Created 2 years ago, updated 2 years ago

Optimise Prime has gathered data from over 6,000 Electric Vehicles (EVs) driven for commercial purposes through three trials. The project also implemented a range of technical and commercial solutions aiming to accelerate the transition to EVs for commercial fleet operators, while helping GB’s distribution networks plan and prepare for the mass adoption of EVs. The project aimed to reduce the impact of EVs on distribution networks and ensure security of electricity supply while saving money for electricity customers, helping the UK meet its clean air and climate change objectives.

The project consisted of three trial workstreams (WS):

  • WS1, investigating the impact of commercial vehicles charging at homes
  • WS2, monitoring and optimising commercial vehicles charging in depots
  • WS3, which uses private hire vehicle (PHV) journey data to model the impact of these vehicles on the distribution network.

The trial period for WS3 began in August 2020, with WS1 and WS2 trials commencing on 1 July 2021. All trials concluded at the end of June 2022.

Optimise Prime is sharing the project datasets by making them publicly available to the wider electricity, fleet and PHV industry to optimise their vehicle electrification plans. DNOs, academics and interested parties will be able to utilise this anonymised data created by the project for further research, analysis and forecasting. Along with the datasets, an introductory document is available below, it provides information on the content of those datasets, guidance on how to interpret each data field and instructions on how to access the data.

Over the course of the trials, the project has collected and analysed data from a wide range of sources in order to carry out a wide range of experiments. The key datasets collected and used in analysis are available here. These includes:

WS1 – Return-to-Home Trials

·      Charge Point (CP) session data

·      Vehicle telematics journey data

WS2 – Depot Trials

·      Details of the assets and asset types at each depot

·      Charging data gathered from the CPs at each depot

·      Building load measurement data from each depot

·      Details of the profiled connections, flexibility trials and smart charging profiles trialled at each depot

WS3 – Mixed Trials

·      PHV charging demand overlaid onto substation available capacity data aggregated by borough


The project is not able to release all data collected and used by the project, as some are commercially confidential to the project partners (such as precise volumes of Uber trips or substation capacities), contains potentially personally identifiable information (such as precise start and end locations of home charging journeys or Uber trips) or were purchased by the project under license (e.g. charge point (CP) locations, weather data and off-street parking data).

Access the data via this link: https://ukpowernetworks.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/optimise-prime/information/

The figure below shows how the datasets are built: