Electric vehicles soon could become one of the world’s biggest energy buyers, with battery capacities creating immense opportunities for renewable energy and profound implications for the management of power grids.
Despite this potential, the emergence of siloed EV solutions for EV charging and grid services points to the need for common digital EV infrastructure integrated “under the hood” into EV solutions for seamless user experience and cost minimization.
While blockchain technology — a distributed, digital ledger for verifying transactions — is only just beginning to be used for commercial solutions in the energy sector, an increasing number of projects illustrate evidence of the technical and commercial viability of using blockchain for managing automated green EV charges, e-roaming and grid services. We discuss several examples in this article.
Why is linking EVs with renewables sourcing so important?
In light of the unprecedented growth of EV adoption, we need to synergize the evolution of e-mobility and the shift toward clean energy that’s occurring in power sectors. In particular, EV charging services should be integrated with renewable energy sources because green EV charging brings:
- Lower costs: EVs in tandem with renewables are more cost-effective than oil-powered mobility over the entire life cycle.
- Potential to reduce curtailment of existing renewable energy capacity and grow demand for new renewable energy projects: EVs soon will become one of the largest electricity consumers and present an opportunity to grow demand for renewable energy.
- Improvement of environmental performance: While EVs have lower lifecycle carbon footprints than their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts, their benefits in reducing emissions and air quality also depend on the power grid mix used to charge them. For example, EV charging in Germany is less carbon-intensive compared to Poland, where most of the power is generated from coal-fired plants.
It is incumbent upon EV owners (especially cities with public EV transport and corporations with EV fleets) and regulators to actively demand, if not require, e-mobility players to provide 100 percent clean EV charging solutions. Energy Web believes clean EV charging should be part of the EV experience enabling EV customers to join corporate energy buyers in scaling voluntary demand for renewables.
Issues with existing green EV charging solutions
Charging stations with onsite solar panels are one obvious way of linking EVs with clean energy. However, these stations are possible only after meeting certain feasibility, technical and commercial criteria.
Other available solutions for managed charging and green tariffs — such as those offered by U.K.-based power retailer Octopus, for time-of-use EV charging, and by U.S. fast charging network company, EVgo, to offer to purchase renewables through third parties based on measured EV charging — are limited in scale, scope and standardization.
Energy Web believes clean EV charging should be part of the EV experience enabling EV customers to join corporate energy buyers in scaling voluntary demand for renewables.
Advancing clean EV charging across global EV networks will require a common digital protocol aligned with energy attribute certificate (EAC) and EV industry standards to streamline the documentation of various relevant EV events (such as EVs and EV owners registration, participation in EV programs and services, completed transactions, etc.). This is where public variations of blockchain — in combination with other technologies such as digital identities, the internet of things and smart meters — come in as a backbone for new solutions that could help EVs reach their decarbonization potential in an efficient and low-cost manner.
Public blockchain brings key advantages for clean EV charging
Public blockchains refer to ledgers accessible by anyone (examples include Energy Web Chain, Bitcoin, Ethereum) as opposed to private blockchains. Public blockchains could provide common digital infrastructure for granular accounting of key EV events that point to the unique digital identity of each EV and EV owner anchored on a blockchain.
Because they are secure, accessible and decentralized, public blockchains could — through integrations with trusted data sources — enable multiple actors in the EV industry to access important verified data while preserving privacy. This is currently not widely possible with more centralized technologies.
Blockchain also supports standardized communication and settlement protocols, which makes blockchain-based applications highly interoperable across markets. In other words, public blockchain technology offers tools akin to a shared document that users can read online and where any edits are visible with privacy protections.
Today’s use of siloed systems for activities such as EV registration, participation and settlement likely reduces EV participation and creates various avoidable costs. In contrast, blockchain enables stronger version control, transparency and administrative efficiencies compared to existing technological tools.
Specifically for green EV charging, public blockchain could bring various advantages, including:
- Automatically matching every charge event with corresponding renewables purchases and EACs, creating additional revenue streams that will help renewable energy project developers to further finance new facilities.
- Enabling EV owners to easily report and demonstrate the proof of charging their fleets with 100 percent clean energy for greenhouse gas accounting and corporate social responsibility purposes.
- Providing time-sensitive incremental carbon credit issuance, tracking and reporting from EV charges based on regulatory frameworks.
- Offering seamless and cost-efficient EV charge payments across EV charge point operators via digital identifiers, mobile wallets and streamlined user interfaces.
There has been initial progress with bringing these EV concepts to reality using blockchain.
An initial EV pilot by EW in Germany in November 2018 provides an example of how blockchain can automate renewables purchasing for individual EVs, in this case for electric bikes. Building on these results, EW — together with a Californian utility and a global EV manufacturer — ran a pilot in February 2019, where 20 EVs fulfill the needs of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS).
Today’s use of siloed systems for activities such as EV registration, participation and settlement likely reduces EV participation and creates various avoidable costs.
In addition to matching every charge event with corresponding RECs, each EV received incremental carbon credits based on the LCFS formula involving the time of the charge and grid mix at the exact time of the charging. Both of these pilots leveraged the public, open-source Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS) technology, which includes the Energy Web Chain.
Open-source technologies that use public blockchains such as the Energy Web Chain also accelerate solutions for EVs in other important areas, such as charge point interoperability.
For example, the Open Charging Network (OCN) curated by the Share&Charge Foundation, an independent nonprofit organization, could help scale and make green EV charging solutions accessible to various EV owners. Coupled with the OCN-enabled easy e-roaming, clean EV charging could be offered across multiple charging station operators and e-mobility service providers using a uniform, single digital wallet owned and controlled by the EV owner.
These examples show how public blockchain technology can form part of the technology stack used to build commercial digital solutions for EVs.
Beyond green EV charging
Blockchain technology also could support solutions for EV grid services and flexibility. The same digital identities used for charging, for example, might be used to onboard EVs in a variety of grid programs, ranging from wholesale power markets to locally managed dynamic pricing programs. For example, blockchain applications could be used to document and settle battery storage services from EVs at high speed and low cost.
Conclusion
Pairing e-mobility services with renewable energy can accelerate decarbonization efforts, which is why EV owners and regulators should demand clean EV charging solutions.
We at Energy Web Foundation think that public blockchain — coupled with digital identities, IoT, smart metering infrastructure and other technologies — provides a promising part of new EV solutions. Hence, we call EV industry players to make use of newly available technologies such as EW-DOS to launch leapfrog solutions in the EV sector.