Growth of charging infrastructure
In terms of infrastructure growth, the number of available charging stations in the Netherlands has spectacularly increased over the past eight years. In 2016, there were about 116,000 private and public charging stations (63 percent home charging stations, 17 percent publicly accessible charging stations), but this number has more than quintupled to over 645,000 stations in 2024 (77 percent home charging stations, 14 percent publicly accessible stations). Despite the rapid growth, the ratio of publicly accessible charging points in the Netherlands to electric vehicles is about 7.73, which means that a much larger expansion of the public charging network will be necessary.
As charging stations become more widespread, new challenges arise, especially regarding the protection of charging stations and their customers. This is where smart video and video analysis come into play. To enable real-time alerts, these systems need to be equipped with suitable data storage infrastructure that provides capacity, performance, security, and resilience for current and future EV stations.
Safety of EV charging stations
An important, yet often overlooked, aspect of the successful expansion of EV charging stations is a reliable monitoring system to protect the facilities. With the increasing number of charging points in both urban and remote areas, operators need to have an overview of the activity at the locations at all times. AI-supported security cameras that offer innovative features can revolutionize the way operators protect their property.
These smart video devices can distinguish between, for example, vehicles, animals, and people and can send alerts in the event of an unforeseen incident or unusual behavior. With the ever-increasing resolution from 4K to 8K and beyond, as well as new technological developments such as motion sensors, new cameras make it possible to track objects, reducing the likelihood of false alarms.
In recent years, EV stations have become an increasingly attractive target for cable and battery theft, vandalism, and other forms of destruction. This not only leads to financial damage but can also affect the reliability and availability of the stations.
Video analysis can help protect against and prevent vandalism before it occurs or can catch the perpetrators in the act. AI cameras can optically zoom in, automatically analyze the target, and take a photo or video of the notable event.
Additionally, intelligent video can use algorithms to detect other threats, such as fire or wildlife. Cameras can assess the situation if a house or forest fire breaks out near the charging station. Fire detection can be useful for taking effective measures against the spread of potentially dangerous events and minimizing damage to the station and surrounding areas. Smart cameras can also detect approaching animals, such as wild boars that may cause damage to the installation.
These smart video systems with AI not only impose new demands on the equipment but also on the data storage infrastructure that feeds the video analysis. Capacity, latency, and bandwidth become crucial when recording, streaming, and analyzing high-resolution images to take swift action.
Storage requirements
Storage is a crucial component in unlocking the full potential of smart video data. When designing the infrastructure, EV station owners need high-capacity storage at the edge in the camera, in the server or recorder, but also in the cloud or data center with low latency, high performance, and fast scalability. Another important consideration in smart video is the retention time of video and data. This can vary based on regulatory compliance, redundancy and backup practices, or the lifespan or reliability of the storage solution.
This means that any storage solution for smart video features must enable long-term storage without compromising performance while also complying with data protection regulations. For example, a 360-degree smart video camera that records in full HD for 24 hours at 25 frames per second (fps) generates approximately 2.5 TB of data over a specified retention period, which usually lasts around 90 days. To have sufficient storage capacity for these daily streams from an EV charging station, the backend must include at least 225 TB. The maximum possible storage requirement in the Netherlands, just for monitoring these specific locations, could reach up to 21 exabytes (EB).
To meet these demands, EV station operators need a tailored storage solution that supports these new AI workloads and associated storage requirements. As video analysis and deep learning for current intelligent video solutions are performed both on-premises and in the cloud, it is important to provide a scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable yet powerful storage infrastructure. EV station operators can obtain highly resilient, durable on-camera storage of up to 256 gigabytes (GB) in the form of microSD cards at the edge of the network, with support for health monitoring of the card, proactive storage management, and reliability for continuous 24/7 high-definition video recording.
"Specially designed microSD cards, such as WD Purple microSD cards, can continue recording even if the connection to the network video recorder (NVR) is interrupted. For reliable storage at the core, decision-makers should look for purpose-built hard drives (HDDs) that offer up to 22 TB of storage and are equipped with advanced features. These allow for up to 32 AI streams for deep learning analysis within the system while minimizing image disruptions. Additionally, these HDDs, designed for intelligent video environments, are also optimized to handle up to 64 additional single-stream HD cameras, making them easily scalable as demands change," says Coert de Ridder, Business Development Manager Central Europe at Western Digital.
"As the use of electric vehicles in the Netherlands continues to rise, charging station owners must prepare for success and position themselves well to benefit from investments in this growing infrastructure. A key component of this is the right smart video infrastructure that allows operators to monitor and enhance the safety and functionality of their stations, enabling them to detect and respond to events in real-time. As part of this, video data and data storage will continue to fuel the potential in this industry to ensure safety, security, and incident prevention."
