Smart Video is Defining Future EV Infrastructure

With the move away from combustion engines towards electric vehicles (EVs), sales of EVs across the world have increased, and with that, so has the expansion of its corresponding infrastructure. Nigeria is witnessing a growing interest in EVs, spurred by the government's push for clean energy and private-sector initiatives. Although EV adoption remains in its early stages, efforts to establish a sustainable EV ecosystem are gaining traction, with projections indicating significant market growth over the next decade.In terms of infrastructure growth, the number of available charging stations in Nigeria has gradually increased. As of recent years, only a handful of charging points exist in urban areas such as Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt. However, government-backed initiatives like solar-powered charging stations are expected to accelerate growth. Despite this progress, the ratio between available charging stations and electric vehicles remains wide, signaling a need for rapid infrastructure expansion to support EV adoption.As charging stations become more widespread, new challenges arise, especially when it comes to protecting them and their customers. This is where smart video and video analytics come into play. To store, analyze, and enable real-time alerts, these systems must come with an appropriate data storage infrastructure providing the capacity, performance, security, and resilience for current and future EV stations.Primed for Success: Smart Video and EV Charging StationsWhen it comes to the successful expansion of charging station infrastructure, an important component that may not always be considered 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 activity at the sites at all times.To pave the way for safety and success, EV station owners in Nigeria are turning to AI-enabled security cameras that offer innovative features to revolutionize the way operators protect their property. These smart video devices can help distinguish between natural elements, vehicles, animals, as well as people, and can send alerts in the case of unforeseen events or unusual behavior. With ever-improving resolution quality, from 4K to 8K and beyond, as well as advancements like motion sensors, new cameras enable object tracking, significantly reducing false alarms.Over recent years, EV stations globally, including in Nigeria, have faced risks such as cable and battery theft, vandalism, and other forms of destruction. This not only leads to financial losses but also affects the reliability and availability of the stations. Video analysis can help protect against and prevent vandalism before it occurs or catch the perpetrators in the act. This is because AI-enabled cameras can optically zoom in, analyze the target automatically, and take a picture or record a video of the conspicuous event.In addition, intelligent video can use algorithms to detect other threats such as fire or animals. For example, a situation can be assessed if a wildfire or electrical fault has broken out near the charging station, and fire detection can be useful to take effective measures against the spread of potentially dangerous events and minimize the damage to the station and surrounding areas. It also allows EV owners to detect approaching animals, such as stray livestock, which could potentially cause damage to the installation.These AI-enabled smart video systems not only place new demands on the equipment but also on the data storage infrastructure powering video analytics. Capacity, latency, and bandwidth become crucially important when recording, streaming, and analyzing high-resolution footage to take quick action.Data Storage is Fueling EV Charging Station SecurityStorage is a critical component to unlocking the full potential of smart video data. When designing infrastructure, EV station owners in Nigeria need high-capacity storage at the edge in the camera, in the server or recorder, as well as on the cloud or the data center that offers low latency, high performance, and quick scalability. Another important consideration in smart video is video and data retention time. This could vary according to regulatory compliance, redundancy and backup practices, or longevity or reliability of the storage solution. This means that any storage solution for smart video features should enable long-term storage without compromising performance while complying with data protection regulations. Translating these requirements into reality, a 360° smart video camera recording in full HD at 25 frames per second (fps) for 24 hours generates approximately 2.5TB of data over a specified retention period, usually around 90 days. To have sufficient storage capacity for these daily streams of an EV charging station, the backend must have at least 225TB.To meet these demands, EV station operators in Nigeria need customized storage solutions that support these new AI workloads and associated storage requirements. As video analytics and deep learning for today's intelligent video solutions are performed both on-premise and in the cloud, it is important to provide a scalable, cost-effective, and durable, yet high-performance 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, supporting card health monitoring capabilities, preemptive storage management, and reliability for continuous 24/7 high-definition video recording. Specially designed microSD™ cards, such as those from WD Purple™, 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 to purpose-built hard disk drives (HDDs) that offer up to 22TB of storage and are equipped with advanced features. These enable up to 32 AI streams for deep learning analysis within the system while reducing image failures. In addition, these HDDs, designed for intelligent video environments, are also optimized to handle up to 64 additional single-stream HD cameras, allowing for easy scalability as requirements change.As the uptake of EVs continues to grow in Nigeria, charging station owners should set themselves up for success and position themselves to benefit from the investment in this growing infrastructure. An important part of this will be the right smart video infrastructure that allows operators to monitor and improve the security and functionality of their stations, as well as 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.