Towards a bidirectional charging ecosystem for different use cases

Mots-clés:

Résumé:

Purpose
The transition to electromobility has turned electric vehicles into far more than just a simple form of transportation. The vehicle’s battery enables the vehicles to become a mobile energy storage system (Noorollahi et al. 2020), which temporarily store energy and take it out again to a later point in time. This concept is named bidirectional charging (Kempton and Tomić 2005) and as vehicles remain most time parked (Brandt et al. 2017), it can ideally be used at the common locations, such as at home, but also at the workplace (Destatis 2021). By con-sidering the industrial environment, four new complex possibilities for using the energy from the vehicles arise: shaving company’s energy peaks, optimizing its energy consumption or marketing the energy by arbitrage or frequency containment reserve. These use cases re-quire different stakeholders to be aligned with each other to jointly create value in an eco-system (Adner 2017; Jacobides 2022). According to a lack of understanding of the necessary stakeholders, joining forces to fulfill a value proposition for the different use cases, this study investigates “how do the constellations of stakeholders look for different economic feasible use cases?”. Due to the fact that bidirectional charging in the industrial environment is in its nascent stage, we consider an emerging ecosystem, which requires the development of an ecosystem that is available in a minimum viable form (Adner 2012).

Design
In a first step, the economic feasibility of the four use cases was examined by analyzing their economic potential. Building up on this a qualitative investigation, for which expert interviews (Eisenhardt 1989) were conducted, supplemented by archival data were used to examine the relationships between the stakeholders. The qualitative approach was used due to both the novelty of bidirectional charging and the lack of previous research from an eco-system perspective. The collected data was analyzed inductively (Gioia et al. 2013). The information found was then combined in an ecosystem development framework (Kraus and Proff 2023).

Findings
The use cases of frequency containment reserve (~ 2.800 €/year&vehicle) and shaving peak loads ((~ 2.800 €/year&vehicle) pay off the fastest (3,2 – 3,5 years), while arbitrage (880-1.300 €/year&vehicle) takes up to five years and optimization of energy consumption will just pay of if the company has unused energy reserves. Therefore, the two use cases with most promising economic feasibility were further conducted and their necessary actors (a provider of charging infrastructure, a provider of the billing solution and the backend of the charging infrastructure, the energy supplier, the grid operator) were set in relation in an op-erating model with data and financial flows. If the aim is to use energy internally, an energy management system provider must be consulted. When it comes to external marketing of energy, an actor who has the skills to successfully aggregate and market energy is needed. The possibility of feeding energy back into the grid requires significantly higher demands on the individual contributions of the actors, which in turn are reflected in their relationships. Precisely because the topic is still very much on the rise, there is no clear orchestrator yet. Promising actors who can orchestrate are energy suppliers who want to maintain their posi-tion or providers from the field of energy management.

Practical and theoretical implications
The study shows the different ways in which the constellation of actors can be designed to establish bidirectional charging in the industry and thus lays an important milestone for both advancing the electrification of commercially used fleets and keeping the energy grid stable at the same time. The application of the ecosystem perspective makes it possible to under-stand the complex interaction of the actors and provides the basis for further development of the relationships. Future research must concretize the ecosystem and add governance mech-anisms and value driver (Jacobides 2022; Dyer et al. 2018).

 
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