Borja Carabante, Delegate for Urban Planning, Environment, and Mobility, visited the EMT Madrid Operations Center in Fuencarral today to closely examine the benefits of the intelligent charging system that the municipal company has fully operational for more efficient, faster, sustainable, and 100% automated refueling of a total of 20 connected electric buses.
EMT Madrid has been immersed in this innovative project of efficient digital charging of electric buses (smart charging) for months, an initiative that emerged in 2020 as a preliminary project and culminated in the signing of a contract with the UTE formed by Endesa X and Etralux in 2022. After the installation and conditioning works of all the system’s elements, the testing period concluded in September 2024 with a contract exceeding 5 million euros (5,094,169 euros), excluding VAT. This project has been funded by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility (4,253,032 euros) within the program of grants to municipalities for the implementation of low-emission zones and the digital and sustainable transformation of urban transport under the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan.
In addition to the 20 electric charging stations, the project includes a firefighting system that, through gas sensors and thermographic cameras, operates in coordination with smart recharging.
The intelligent charging system, technologically cutting-edge in the transportation sector, aims to optimize electric charging and is designed not to require human intervention throughout the process: from the connection of the chargers to the start of the drivers’ day, avoiding waiting times and ensuring that buses are ready and climate-controlled to leave on time. All processes related to departure schedules and energy consumption of each bus and facility are managed in a 100% automated manner. Similarly, the system can minimize the power used in the charging center, optimizing electricity use during different tariff periods. In parallel, EMT Madrid has planned to manage the photovoltaic energy generated at its facilities using battery containers for storage.
For the commissioning of this intelligent system, various brands of electric bus chargers and pantographs were selected during the testing period, and all of them have proven to be compatible with the currently operational electric bus models in the fleet, as the goal is to extrapolate this efficient system to all municipal company operations centers in the near future. Likewise, future centers such as Las Tablas and La Elipa will incorporate the advances of this project into their design.
Decarbonization and Digitalization
The decarbonization of the municipal bus fleet is one of the main objectives set by the City Council and EMT Madrid, making multimillion-dollar investments for this purpose. The efforts of the City Council and the municipal company are focused on three goals: the acquisition of zero-emission buses, the adaptation and construction of new sustainable infrastructures at the company’s operations centers, and the use of the latest technologies applied to mobility and clean energy.
The city of Madrid currently has a fleet of 432 electric buses, which will reach 463 units by the end of this year. By the end of March, EMT Madrid will have a total of 40 fully electrified lines in its network.
Technological innovation, one of the main axes of the strategic plan until 2025, has become a transversal partner in the municipal company, facilitating decision-making based on real-time data, improving the efficiency and competitiveness of EMT Madrid. The shift from ‘refueling’ to electric recharging has brought about a significant transformation of internal processes and service operations. To achieve this, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) of vehicles, operational technologies (OT) managing electricity, and information technologies (IT) converge, sharing information and data analytics capacity under the criterion of cyber security.
The fusion of these areas of knowledge enables growth in the face of EMT Madrid’s new challenge of transforming the fleet into electric and connected vehicles, governing the electric recharging process through cloud-based algorithms based on ‘smart charging.’ Beyond energy procurement, EMT Madrid evolves into an active role where, thanks to information, it can make dynamic management decisions seeking efficiency based on operational and financial parameters.
