Georgia:

Hello, and welcome once again to Watt’s Up with Energy, a gridX podcast. I'm Georgia Knapp, content manager here at gridX, and I'm joined once again by Lars, one of our solution engineers at gridX. Lars, welcome back.

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Lars:

Hi, Georgia.

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Georgia:

Lars, you mentioned that Europe is currently poised to become a global leader in charging infrastructure. What exactly needs to be done to make this happen?

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Lars:

Several things. So, besides that we see that we often have a lack in funding for rural areas, we also need to make sure that we have a high level of standardization. So, everything across the charging network is standardized.

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And then also we need to make sure that whenever we build new public charging stations, and if we want to build more high-power charging stations, that on the one hand we do not overload our grid.

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So, this also is conformed with the grid capacity that we have, and that we do not waste the precious space that we have in a very populated area that Europe is, that we just make this conformable with the space that we have here.

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Georgia:

And you mentioned standardization. Can you give an example of how this is a barrier specifically?

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Lars:

So, we already have come a long way here, because it's very, very important to make sure that people that are traveling across borders, for example, even if this is something that is not done daily, but it's a use case of having your own car, that they can just charge their car wherever they end up.

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So, this becomes or this is something that we need, the same charging plugs for all the cars that every car can charge at nearly every charging station.

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And then one very important point is the payment process for public charging stations. For a digital native, it sounds really easy because all these infrastructure providers have, they are charging apps, and there are a lot of apps that you can use multiple different charge point operators with.

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But we have to keep in mind that not everybody is a digital native that drives an electric vehicle, so we should also enforce that we have a very low entrance level for people to use public charging stations.

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For example, to enable every charging station to pay your charging session with a credit card or a debit card. 

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Georgia:

So, if the issue of standardization was solved, would this actually make us the global leader in charging infrastructure, or are there more obstacles?

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Lars:

We have several more issues, because most people are not crossing borders every day, so most people use similar charging stations most of the time.

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So, this is not an issue a lot of people come across daily, but we also need to make sure that we can install all the charging infrastructure that we need and don't overload our grid with it, so all the people can charge when they need to charge and just manage all the charging sessions that we are getting when we are getting more electric vehicles in the mix in a way that everybody gets the amount of energy in their car that they need without having big investments in increasing grid capacity and maybe even having blackouts because we overload our grid.

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Georgia:

How would an energy management system help all of this?

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Lars:

With energy management systems, you can set up multiple chargers so you can allow a lot of people to charge without the need of extending your grid capacity, which would have huge cost for charge-borne operators.

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You just make it more easy to put in or to give more people the chance to charge in public places. Because an EMS can then achieve that we dynamically balance the maximum charging power of all the cars that are charging right now, something we call dynamic load management.

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And because a lot of cars are not charging with their full potential power all the time because of the battery temperature, their state of charge already, or because they cannot charge higher powers just because how they are built, many people will not notice that we are limiting the maximum charging power.

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And if really there are a lot of cars that could charge very fast, but we have to limit it due to grid capacity, then we can limit it in a balanced way, so everybody is getting the most out of it.

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And as soon as one car is maybe fully charged or plug out, we can then adjust again so that every car is charging as fast as possible.

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And so we can offer more people the option to charge at the same time without huge cost for the charge point operator.

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Besides that, we can also reduce grid fees for charge point operators because a lot of charge point operators, as they are consuming a lot of energy, they would pay grid fees for the highest average peak power in a certain time frame.

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In a lot of countries, it's in a 15-minute time frame. So, when we are just limiting the average maximum power that is drawn from the grid under a certain limit, the charge point operator just saves a huge amount of money on grid fees.

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But as we're doing this dynamically, we can then make, get just maximized the use of this grid capacity. So, we maximize the energy that can be charged into a car during this 15-minute time frame, which on the one hand saves the EV user time and brings more money in this time frame to the CPO, but still be under this average limit to save money on grid fees.

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So, we're just optimizing in all ways. We also can push interoperability. You mentioned in our first episodes that we now have like 15 OEMs integrated in our system.

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When you are able to combine multiple OEMs in one system, that brings you the option to just choose different charging stations from different manufacturers and combine them and still use them all in the same place, use the same platform, use the same load management for all of these stations and just make the most out of it, which offers the possibility to combine AC charging and DC charging from different manufacturers and just offer the right charging solution for everyone.

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Georgia:

And what role do dynamic tariffs play in this?

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So, dynamic tariffs, I would say, are more like the way of communicating the actual grid load at the moment, because when we have a price signal that just tells you how much a kilowatt hour is at the moment, you will adapt your, if possible, you will adapt your use of your energy.

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So, if there's a lot of demand right now and maybe not a high production, because it's early in the morning, everybody gets up and wants to use it, the prices will be higher. So, it would be bad for our grid to charge all our cars at 7 a.m. in the morning.

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And if we have not that much production or if you have not that much consumption, a high production during the day at 12 o'clock when everybody's at work maybe, or we have a very low consumption in the middle of the night, then prices will be low.

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So, this is the communication interface, I would say, so that we can adapt our consumption based on these price signals.

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So, this offers for the classic CPO, this is an opportunity, but also a challenge, because they need to manage how they use their energy based on dynamic tariffs if they need to use a dynamic tariff.

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But for public charges, they cannot just say, hey, you're not allowed to charge right now, because prices are high, because if you're at the public charging stations, people want to charge.

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At home, this is a whole different story, because with intelligent software, we can then just time the charging session in low tariff periods. So, you pay less for your energy, your mobility costs are way, way smaller, but you still have the range or a fully charged car that you need to have when you leave in the morning or when you leave in the afternoon. So, this is also a huge opportunity to save money on mobility for private homes.

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Georgia:

And in your opinion, how do you envision the role of energy storage solutions, such as batteries or super capacitors, how do you see these enhancing the efficiency and the reliability of charging infrastructure?

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Lars:

Batteries will play a huge role in the public charging sector in the next years, because you can, on the one hand, maximize the usage of renewables, because if you have more renewable production than you have charging at the moment, you can store your energy in a battery.

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And if you have a huge consumption at the moment, that may even exceed your grid limit. So, if you would draw all this energy that cars want to charge from the grid, you would drip a fuse. But with a battery, you can virtually expand your grid capacity.

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So, you could shave off those peaks of high charging power with a battery, so you can serve more people with a high charging power at the same time, even if your grid capacity doesn't really have it at the moment. Or if your grid operator tells you, you are not allowed to use this much energy at the moment because we have a problem with grid stability at the moment, then you could also shave off this peak with a battery.

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And for charging at home, it's the same. Basically, you can just maximize the use of your energy, of your own produced energy with the solar panel on your roof or of energy that is just cheap at the moment and you charge into your battery because it was cheap during the day and you get back home and then you charge your car with the energy that was in your battery.

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So, those systems will play a huge role because just producing renewables is not enough anymore because if we want to switch to more and more renewables, we need to consider how to store and how to use the energy when we need it.

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Georgia:

And do you see public perception being a barrier to this at all or is Europe pretty accepting of the EV switch?

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Lars:

I would say it differs from country to country and from region to region a bit. It's also people that experience electric vehicles and that have a good experience with charging because they live in an area where they have a good charging network.

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They are way more or they really like electric mobility. But we also have situations like in Germany where we are the only European country having an exception to the ban for internal combustion engines in 2035 because we have the e-fuels included now where a lot of people in Germany really pushed for it because they don't really believe in e-mobility at the moment.

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I mean, Germany being the only country without a speed limit in Europe right now, maybe we're just a bit car-fanatic country and it's harder to convince us than other countries.

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But I would say overall, it's most important that we get everybody in the same boat, we convince everybody this is the right technology to just save our planet from climate change and just get everybody in the mix to make this journey and to be able to do the switch from fossil powered cars.

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Georgia:

In your wildest imagination, what futuristic features would you love to see in the charging infrastructure? Maybe a station that can charge an EV in the amount of time it takes to make an instant coffee or one that's fully powered by a wind turbine on top?

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Lars:

So, I would say we can already charge a lot of EVs in the time it takes to grab a proper coffee. So, if you get a proper coffee, you will get a lot of charging done in that time.

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But in my wildest imagination, I would want to see all the different parts of our mobility system linked so that we do not just say, OK, we have mobility now and we do everything as we did it before, just a little bit greener so that we just link everything and make it work smoothly so everybody can enjoy e-mobility, not only those who can afford EVs at the moment, so that we have a lot of shared infrastructure.

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And we also make use of the possibility that we make our roads safer with modern cars so that we just start building a mobility system that works for the people and that it's not like that the inhabitants of cities or a lot of areas in Germany adapt to what we need for our mobility.

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Georgia:

Well, thank you so much, Lars, for joining me for the first season of Watt’s Up with Energy. I have found this very insightful and I hope our listeners have too. Any last thoughts before we finish out?

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Lars:

It was really fun. So, I'm really looking forward to hearing the next episodes of this podcast and the next seasons of this podcast. Thank you for having me and thanks.

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Georgia:

Great. And for all of our listeners, please join me next week for the final episode of our first season when I will be chatting with Felix Hamer, professionally known as Electric Felix, an EV travel hacker who travels around documenting the best finds in e-mobility.

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He was one of our panelists for gridX days last year, and he had a lot of great insights about electric vehicles, why we need more charge points, and his social media channels are very active in tracking the highlights and the pitfalls of the charging infrastructure, particularly here in Europe. I think it promises to be an interesting conversation.

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If you'd like to learn more about the world of renewable energy or energy management systems, be sure to check out our website, gridx.ai, where we produce regular blogs and glossaries about the subject.

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You can also follow us on LinkedIn, or on Twitter and Instagram @getgridX.

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