SwitchDin empowers Lake Maquarie City Council to deliver reliable and cost-efficient EV charging
Executive Summary
Australian councils are leading the way in sustainable electrification. In regions where grid capacity is limited, they are delivering fast, reliable public EV charging by intelligently integrating solar, batteries and chargers, keeping costs down and the network stable.
Lake Macquarie City Council (LMCC) serves the Lake Macquarie region in New South Wales and has a long term focus on strategic growth for a sustainable future. The Council has installed solar and battery systems across many of its facilities and supports wider community electrification through public EV charging.
The Council required reliable and cost-effective EV charging at the Swansea Multipurpose Centre and Library. The site is constrained by a limited grid connection and hosts a variety of devices from multiple suppliers. Without active management, fast charging risked creating demand peaks that would trigger higher energy bills. The Council needed a solution that could coordinate all devices and protect the site during EV charging.
SwitchDin delivered this through the Virtual Energy platform and the onsite Droplet device. The system manages solar PV, battery storage and inverters in one integrated control environment. It supports fast EV charging while keeping the site within its supply limits and helps the Council reduce exposure to demand charges. The Stormcloud platform enables the Council to increase solar use, limit demand peaks and maintain safe operation during charging sessions.
The site now provides stable EV charging with no overcurrent trips. Demand remains safely capped. Avoiding a single high demand event each month can save the Council about $5,500 a year. This gives the Council greater reliability and improved cost control while supporting its long term vision for a cleaner and more resilient future.
Challenges
Grid connection constraints
When LMCC installed a new EV charger at the Swansea Multipurpose Centre and Library, modelling revealed that charging during peak demand periods could exceed the site’s grid connection limit. Without active management of onsite energy flows, this created a significant operational risk.
Multiple devices across multiple OEMs
The site included a diverse mix of equipment from several manufacturers—
Solar inverters: SolarEdge, SMA Solar Technology
Battery management systems: Orion
Battery inverters: LC Energy Solutions
Metering: EDMI
Coordinating these devices into a single, unified, intelligent control scheme created a technical integration challenge.
Rising energy costs
The site faces network demand charges, so uncontrolled fast EV charging during peak times could sharply increase operating costs. LMCC needed a way to manage how and when EV charging interacted with other loads and onsite generation.
Solution
LMCC selected SwitchDin’s Virtual Energy platform to enable fast, reliable DC EV charging while maintaining strict electrical, operational, and network constraints.
Virtual Energy delivers cloud-based management paired with local edge control of onsite DER including solar PV, battery storage, and inverters, to ensure performance, resilience, and scalability.
At the site level, the SwitchDin Droplet device orchestrates a hierarchy of control strategies to optimise battery usage and coordinate Distributed Energy Resource (DER) operations. Using the Stormcloud platform, LMCC can:
Maximise solar self-consumption
Manage and limit demand peaks to reduce network charges
Ensure the site never exceeds its mains supply capacity during EV charging
Swansea Multipurpose Centre and Library Solution Architecture
Key features & benefits
Robust and reliable
SwitchDin’s Droplet provides exceptional reliability, with >200,000 hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and built-in fallback modes for seamless operation during connectivity loss. High-frequency, low-latency communications underpin secure, stable power management.
Vendor agnostic integration
SwitchDin integrates with thousands of DER device models across many OEMs, which is an advantage built over more than a decade of interoperability development. At LMCC, five different OEM systems operate seamlessly under a unified SwitchDin control environment.
Energy savings with power security
The Droplet uses advanced sub-second control algorithms to instantly coordinate solar and battery resources. This dynamically balances cost optimisation with power stability and EV charging reliability.
Outcomes
Reliable EV charging with no site trips
Through the site’s control strategy and minimum battery state-of-charge settings, LMCC has never experienced an overcurrent-related site trip during EV charging.
Significant potential cost savings
By capping demand at 20 kW, even during a 50 kW charging session, the system avoids costly spikes in network demand charges. Avoiding just one 50 kW demand event per month can save LMCC approximately $5,500 per year, despite the small amount of energy associated with such events.
An example of an EV charging session being managed by the battery
Conclusion
SwitchDin enables LMCC to deliver fast, dependable EV charging while maintaining grid stability, integrating multi-vendor DER assets, and reducing operational energy costs.
This solution supports LMCC’s mission to transition toward a cleaner, smarter, and more resilient energy future for the Lake Macquarie community.
