Tackling e-mobility charging infrastructure - an expert’s view on one of the most important Smart Grid challenges today

This is the second of three parts in this interview series. Check out the last publication for getting to know Stefan Pernpaintner , his core motivation, and his view on the industry in general. Next time, we will close with a broader perspective on major challenges and trends related to Smart Grid. All interviews were conducted by Christian Kolbe , Managing Partner of Comsysto Reply.

Christian: Stefan, what would you say was the single most exciting challenge or an example for something which really felt like a big thing you've already worked on related to Smart Grid?

Stefan: I would say one big challenge currently is to build and expand the charging infrastructure. Not only in Germany, but also in Europe and basically the whole world. You can clearly see that there is a huge increase in new registrations of electrical vehicles, especially in Germany. In 2023 for example, I’ve collected some numbers, there were around 500,000 vehicles registered in Germany and the government’s goal is to see a total of 15 million electric vehicles on Germany's roads by 2030. Also the European Union has a target of around 30 millions of electric vehicles in the same timeframe, so this is a really big challenge.

Christian: Do you think this is realistic? Just recently, I read in the news that demand is already slowing down this year.

Stefan: Yes, this is true especially in Germany because some subsidies for buying an electric vehicle have been stopped. Naturally, this pushes back the sales numbers a bit. So I would say it's a very optimistic goal when looking at the numbers. But in any case, we should be prepared to see a huge growth coming up in the next few years. How big will it be? Nobody knows today…

Christian: How do we prepare for that? Which technologies are particularly important for this challenge?

Stefan: So what is important here is that we have a high quality data set of locations where charging stations are already publicly available. This data set can be the foundation of taking further decisions, first and foremost where do we have to build new ones? What are good places with a lot of traffic? Where are people for long periods of time to charge their car? These are crucial questions for charging infrastructure operators and also for city planners, for example.

What we at Comsysto Reply have built to help with that is a solution called eCharm that stands for “electric vehicle charging map”. It’s an open source tool that is used to bring this data together. With that we have the possibility to use different publicly available data sets, combine them, merge them, and reduce the overlaps. The result is a high quality data set that can be used to exactly tackle the questions I mentioned: Where do we build new charging stations?

Christian: Without being an expert myself, I could imagine that something like the actual usage of charging stations is very helpful to identify high demand. Is that also part of eCharm?

Stefan: Not yet. We don't have live consumption data. We put together the different locations and attributes like power and types of plugs of the charging stations.

Christian: Do you think it would be possible to get this consumption data as well, or is this a challenge everybody is facing that you just can't reliably collect the data?

Stefan: Since we are focused on having an open source solution here it will be really tricky to get this data in a good quality, from publicly available sources. But of course eCharm is intended to be one cornerstone of a bigger solution that can be used by other players who have access to additional private data. A big charging station operator in Germany that is using our data as a part of their solution to bring further insights is doing just that for an even more enriched perspective.

Christian: But there are many of them, right? So basically, nobody has all the data available with a full view where everybody is charging how much and nobody knows what the next best location in terms of demand would be. Is that correct or is it just eCharm which is lacking features to answer those questions?

Stefan: Indeed, even these players only have their view on the systems they operate themselves, or maybe partners.

Christian: So it's a bit like the problem all the navigation system providers were facing like 10 or 20 years ago. Everybody could use live data from their own fleet, but not from everybody else. So if you are not selling enough and you don't have enough cars on the road, you are basically blind, and only when you get to some sort of standardization like everybody's using Google Maps nowadays, then you have one source of truth which is quite accurate. But I guess it will take some time until we get there for the charging infrastructure.

Stefan: That’s exactly the problem, yes. There are open standards and clearing systems that bring this data together, but as I said, not yet in a way that is openly accessible. You see, that is one out of many reasons why this aspect of Smart Grid is a major challenge, and we haven’t even talked about other aspects of the same use case such as predictive maintenance or security.

Christian: True. We certainly will in the next part of this interview series. But for now, thanks again for sharing your view, Stefan!