters in Barcelona, Sirius increased the building’s renewable energy consumption by 20% and reduced grid dependency by 50%.

the beta test was run using a fleet of 23 Nissan LEAF cars, Wallbox’s bidirectional Quasar chargers, roughly 7,500 square feet of solar panels, and 560 kWh of onsite energy storage, all tied to the city’s electric grid.

The company’s headquarters actually supplied the inspiration behind Sirius, as CPO and co-founder of Wallbox, Eduard Castañeda outlines.

“When expanding our headquarters, we realized that our energy usage would be up more than 400 percent,” said Castañeda. “It would have required a new substation to provide the power we needed, which would take nine months for its full installation. We decided to apply our own technology and saved a lot of time and money while reducing our carbon footprint.”

Beta testing of the product is not yet complete, but upon completion Sirius will be available in every merket where Wallbox currently operates, roughly 8o countries globally. In addition to Sirius, Wallbox is developing several other energy management systems, and soon expects to launch Eco-Smart, solar and wind EV charging technology which will allow a consumer to use the green energy generated from solar panels or wind turbines at home to charge electric vehicles.

In July, after announcing that Sunpower and Wallbox had come to terms on a partnership that would allow SunPower to install a Wallbox EV charger at the same time as their solar and/or storage installation, the companies hinted that they were exploring the potential of backup power solutions incorporating the EV charger’s bi-directional technology into the solar and storage system.

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