By Greentech Lead Team: Ericsson announced a new architecture allows electric vehicle
drivers to control charging of cars while they are plugged into any ordinary
power outlet.
The system
directs energy costs to the car owners’ bill. The driver sets the time and
amount to charge on a console in the car or remotely via a smartphone or
tablet.
Ericsson’s
contribution to the project is to understand and influence how existing and
future mobile networks, services and terminals can support new business
concepts as well as services that benefit society. Ericsson is providing IT and
communications expertise.
Using the
mobile network, the car communicates with the grid so that charging is
scheduled based on energy prices on the grid, reducing user costs.
For the energy utilities, coordinating the charging of cars across the grid is
more efficient and sustainable.
“New
solutions like these need to seamlessly and reliably coordinate multi-party
machine-to-machine and human-to-machine interactions, where both people and
machines are mobile, while allowing secure financial transactions. Our job is
to make that simple,” said Paolo Colella, head of Consulting and Systems
Integration at Ericsson.
The Volvo
Electric C30, now in low-scale production for leasing customers in Europe,
has been used during the project and equipped with the in-vehicle meter and
software.
“Our
basic view is that the owner of an electric vehicle shouldn’t have to sacrifice
any of the properties he or she expects from a luxury car. This smart
technology for charging in any outlet, and paying automatically via your own
electricity bill, is an excellent example of how we do everything to make the
daily use easier for the customer,” said Lennart Stegland, vice president
Electric Propulsion Systems, Volvo Car Corporation.
To provide a
range of perspectives the concept was developed in a consortium involving Volvo
Car Corporation, Goteborg Energi, the leading utility in western Sweden,
Ericsson and Viktoria Institute, a non-profit IT research institute.
“Electric
vehicles will be a key component both for a sustainable society and for a smart
grid. We are committed to making the charging of the vehicles easy, as well as
optimizing the use of the power grid at the same time,” said Lotta
Brändström, CEO Göteborg Energi.