Case Study: University of North Carolina at Charlotte scales EV charging with Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics

University of North Carolina at Charlotte uses Azure PaaS to bootstrap an EV charging solution

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC) was looking for a way to make EV charging more accessible without the cost and disruption of installing new public charging stations. With help from Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics and other Azure services, the team explored how to retrofit existing streetlights into smart charging stations that could support multiple vehicles.

Microsoft helped deliver a scalable Azure PaaS solution that connected IoT-enabled circuit breakers to a mobile app, with Azure IoT Hub ingesting telemetry and Azure Stream Analytics routing data to the database. The project reached a minimum viable product in about six months, and after a year of testing it was ready for campus rollout, with the design positioned to scale from a few stations to tens of thousands.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Robert Cox

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering