If you thought the future was about driving electric cars, then you’re in for a shock.
What’s the most valuable thing inside an EV? It’s not the motor. It’s the battery.
That battery, depending on its size, can power an individual household for up to a week.
It’s like a mobile power plant that could replace the ones we rely on today,
the ones that push electricity over wires, one way, down to individual homes.
That battery is a wallet, allowing you to store electricity and help your household become energy self-sufficient.
Or you could use it to trade excess energy with whomever you want.
We’re not just looking to push EV, or to make EV a reality, it’s all about clean mobility an the energy transition.
To make sure we live off renewable energy, renewable electricity
and that involves also a change in being able to trade kilowatt-hours freely and get to a kind of a marketplace.
That’s Sander Hourkirk.
He’s the the Director of Business and Development and Energy Services at NeMotion,
one of Europe’s biggest providers of smart and safe charging solutions for electric driving.
I think we are in a hurry t to make the energy transition for my children’s children
and their children to take better care of the planet in general.That’s why we’re here, that’s why we founded the company.
That’s why I’m an electrical engineer and that’s the whole purpose, the raison d’etre,
of the company and myself
is that we want that sustainability also in the energy chain.
We also have the food chain and the water chain, but especially the energy chain, we want to achieve that.
With zero emission.
But there’s a catch.
If everybody came home at six o’clock in the evening and plugged in their car, well the grid couldn’t cope,
our generators couldn’t cope.
That’s Chris D’Souza.
I’ve been at Shell about 17 years, and in those 17 years, I’ve had a whole variety of different roles.
Started working on electric mobility about five years ago, and that’s really when we wanted to see what in Shell
we either should or could be doing.
Shell recently bought NewMotion, marking the energy giant’s first electric mobility deal in anticipation
of the “tipping point” towards zero emission vehicle demand.
With renewable energy sources,
one of the problems with them is that they generate electricity when the sun shines.
They generate electricity when the wind blows.
They’re not switch on and off like the traditional coal and oil and gas sources of energy are.
Here’s where the electric vehicle batteries come in.
Imagine that you can store all this renewable energy you’re generating. Store it until you need it.
Or plug it back into the grid.
A grid is just one place where I can put the electricity I have in my car, but I could also place it in your car,
if you’re parked next to me, if you like.
I could place it back into the home.
I could place it back into the office. Or even when I’m at my soccer field at night,
I may want to fire up lamp posts at my soccer field when playing soccer in the dark.
That kind of market thinking and making sure that the market comes into existence
is rather different than the world where we had big power plants pushing electricity over wires.
We’re talking about me producing on the solar panels, selling to you, two houses down,
and you may drive a bit further out to your folks and then sell your last kWh to your folks when you’re there.
This system is called a vehicle-to-grid,
and NewMotion, among others, thinks it’s the key to a more sustainable future.
It is as simple as it is a charge point that can
put electricity into the car and take it back from the car.
And that’s it.
here’s no more to it than it’s really in two ways, in two directions.
It’s literally all about AC/DC.
So for the real technologists under us – so this makes from AC in the building, it makes DC and puts DC in the car.
And DC from the car and back into the charger and AC back into the building.
So suppose this car urgently would need a quick charge, but
the building is maxed out in terms of power capacity,
this vehicle could charge that vehicle.
And even
in cases we can use the car to power the building as well.
This bidirectionality can change how cities power themselves.
Think about it this way.
Parking is what your car does 90% of the time.
That’s a lot of excess energy just laying dormant.
What if you could use that energy to temporarily power your house, donate energy to someone else?
Especially when there’s no sun or wind outside?
We’re not transporting ourselves all the time and then still there’s moments that the batteries are connected
and you can give it a function in the electricity system.
So, I actually think one step further,
I think that cities should actually become a production entity on its own and that we should have
plenty of electricity for everybody.
One of the reasons for us putting our money behind our New Energies division
was because we believe that that’s the right thing to do for us as a business, but also
you know for the environment, and also, you know, to support the growth of energy,
articularly in developing economy, where they need access to more energy
and that needs to be clean energy.
So we’re kind of putting our money where our mouth is in this one.
As cities become smarter, they can function as independent production entities with plenty of electricity for everyone.
The electric car battery and smart charging points are just the beginning of the energy transition towards a lower carbon future.