Talking New Energy: Are there really any good practical examples of V2X?

[00:00:01.760] - Jon Slowe

Welcome to Talking New Energy, a podcast from LCP Delta. I'm Jon Slowe.

[00:00:06.480] - Charmaine Coutinho

And I'm Charmaine Coutinho. Together, we're exploring how the energy transition is unfolding across Europe through conversations with guests at the leading edge.

[00:00:16.500] - Charmaine Coutinho

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Talking New Energy. I'm Charmaine Coutinho. I'm your host for today. And today we're going to be talking about the really good practical examples of V2X. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with smart charging or V2Grid or V2X or V2 anything, we have not spoken about it for a while, but here we're looking at how electric vehicles can really provide flexibility charging and actually provide lots of services to an ever-changing grid. We're going to explore today how smart charging is actually being achieved in the energy market.

[00:00:52.520] - Charmaine Coutinho

I'm very pleased to welcome two companies who are operating the sector, Hive Power and Free2Move eSolutions to talk about their experiences with EVs providing grid flexibility, but also one of some of the challenges that are going on across Europe, particularly with the EV market in the last couple of years, and the fact that flexibility, particularly on the demand-side, is rising and becoming more and more important. How are those two markets really meeting? What's going on? Are there some good examples that we can talk to and anything that people can learn about? I'm very pleased to introduce Gianluca and Vinicio. Gianluca, can you give us a bit of an A little bit about yourself and a bit of an elevator pitch for Hive Power.

[00:01:34.260] - Gianluca Corbellini

Yes. Hello, everyone. My name is Gianluca Corbellini. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder at Hive Power. Basically, what we are doing is pretty simple. We enable new flexibility to generate revenue streams or to monetise savings, basically leveraging their flexibility again, for electric vehicles, charging batteries, and solar, and heat pumps. This happens with different business models, partner goes with energy companies and asset managers, but we will see later on exactly what we're doing.

[00:02:07.510] - Charmaine Coutinho

Brilliant. And Gianluca, where are you guys based? Where do you operate?

[00:02:10.200] - Gianluca Corbellini

Yeah, Hive Power is based in Switzerland, in Ticino, exactly. But let's say people are spread across Europe, and we have operation in multiple European countries already.

[00:02:19.470] - Charmaine Coutinho

Lovely. Thank you very much. And Vinicio, I think I got that right, hopefully. Could you give us a bit of introduction to yourself and Free2Move eSolutions as well?

[00:02:28.240] - Vinicio Lupo

Hello, everyone. Very pleased to be here. My name is Vinicio Lupo. I am an electronic engineer. I work for Free2Move eSolutions since November 2021. Free2Move solution is a joint venture between Stellantis and NHOA Group. We are mainly focused to charging solution, EV charging solution. We are focused on three pillars, software, hardware and services. This means that for eMobility, we produce hardware charging solutions. We have some wall boxes to charge vehicles. We have a lot of software stuff like the mobile app to allow you to charge publicly and at your own home. Of course, as well, all the back-end and cloud, the solution to manage the charging solution.

[00:03:28.270] - Charmaine Coutinho

Fantastic. I'm going to ask the same question. I can tell, well, I know that you're based in Milan, but where does Free2Move eSolutions operate?

[00:03:37.560] - Vinicio Lupo

Essentially, as soon as we are, let's say, a preferred partner for Stellantis itself, we follow the markets of Stellantis, so means that as soon as we are mainly, we are basically in Milan and Turin as main offices as a solution, we cover mainly the European country, but we have as well a subsidiary in US to follow the North American market of Stellantis.

[00:04:10.100] - Charmaine Coutinho

Lovely. Thank you. For those of you who are not familiar with Stellantis, if you're not from the EV sector, very large player, you can go and Google them quite easily. Right. Okay. Thank you, guys. It was a great pleasure to have you both on. As I mentioned, we haven't really talked on the podcast around EV and smart charging. But if I go back a couple of years, from the research work that we do at LCP Delta, everyone was talking about flexibility, demand-side response, EVs and Vehicle-to-Grid. Gianluca, could you tell us a little bit I suppose people who are not familiar about the role that EVs actually really play in flexibility and what, I suppose, you think makes them particularly interesting?

[00:04:52.790] - Gianluca Corbellini

Well, electric vehicles have been often seen like a challenge for the electric system because they are basically adding additional load, and it could be massive load once the electric mobility will be fully deployed. But instead, a lot of experiences across the world, pilot projects or even already fully deployed solutions, already demonstrated that they could be definitely a key player to foster the energy transition. This happens in particular to balance prices on energy markets. It could help also to, let's say, reduce a little bit the intraday volatility but more interesting is even that they can help a lot grid performances. Basically, the idea is that you can shift in time the charging of electric vehicles at the best time and typically also the best price. What we saw in many projects, also by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), by charging companies, CPOs (Chargepoint Operators) and so on, is that people typically with private charging, and we're mostly talking about private charging, have a lot of time to charge the vehicles because they do a few kilometres per day, and then they have many hours to charge them. Basically, it means that you can shift it in time. Shift in time, the charging of the vehicles without affecting at all their comfort.

[00:06:11.290] - Gianluca Corbellini

Basically, the vehicles will be fully charged when needed. This possibility is basically called flexibility. It means that then for energy companies or optimisation companies like us, we see the vehicles basically as batteries on wheels. Additional advantages are that there will be millions of electric vehicles. There are already millions of electric vehicles globally. There are many distributed assets, which means that this pool of assets, because, of course, you need to aggregate many vehicles to have reasonable power amount, is very robust. You can really have a robust way to stabilise the grid, very distributed, again, and very numerous. Also, compared to battery energy systems, of course, the investment of the… The cost is already covered because you buy a vehicle for mobility purposes, so it's a huge advantage. I would say there are two main use cases that you can have a look at once you want to learn more about smart charging and vehicle-to-everything. Number one is price arbitrage on the spot market. It's mostly on the day ahead or intraday markets. This basically happens thanks to the increasing volatility that we see in the spot markets. During the same day, you can have very high, very low, or even very negative energy prices.

[00:07:30.910] - Gianluca Corbellini

Basically, charging when the energy is cheap or discharging the vehicle when the prices go to the peak. It's obviously very interesting.

[00:07:40.231] - Charmaine Coutinho

Mm-hmm.

[00:07:40.510] - Gianluca Corbellini

The second main use case is about providing services directly to the electric grid, which is today mostly mean to transmission system operators (TSOs). Those very big companies that at the national level manage the high voltage lines. And the idea there is that you want to use these vehicles perfectly balance supply and demand. So basically, you know that the demand of energy is forecasted very well, but the reality is always different.

[00:08:09.440] - Charmaine Coutinho

Mm-hmm.

[00:08:09.620] - Gianluca Corbellini

Same thing to apply to the production. And then you need some asset to always improve this balance between supply and demand. And the electric vehicles are very fast to react. They already proved that they can be very reliable and efficient. The bonus thing is that you can also do those two things together with what is called value stacking. So basically, you do the stacking of those two new business models. It's totally doable, and we're already also doing it in Switzerland with some very big players from the automotive and energy sectors. So, it's really a new promising business models, a set of business models, leveraging existing assets and providing savings and revenues also for the end-users.

[00:08:55.350] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah, there's something very neat about being able to have a user asset that's already there that you don't need to spend more money on an existing one to provide something, service to the grid, that the grid really needs and will increasingly need. I think that does make them interesting. The batteries on wheels for me, is something that I keep on thinking and reminding myself about because not only can you do that, can you do the other batteries, but you can move. That makes them a bit more complicated, but it also makes them much more interesting. Okay, so two really useful and interesting use cases. Vinicio, can you tell us a little bit about the work that you at Free2Move eSolutions are doing with Hive Power? So, listeners are always interested in case studies.

[00:09:38.120] - Vinicio Lupo

Yeah, sure. Let's say the concept that Gianluca already introduced it, we are trying to put in place with the real technological solution. So this means that we tested already with Hive Power, the integration of vehicles. Actually, I'm talking about already bi-directional vehicles, so bi-directional charger connected to a bi-directional vehicles in order to support exactly that use cases. We work together to achieve this final fully integrated solution in order to allow, let's say, the customer offer on the grid, the energy stored in in their own vehicles to support the use cases mentioned by Gianluca. Essentially, we tested already at lab level, but we are pushing forward to launch on the market as soon as possible this type of solution. We actually are using the latest technology, of course, both SU, someone I suppose most can know who is interested in bi-directionality is the latest protocols like ISO 15118-20. We are using the latest technology in order to retrieve information from the vehicle itself in order to monitor as well the status of the battery we collected, and I want to stress this specific point because we talked about battery on the wheels. But just because we always have to keep in mind that the primary usage is mobility, we collect, and we are customer-centric focused.

[00:11:49.150] - Vinicio Lupo

This means that the mobility needs are crucial in our solution in order to always guarantee the usage of the EV and reinsure our final customers that even if they give some availability and then some flexibility to charge or discharge the vehicle in a smart way from a grid perspective, we always guarantee the usage of the EV as a car.

[00:12:22.350] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah, it's very easy when you're talking about smart charging to forget that actually the primary focus is that the people have bought it as a car, as a mobility. Actually, any flexibility, revenue or arbitrage is really an added extra. You mentioned that you've done some lab testing, and then you're looking at rolling out for consumers. What kinds of consumers or customers do you think we'll be interested in generally?

[00:12:55.570] - Vinicio Lupo

That's a really important question. Because essentially, we think that is quite applicable in a lot of use cases, mainly, let's say, the commercial vehicles. It's one use cases, especially during the night when they are not running their duty cycle or maybe for just a part of the fleet that is not used, can be exploited, extracting value from, let's say, mobilised asset in this case, or even in residential use cases where essentially, if we can imagine an household announced that can have as well PV production or renewable energy production in general and smart solution. The V2G technology can allow a lot of improvement as soon as essentially is a huge battery available to be exploited at a domestic level.

[00:14:10.290] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? You can look at both of those two different customer groups, and they're quite different, aren't they, in what they want or what their needs are. I suppose this is a follow-on question to that. In this project that you've been working on with Hive Power, what have been the surprises in your testing process?

[00:14:35.340] - Charmaine Coutinho

If you can talk about them, obviously.

[00:14:38.210] - Vinicio Lupo

Yeah, no. Essentially, there are a lot of challenges. I would say, first of all, to be sure, as I said, as soon as we are customer-centered, the importance and then the how to manage the mobility needs and the constraint that is actually not a battery on the wheel, but vehicles with a huge battery. Then it's really important to ensure and protect this aspect as a priority. Then I would say that the other important topic, as soon as we can see the… The technology solution is very, very mature at a technical level. The really important things I would say that at the moment is how to vehiculate to the final customer the concept of supporting the grid with their own car. This for sure is a challenge, especially on the interface to the customer. I'm talking about, of course, user interface and let's say, the front-end that is on the customer side and to try to simplify as much as possible all the complex process that is happening on the background and at the same time provide enough visibility on what is going on and where is the benefit of such solution.

[00:16:23.860] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah. Gianluca, is there anything... I was going to ask you a question later about scaling vehicles to everything. But I suppose that links quite nicely is one of the challenges around getting what's the right level of information to help customers participate. If you are asking them to do it willingly or if you automate it, is there anything that you've seen in the other work or this work where you've done with Free2Move eSolutions or other places that speaks to that?

[00:16:49.810] - Gianluca Corbellini

Yeah, definitely. One of the key topic is about the user experience, so how to engage with customers, with the end-users, because without them, of course, this cannot be deployed. I think, like always, it will happen first with the early adopters, so people which are maybe a little bit more nerd or close to happy to have savings. But also, sometimes I would say also happy to help the environment because what we did not mention yet is that very often when you charge at a cheap price, it's because the renewables are producing a lot of energy. Basically, in the very sunny and very windy hours. It's also, I think, maybe for young generations, for example, even more important to have this beneficial environmental impact on the CO₂ reduction. We saw also during our projects together, we also simulated long-term trends, like how much we can save in terms of money and CO₂ emissions, something around 40% of CO₂ savings thanks to smart charging compared to steal an electric vehicle with normal charging. The challenges in the adoption are definitely there for the coming years, but we're very optimistic that this trend will happen soon. Also, because we saw that in many of our experiments, the end-users would not even realise, if you don't tell them, that there has been a time shift in the charging experience.

[00:18:30.370] - Gianluca Corbellini

This is very true, especially for the ancillary services. When you're basically starting or stopping the charging of the electric vehicles to help the electric grids, it happens typically for some minutes and at the end of the day, it's almost impossible for the end-users to realise that something happened. The car will be fully charged. They will make some revenues, or they will have some bonuses, whatever. It's useful. Maybe a little Some concerns could happen with bi-directional charging. So today we're talking about V2G because then you are adding some cycles to the battery. But I'm curious to see also the perspective of Vinicio on this topic. I think it's quite a hot topic on your side, right?

[00:19:16.840] - Vinicio Lupo

Right. I was not mentioning just to simplify a little bit the technical topic, but as soon as in some way I'm advocating the position of car maker itself, it's actually a crucial point not only for the final customer to prevent any degradation of the battery, even discharging it or a geo-paradise in some way the life of the battery for the vehicles. Of course, this is a very important topic for us, for the car maker and of course, as well for the final of the car. But we are strongly committed to have, let's say, a negligible impact on the vehicles. We had already some experience in past project that are now live, where we cycle the battery with the V2G technology supporting the grid. We know for sure that the impact of the cycling, if it's made with a certain contingency, frequency and a certain parameter, can be, as I said, negligible or, let's say, a solo impact that could be ignored.

[00:20:42.180] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah, it's interesting because I think those two things, that impact on the customer from a very technical perspective. I think if you're a consumer, for example like me, and I've gone to buy an EV, you would not really realise how much time goes into considering and checking that actually if we're saying you can bi-directionally charge, we have made sure that that's not going to impact your experience as a consumer, either on how long your battery lasts or how fully charged it is on any particular day. It's really interesting to see the level of detail and testing that you guys have done on that area. Quite long projects because these are things that you need to cycle through repeatedly and for many periods of time, it's not something that you do over the course of two months, right?

[00:21:35.090] - Vinicio Lupo

Correct.

[00:21:37.030] - Charmaine Coutinho

Okay, great. Well, I suppose not related. In terms of just thinking about V2G, generally, could you both... Can you just maybe pick one area of change that you think would have the most impact? I'm going to ask you a question about what you think about the future in a minute, but just what do you think would have the most impact in the market that you could change in the next year?

[00:21:59.690] - Gianluca Corbellini

Yeah, I would say in general, the regulation side is still quite challenging. In some countries, in some others, it's already quite okay. For example, you want to avoid a double taxation of energy because then you're charging and discharging your vehicles. It doesn't make sense to pay grid fees, taxes and so on when you charge it to then discharge it. But in many countries, it's already like that. It's not like that in Germany, for example, but sooner or later, it will evolve. The… The regulation is maybe the very big thing that must be still adopted to have a global massive adoption. In general, I think this is the main challenge. The huge opportunities that I think that this year we will still see very high energy prices and extremely high volatility in the energy markets, mostly driven by the natural gas prices that already went up, which, of course, is not a very good news for Europe, but will drive I suppose very high prices and very, very high volatility. So maybe this could really be the thing that can push the adoption or let's say the public discussion about smart charging first and then vehicle to grade immediately later.

[00:23:20.110] - Charmaine Coutinho

Vinicio, do you agree? Do you have any other things you want to add on to that?

[00:23:22.870] - Vinicio Lupo

Yeah. Now, let's say, totally agree on what Gianluca said. If I may add, it's actually, I think one of the challenges that I think this industry and sector is facing is, let's say, a lower adoption than expected. Of course, this entails the mindset, the heavy mindset adoption at the same time. That means that is a very basic, let's I would say it's a must have to then push and try to spread the Vehicle-to-Grid technology. Because, of course, Vehicle-to-Grid, I think it's clear after all this discussion, it's quite complex because it entails two different industries, not only automotive and energy, but even, let's say, other aspects like regulation, taxation, and so on and so forth. In order to spread this solution, it's very, very important that the basic concept of EV charging and then the adoption and the spreading of the EV, it's one of the challenge that for sure as a player, strictly on the side of the carmaker itself, let's say, suffer at this moment.

[00:24:56.070] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah, I think it's... I mean, when we... Our research focuses a lot EV charging as opposed to EVs, but we do track some EV market because obviously you can't have one without the other. Obviously, a very key driver. Okay, I'm going to finish up with my last question, which is the question, hopefully, the listeners will be familiar with this is the Talking New Energy's crystal ball question. Imagine we are setting the scene to 2035, so 10 years away. Could you both tell me your vision for how widespread you see V2G compared to maybe other smart charging technologies? Then what was the one thing that happened in the next 10 years to achieve that? Vinicio let's go with you first.

[00:25:46.550] - Vinicio Lupo

Sure. I would say, first of all, it's trivial to say that the EV market has reached the critical on the population in term of mindset as well, as we said just one second ago. The second one, and the most important, I think, is what Gianluca mentioned at the beginning before, sorry, is the aggregation, at least at the European level or US level, that all the regulation has been unified on the topic in a that will push, let's say, at the end of the button to allow the V2G at commercial level in a way that we can do as a developer of this technology, the the scale concept using always the same solution on the different reads with specific constraint at the moment. For sure, the game changer will be when we can have a unified regulation to allow this type of solution and enable this type of solution.

[00:27:14.690] - Charmaine Coutinho

Yeah. And Gianluca?

[00:27:16.680] - Gianluca Corbellini

Yeah, I fully agree. I think by 2035, for sure, the technology of batteries for electric vehicles will definitely improve a lot. I mean, that's quite obvious. In that case, we can There will be no doubt at all about the lifetime of the battery so we can go bi-directional without absolutely no challenges. The regulation will be in place for sure. I think we could reach a point, it should happen before 2035, that vehicle-to-grid ready vehicles must be a feature that must be there. Otherwise, the vehicles is not so interesting for… for the end-users because it's something that if you think about 2035, most of private houses will have solar rooftops, most offices, solar will be everywhere. You want to store it in your battery when it's better, then give it back to the house or to the building or to the grid when it makes sense. I think it will be a standardised feature, maybe even by regulation, but I think it's not even needed. It will be automatically installed or new electric vehicles of any kind.

[00:28:32.140] - Charmaine Coutinho

That seems like a great plate to finish off on. I'm just going to recap two key things that just stood out. One, I think the idea of V2G being so widespread irrespective of regulation because the customers want it. I think that's what Gianluca was getting towards. That is a big thing for me, and I think that would be a great position for us all to get to. But coming back to earlier, I think one of the things around remembering that in this, the customer has a need which is around the mobility and as well as the flexibility. That always needs to be there. Yes, thank you both, Vincino and Gianluca, for your time and for your insights. Really interesting. I'm sure we'll wait and see what happens in the next five years, let alone in the next 10 years on smart charging. Jon and I will be back next week for another episode of Talking New Energy. But in the meantime, thanks again to my guests and thanks for listening.

[00:29:29.880] - Vinicio Lupo

Thank you.

[00:29:30.590] - Gianluca Corbellini

Thank you. Bye, everyone.

[00:29:31.620] - Charmaine Coutinho

Thanks for tuning in.

[00:29:33.290] - Jon Slowe

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[00:29:39.560] - Charmaine Coutinho

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