It is no secret that the demand for fully or partly electric-powered vehicles on the fleet market is increasing – not least because attractive models from the Group brands Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles are boosting this trend.

One challenge that this development continues to pose, however, is that of the charging infrastructure – though things are happening here too. For example, the Federal Network Agency in Germany announced more than 44,000 publicly accessible charging points with in excess of 6,300 fast-charging points for June – not counting corporate and private offers. What is common to the electricity purchasing experience is the fact that the energy transfer is cable-based – but this could also change in the foreseeable future.

Using a bi-directional system, the high-voltage battery in an electric vehicle could therefore be used as a local storage medium, so that if corporate clients have a photovoltaic system, they could use their electric company cars as a temporary storage for the green electricity they generate. When the sun is no longer shining, the vehicle simply feeds the stored energy back into the company’s power grid. This can reduce electricity costs and increase network stability at the same time. In addition, it is even conceivable to achieve almost complete energy autonomy as well as increased certainty of supply in the case of a major blackout by also using an energy storage unit. It is therefore already foreseeable: The new charging technologies can make fleets more flexible and independent in the future – and perhaps even enable completely new business models too.

Status: 01.09.2021
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