Community Based e-charging Infrastructure—A Solution for Rural Areas?

The “Bürgerladenetz BW”, a federal state funded project, enables 20 citizens and small businesses to set up a community based EV-charging infrastructure as pilot customers in rural Baden-Württemberg. The project partners offer the necessary hardware and software for implementation. The wallbox model B3200WFE from the manufacturer EV Plug Technologies Ltd. was supplemented with an IoT device before delivery to the participating pilot customers of the project. Based on this hardware, IoT edge software enables wallbox control by a dashboard, which serves as a user interface to the wallbox operator. A mobile app for wallbox users enables credit card payments for shared use of the e-charging station. In addition, self-use and roaming with RFID cards and chips is possible. While the use of EV charging stations via credit card payment is only slowly increasing, a significant increase in use is expected from the recently implemented roaming option. As part of the project, first power grid simulations on the effects of e-mobility were carried out. The results show that even in a very rural power distribution network with increased power consumption by 13% in 2030, no bottlenecks were identified even if all e-charging was bundled at one time. The next steps are to integrate the future results of the pilot phase into the calculations and to update the underlying assumptions to recent political developments, e.g. the political goal of 15 Mio EVs in 2030. The biggest challenge of the project are the main legal and regulatory barriers, which currently make sharing of charging stations less attractive for wallbox operators. Such hurdles should be removed for functioning peer-to-peer energy supply solutions. Nevertheless, the project has shown, that a community based EV charging infrastructure can be part of the solution in rural areas and will therefore be expanded due to the project’s success.