Georgia:

Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of "Watt’s up with energy?", a gridX podcast.

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I'm your host, Georgia Knapp, the Content Manager here at gridX and a relative energy newbie, which might seem like an odd choice for an energy podcast host, but it's a topic that I'm really interested in and fascinated by. So, my hope is that I and the listeners will learn more about this field as I speak with different energy experts each week, both within gridX and beyond.

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This podcast will be coming to you month by month with a new season each month and a new episode released each week.

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This season, I'm joined by Lars Rheinemann, one of gridX's Solution Engineers.

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Lars, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

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Lars:

Hi, Georgia. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here for the very first season of our podcast. I'm working as an SE, so a solution engineer, for gridX for now one and a half years nearly. And before that, I was always just very interested in mobility and modern forms of mobility and the mobility system.

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So, before my job at gridX, I more worked in the mobility sector.

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I was focused on urban traffic engineering, but I always had the urge to expand my path in the mobility field, and then I just stumbled upon gridX and realized that they gave me the chance to combine renewable energy and e-mobility just in one job.

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So, it was the perfect fit for me, and yeah, now I'm here.

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Georgia:

And can you explain a little bit what you do as a solution engineer?

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Lars:

My day to day is basically helping our customers to use our platform and to build all the nice energy solutions they are going to offer their end customers. So, I'm more or less their first contact point for all the technical questions they have.

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And besides the focus on home energy management systems, I also have a very strong focus on e-mobility, so both in the home domain and in the bigger charging sites domain of our B2B sector.

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Georgia:

Well, thank you so much for joining us – joining me for our first season.

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We will be hearing more about gridX from one of the co-managing directors in another season, but until that happens, here's a little bit of background info about the company: gridX is a leading smart energy company based in both Munich and Aachen, Germany. Lars and I are coming to you from our new office in Munich, right near the fairgrounds where the famous Oktoberfest is held each year.

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gridX was started in 2015 as an idea between two friends when they were on a cycling holiday in Ecuador. While on this trip, they started discussing the idea of connecting distributed energy resources such as solar panels, storage batteries, EV chargers, and the like. They wanted to create a platform that digitized these physical assets to help create a more digital, smart power grid. 

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They wanted the software to be manufacturer-independent, meaning a household could have a solar panel, a battery, an electric vehicle charger, all from different manufacturers, yet working together and managed with the same system. And as of today, we are plugging away at that goal and have currently integrated 50 manufacturers, meaning 50 OEMs are now compatible with our energy management software, XENON.

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We also publish reports about different energy topics. Our most recent one was our annual Charging Report, which finally brings me to what Lars and I will be talking about today and for the next few episodes: the charging infrastructure.

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Lars, can you explain what we mean when we talk about the charging infrastructure?

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Lars:

Yeah, sure.

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So, charging infrastructure, to frame it easily, is everything you need to recharge your electric vehicle. So, it starts with the charge point. So, the charging station also goes over the grid, because you need to power the charging station, and also includes stuff like the software for payment and for management, because if you use public charging station, of course you need to pay for the energy you charge.

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So, it's a word used for everything that you need to charge EVs.

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Georgia:

Why is the charging infrastructure so important?

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Lars:

For the first thing, it's the convenience and the accessibility for e-mobility for all the users, because the EV adoption really hinges on drivers having the confidence that they can reach their destination, and they are not getting stuck somewhere in the countryside having no choice to charge somewhere and calling the ADAC or something like this.

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So it's something that we are quite used to, because we can refill our petrol cars everywhere in Germany, like it's on the countryside or everywhere in Europe. Basically, there are petrol stations everywhere, and that's something we need to build up for EVs as well.

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And then, of course, the broader energy system, because we have a lot of renewables growing right now, and we need a smart charging infrastructure to use those renewables in the best way and also to stabilize the grid, so that we don't have a grid outages due to large amount of chargings happening at the same time, or that just lead to a grid outage.

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Georgia:

And how exactly does EV charging stabilize the grid? In my mind, it would just put more pressure on it.

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Lars:

Of course, if you're just thinking about charging all the time you want with the highest power you can get, that would put more pressure on it. So, it's all about the right management of the charging.

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Georgia:

And you mentioned the integration of renewable energy. How does this relate to the charging infrastructure?

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Lars:

Again, it's all about the optimization of the energy use. So, of course, you do not want to rely on a solar panel to charge your car. Because if there's no sun, you still want to charge. So, you can just time with good energy management software when to charge your car and use solar energy directly, if solar energy is available, or buffer solar energy in your battery and then charge when solar energy is not available.

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So, that's really something you can use in the home domain, because you have to keep in mind that most of the cars are standing around 23 hours a day. So, in Europe, a car is normally used for one hour a day, and a lot of cars are even used less. So, they are stationary a lot of the times at work or at home.

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And here you have great flexibility to time charging sessions in a way that renewable energies can be used best.

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Of course, when you look at public charging, it's a bit different story, because for public charging, people want to charge as fast as possible. So, you cannot just say, okay, you're not charging fast now because the sun is not shining. But here you can use PV to virtually expand your grid capacity.

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So you can charge even more if the PV is producing, because all the power you use from the PV is not touching the grid, so it's not used from the grid and doesn't lead to grid instabilities.

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Georgia:

But one thing I have heard some EV drivers talk about is bidirectional charging. Could you explain that? Because that to me just sounds like two plugs.

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Lars:

No, not at all.

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So, bidirectional charging is another form of helping, where EVs can help the grid to be stabilized, because the idea of bidirectional charging is just making use of the big battery that you're having standing around in front of your house when you're at home and you're not driving your EV.

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Because EV batteries are easy to say very big, because a normal household battery is often like 10 kilowatt hours, 15 kilowatt hours for larger ones, but they're also smaller ones. An EV battery, even the smaller ones, are often above 40 kilowatt hours. There are even EVs, real big EVs with 70, 80, 90 kilowatt hours. So, you have a huge capacity of an energy storage just standing around. And now we have intelligent charging points and intelligent cars where we can just use the power of the EV battery, not only to power the EV, but to power a household.

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So, that's why we call it bidirectional, because these charge points can charge the EV from the grid or from your PV or whatever. And if your household needs more energy, they can use the battery of the EV to power your household. So, for example, if you're coming home and you're having a battery quite fully charged, and at 6 p.m. everybody wants to cook their dinner, use a lot of energy, your EV could then just provide you with some energy that is basically not from the grid, so you don't utilize the grid for it.

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And during night where there's no production, the EV can charge again, and now you have a fully charged car in the morning, but you still had the opportunity to have the cheap energy from your EV, because you might have gotten it cheap because you charged it during a low peak hour, during a cheap tariff, or you charged it with the energy from your PV during a high peak time.

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And that's just a win-win situation, because you can save money with it, and the grid is not utilized, so we can stabilize the grid with it.

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Georgia:

Could having an EV replace the need for having a separate storage battery at your house?

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Lars:

It could, and sometimes. But of course, you have to remember that sometimes you just do not want to discharge your EV, because maybe you want to leave quite soon. And of course, you can only use it if you're at home.

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So if you're not at home, the good point about a household battery is that you can charge your PV energy that is produced during the day into the battery.

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And yeah, your EV might not be there because you're at your workplace, and your EV is standing around in front of your workplace. And then you can just charge into your home battery and discharge your home battery as well whenever you're getting home, and maybe the sun is not shining anymore.

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Georgia:

It sounds like to me that the battery can be charged fairly often, but then I also hear about people having range anxiety.

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Lars:

Of course, the range anxiety is one of the biggest topics for EVs right now, because the first generation of EVs, they just didn't have the range people expect to have. But you also have to keep in mind what's your daily usage of your car, because of course we can use our petrol-fueled cars for nearly 1,000 kilometers with one fueling session. But how often do you do such a trip? So, do you really need this?

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And a lot of cars are only used for getting to work, maybe 100 kilometers. And that's something that every modern EV can do right now. And we're seeing a huge increase in range with modern EVs. So, it's something that we have to keep in mind, because it just hinges people from buying an EV, as long as they have this range anxiety.

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And it's also something that we just need to address with the choose of the right charging stations and the right place of the charging stations, so that all people all over Germany that need an own car are able to use the car as they want to use it, and they don't feel like they have the second best option to a petrol car.

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Georgia:

Are there any myths or superstitions around charging that you've heard of from drivers or colleagues, like you shouldn't charge near a water source or maybe never charge until the battery is at exactly 13%?

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Lars:

One of the biggest myths or fears that I heard is that you can never be sure when you leave your electric vehicle plugged into a public charger that it's still plugged in when you come back, because some kids might find it funny to just unplug the car, and then you're coming back and your car hasn't charged.

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But that's still true for some older EV models, but most of the modern cars and modern chargers have a functionality that you lock the cable once your car is locked.

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So, when you lock the car and the charging session has started, no one is able to pull out the plug, and only if you unlock your car, it will stop the charging session and you will be able to retrieve the cable. So, you can go shopping, you can get a coffee break while your car is charging. No fear of some kids unplugging your car because it's funny.

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Georgia:

That was something I've always wondered about, because I see vehicles just sitting on the side of the road plugged in, and I wondered how easy would it be to just unplug it. I just thought people were very trusting about their electric vehicles.

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So, when we're talking about charging infrastructure, we're not only talking about fueling cars, but also building a smarter, more resilient grid.

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What challenges do we face in deploying this system?

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Lars:

On the one hand, the deployment needs to be just carefully planned. So, it's important that we have the right share of public charges and the right share of private charges, because depending on your use case, if you're living in a rural area or in the city, it makes a huge difference if you have more public charges available or if it just makes more sense to charge at home.

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Then, of course, we need to balance cities and rural areas out. So, we shouldn't just focus on all the cities, because a lot of people live there and leave out all the rural areas, because those people drive longer distances, because they might drive to the city for their working place. So, we need to keep them in the mix as well.

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And when coming to cities, we also need to consider that it will not be the solution to just switch every petrol-fueled car that we have right now for an electric vehicle, because a lot of our cities are already overcrowded.

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They don't have enough space for all the cars. Parking spaces are just not available anymore, and there's always the fight between do we get a new bike lane? Do we get a new bus lane? But then we have to cut one lane from individual traffic, and that's just something that we need to address as well.

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So, we need to keep in mind that we also focus on public transport. So, public transport that also needs to switch to electric vehicles. All the buses in the cities should not run on petrol at some point in time. And that we just build a new mobility system that suits all needs, so no one gets excluded, and everybody can enjoy a form of eco-friendly mobility on their own.

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Georgia:

That's interesting that you bring up the point about there's not enough room, parking is already limited, because whenever I go to a mall or anything that has a multi-tiered parking structure, you do see the spaces that are reserved for electric vehicles only, but they're usually – it's five at the most. Maybe I'm not going to the right malls or something, but it feels like the parking spaces aren't quite encouraging the electric vehicles, because I would expect there to be more spaces for them.

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Lars:

That's true. It's somehow a chicken and egg problem. So, of course, if you want to put up charging stations, and they are public charging stations, you want to earn money with it. So, without public funding, it's always like a business case to check, okay, how many charging stations do I put up there? How much money can I make with this?

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But of course, we need to give EV drivers more options to charge wherever they need to charge to just address the fear of, okay, I don't have somewhere to charge. I don't live in a private home, so I might have the problem that I don't find a charger at all because all of them are just occupied by other vehicles.

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Yeah, that's just a fear that we need to address as well.

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Georgia:

Lars, thanks so much for joining me for the first episode of our first season of Watt’s Up with Energy. During the next episode, we're going to continue talking about the charging infrastructure, specifically the current state in Europe.

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Lars:

Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

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Georgia:

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.