The 10 Best Automotive Franchises to open 2019

About the Author
Stefan Lodeweyckx, Founder & CEO of Enervalis is an internationally
experienced and an all-encompassing manager in the technology sector with handson
and managerial knowledge ranging from start-ups, business development,
engineering, operations, change to customer service and product/project/people
management/planning.
His professional experience is endorsed by a solid educational blend of engineering
and business degrees (MSc/MBA). Apart from being the Co-founder of Ego-LogiQ,
which focuses on the mental aspect of individuals to increase their personal and
professional performance, Stefan’s Enervalis is a high tech start-up company which
provides smart grid software, service and solutions. He is also the Managing Director
at Ubisin, a consultancy rm in the high-tech sector on various domains such as
business development, project and product management, strategy, and overall
management.
To start off, the current EV penetration is so small that the
energy usage is marginal in comparison with an overall
country’s usage. Looking at the mid-term (2030) would
give lead to an overall modest % of EVs (100+ Millions
worldwide) which would still only on average consume
4-6% of the overall electrical production which again is a
marginal step-up of what we have now. So far seemingly no
issue but here looms the real danger … electrical grids need
to be in balance and a key balance period on EU level is
15min in which supply and demand need to be in
equilibrium. One can easily imagine that if worst case all
EVs would charge at the same time there can be a
significant increase in energy need on 15 minute level. This
relates to typical human/societal group behavior and e.g. the
current approximate 1million + EVs can realistically give
lead to 1,2GW of instantaneous power need. This equates to
about 3-4 gas fired power plants or nearly 2 nuclear power
plants.
As an analogy a country like Belgium on average would
need about 8-10GW of power and thus if all these EVs
would be concentrated on that single country one can easily
see that this causes a significant problem. Coming back on
the 2030 targets, the 100 million+ EVs would pose an
average 10% extra power requirement which is also not
insignificant anymore, but overall there are no real national
level issues to be expected the next 10+ years with the EV
introduction. The real shorter-term issues will (and are
already) arise within concentrated EV deployments (e.g. a
group of 100 houses with 5-10 EVs can worst case already
impact the power peeks up to 20% which is the danger-zone
of typical dimensioned normal low-voltage network). Here
smart EV charging technology can become a blessing to
spread out the charging process over a longer period such
that the local grid nearly does not see any power issue and
hence again no issues are expected because the increased
energy demand is relatively low.
Another value is that these EV-drivers typically work for
employers which are becoming increasingly aware of the
need for sustainability and also have solar panels on their
business’ roof which with smart charging technology again
can be absorbed nearly fully avoiding peek-injection of the
solar panels and lowering the charging costs by means of a
lower cost of own produced green energy versus net-energy.
Finally imagine that all the above mentioned 1M+ EVs in
EU would be bi-directional and thus would be able to also
provide the network of energy when there are high periods
of need of energy during short periods of time. This
situation does realistically occur (recall more volatility on
the green production side) and at that point in time the EVs
could avoid the need to use 3-4 gas-fired power-plants
which more and more are still kept alive for these short
imbalance periods. This would save 100’s of millions of
euros only of these type of power plants using latent
available EV batteries.
This seems far off, but currently in small scale it is already
running in projects fully automatically proving the viability
of advanced AI technology to perform this type of charging
without discomforting the EV driver who needs to get to his
next location.
To summarize, EVs are not at all a curse for the electrical
grid, but rather a blessing when combined with advanced
smart EV charging algorithms. The result will be a more
stable, greener and cost-effective energy grid which is what
we are striving for, so let’s all embrace and positively
stimulate the EV growth to help save our planet and make a
better world for our children.
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