Deploying Fast-Charging Hubs in the Netherlands

Okay, hello everybody, and welcome to this exciting virtual panel. My name is Christophe Leflibert and I am part of Flexecharge, and I have the pleasure today to moderate the panel. Having no grid capacity on high and medium voltage electricity networks seems to be the new normal in the Netherlands. Grades across the world have become bottlenecks, slowing the advancement of renewables, but the Netherlands seems to have been hit by the problem particularly early and hard. The Dutch story showcases how grids can become a bottleneck for the expansion of renewables and electrification in any country with such ambitions. So, and you might know the density of EV chargers per inhabitant in the Netherlands is the highest in Europe, which is a rapid rollout, which is maybe now jeopardized or at least slowed down by the serious grid congestion concern. So how do EV charging professionals cope with such challenges as they deploy high power charging hubs, a type of hub which is very much requested by the markets. So today we have the pleasure to welcome a range of specialists. We will start with presenting you, Peter. Welcome, Peter Hermans, a leading expert and consultant within power transmission and specialist of the Dutch grid. You are a former CTO of Stedin, which is a major DSO, which manages and maintains energy grids in most of South Holland, Utrecht and Zeeland. Welcome to Anu and welcome to you, Shors, replacing your colleague, Steven, the last minute. Great. Thank you. You can make it happen. You are a seasoned professional from the renewable energy industry, holding a master in energy science and today business developer at Iwell, which is for those who don't know Iwell yet, one of the leading supplies of energy storage technology in the Netherlands and across Europe. And we have also the pleasure to receive you Bart, Senior Product Manager for Fudura, one of the leading companies deploying EV charging infrastructure across the Netherlands. Welcome to you. And last but not least, our very own Robert Brame, co-founder and CTO of FlexChart and above all, energy management specialists. So a word to the participants. Thank you for joining us. You can post questions in the top right corner. There is a field for questions and we will pick them up later by revealing them on the screen so everybody can see them. And that's the there's also a chat section, but we won't pick up questions in the chat section. So if you really want to ask a question, put it in the questions. So without further ado, let's dive into today's exciting discussion, starting with you, Peter. So between 15 and 20, you were CTO of Steadin. Can you please take us back to the most significant events and challenges and projects that you were involved in in relation to the Dutch grid? So what has been happening? What do you see and what have you working on? The word is yours, please. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Christophe. Happy to do so. For everybody who doesn't know me, I worked for 13 years between 2007 and 2020 in the energy sector from 2010 to 2020 for the Dutch TSO Steadin. In 2020 I retired, but I remained active on the issue of the energy transition on national and European level. And actually, the energy transition, which I got involved, started really in the beginning of 2012, 2013 on smart metering. And between the period from then to 2020, I was involved in a number of Dutch projects, which relates to the energy transition, but also digitalisation and to exchange of data to the market. In the Netherlands, there was a market facilitating board of the system operators, which was the secretary to run that. Then on European level, there was the task force flexibility from the task force grids from EG3, working on flexibility from the European Commission. I worked on the active system management report of the TSO DSOs. I come back to that later. And then after we write those nice reports on European level, I really got engaged or initiated in the Netherlands project on addressing congestion management, which then turned out into the delivery of the COPAX platform, a joint platform of the TSO and the DSOs in the Netherlands, which came alive in 2019. Then after my retirement, I also worked on data exchange, because data exchange goes further than just exchanging exchanges between grid operators and suppliers and metering companies, because in the energy transition, energy data is relevant for much more sectors, for example, in this case, the mobility sector as well. We set up an energy data space, which is called in Europe today, called MFFBus. I come to that also later. Then after 2020, I also was involved in smart meter data, using for grid management purposes to get a much more better view of what is going on there. Then we really had to deal with the GDPR and all type of privacy aspects. And the last point which I was involved after my retirement was working with local energy communities, because I really believe in the concept of local for local, and that we're really heading to a complete other energy system. So the insights from that was that at least I think we are on the way of a completely different energy system of the future than today. In the Netherlands, we call that we are transforming from the world of A to the world of B. And a lot of discussions we have that people think, well, we're changing something in the world of A, while also people say, well, let's first define the world of B and then figure out what the first step should be to go into that direction. A world in which I think the last mile, as we refer it, the low voltage grid will become the first mile. A situation where we see that the grid originally designed for traditional one-way direction of energy flows and not fitted for two-directional energy flows, especially for heat pumps and EV charging. And you also see changes on system management and grid management, because we talk about, I talk about grids and we have a number of grids, the distribution grids and the transmission grids. But at the end, we have one system and we should ensure that we don't end up with a situation with seven captains managing one ship, et cetera. So that really requires a good cooperation between the DSOs and the DSOs. So that is where I was involved so far. So if you could have asked me to zoom in a little bit on the congestion management topic in the Netherlands. So first of all, my view on the root cause, why are we there where we are there today? And then we actually, my personal view is that there was a strong incentive for renewable energy generation subsidies on solar panels, netting schemes, et cetera, because the government really pushed for the R2 to increase and that effect over overlooked system effects, because then you saw that a lot of renewable energy integration came on online in areas where the ground is very cheap and where the ground is very cheap. There is not so many people living there and well, not so many people are living there. There is no good capacity. The second point is that the regulator today, I think as in most European countries, is setting the tariffs for the grid operators still on efficiency, which is not an incentive to invest upfront. So actually grid operators were a little bit late to sound the alarm bell. Now, where are we now today? Maybe Christoph, you can show the first slide I showed you. This is the situation in the Netherlands on the moment. The grid operators show the two maps you see here on the left on load and feed in and you see significant areas of the Netherlands showing to red. Now, the question is what is shown here? And that is currently a big discussion because there's a difference between physical congestion and grid capacity shortage. These pictures show grid capacity shortage. That means that the available grid capacity, which is there, is less than the grid capacity, transport capacity, which is requested for. And this situation will worsen until 2030. We are not at the peak of the problem. That's the problem. The problem will become stronger. And especially in the provinces, Flevoland, Utrecht and Gelderland, the situation might even become a little bit critical after 2025, also hitting the residential markets. If in those areas, for example, in Utrecht, you see that the number of enterprises which request transport in July, they mounted up to more than 1300 with more than one gigawatt power request and for feed in more than 500 require more than 200 megawatt feed in. Now, the problem with the grid operators is that they lack staff, they lack time because the targets for the government are set for 2013 based on the European climate agreements and they lack finance because also this is a very heavily investing thing and finance is also an issue there. So that is where we are now. And then what you see is that the grid operators start to work with Tenet. Tenet is a TSO. TSO is really so far the system operator. So they run the system and the grid operators, the distribution network operators in the past, they provide the transport for the distribution. And you see now with the changing dynamics in the system where the energy starts to flow in from the bottom side of the pyramid, that also the grid operators need to evolve capabilities on system operations. So they need to develop capabilities to do predictive load flow analysis. In the past it was that the TSO said, well, for the day I had forecast, we do a forecast and the grid operators only have to confirm that there is capacity enough on the coupling point between the distribution grid and the transmission grid. And then the TSO said that's fine because the distribution grid is your stuff, we are not involved in that. And investment strategy, there was a copper plate investment strategy. So there's always sufficient capacity. So why should we go for such detailed forecasting? Now that is the need for today. That on a daily basis for 15 minutes also know where the problem will be there and for how long the problem will be there and how big the problem there. And that is what I call the predictive load flow analysis capability. And if the DSOs have that capability on board, then they are able to much more better to communicate to the market where the problem is, but also when the problem is. And you see the second slide here is the left one is the static one on transport capacity. But well, the physical congestion is not 24 hours a day a case. It's only in certain times of the day and I make the comparison with the weather radar and analytics. So the market should know when and where the problem is and then the flexibility could be offered much, much more, much more better. That is my first thing. Then Christopher, you asked what are the plans, what is going on today? There's a lot of things going on and I reference to the gridlock report. Christopher might send that around later on. The grid operators are doing at most to improve the situation. They invest more than 8 billion euros per year. On one hand, that sounds good. On the other hand, if you continue that for more than 25 years, you end up with an amount of more than 200 billion euros. And then the question is who's going to pay that? We see now the discussion about affordability. And I think the general feeling in the Netherlands is that only putting more copper in the ground will not lead to affordability so that we really need smart solutions next to just building the infrastructure. Of course, accelerating the process, especially accelerating in the permitting process and the build process. DSO some say as a project with last 10 years, where eight years passed by getting the permit and the national procedures and all the consulting consultation rounds and only two years the build process. So that is a process in which also the government, the regional processes, the municipalities are strongly involved in. Now, in the meantime, for the enterprises, well, on the waiting list, the grid operators have also some new products or services in the portfolio now. And actually, we are in a process where at the end, a firm transport contract will be a very scarce thing there. Actually, we will be moving fast towards non-firm transport contract. So what the grid operator will say, well, for areas where they see, well, here is congestion, they do an investigation and they do a report and the regulator checks that report. Then they announce after six months of certain periods when the report is published, they announce that that area as a formal congestion area. And then everybody in the market is requested voluntarily to submit a redispatch bid. Now, those redispatch are requested by the GoPax platform. It's a national platform in which all the DSOs and the DSOs participate. And participants, aggregators, or enterprises, or BRPs, everybody can submit their bid for reducing load in a certain area. And it is combined with a compensation bid in another area to make sure that the balance is remained. That's the first thing. And then the second product is that the grid operators sign contracts with enterprises with limited or restricted transport contracts. So that they say, well, you get a transport contract, but the profile on how you use the contract is limited and agreed upon that. Then there are actions on use it or lose it. There's a lot of discussion on that. Some companies have a lot of transport contracts contracted in the past, but they don't use it. So there is a discussion if you don't use it, then you lose it because then we can give it to somebody else. And then one line protection in some cases by the TSO is left. Dynamic line rating so that the capacity on the TSO grid might vary and might be increased due to the weather conditions. And in delivering transport contracts today, there is also stepped away from what we called in the past first come first serve. You will request for transport, then you are on the waiting list and then you are number one. Then you are served and if you are number one, you have to wait. Now there is a priority scheme agreed by the regulator. They said, well, certain requests may be prioritized. So I always say a hospital gets more priority than a casino. So it's the public and vital infrastructure assets which get more priority. And also there is an issue on buildings. We need to build much more buildings in the Netherlands as we have today. Also that is hammered because then you build buildings and houses, but there is no electricity, nobody can live in that. So also that is prioritized. Then enterprises themselves also take now the action. So it's not only, and it's important, it's not only the action by the system operators, but actually the whole society should act on that. So where enterprises are sitting geographically together in an industrial area, they create what we call energy hubs. And actually the initial step of an energy hub is can we see and can we share our transport contracts? Because if every company has its own profile and one company has the peak in the morning and the other one in the afternoon and the third one in the evening, you could share the transport contracts. And the grid operators are piloting and working together with areas to test that and to pilot that. But that requires that the companies on an industrial area work together and also in a legal entity sit together because the liability is to them all. And the grid operators have to have a good confidence in what they offer that is workable. So that is what energy companies, energy hubs are doing, creating group contracts. And on the moment that was in such a contract, there is also local generation because there is a solar roofs or windmills on there. Then you come also in the next step that it's not sharing transport contracts, transport capacity, but it's also sharing the electricity. And then you start to share electricity local for local, use locally what you generate locally and only the deficit and so you exchange with the market. In that last area also the energy communities in the Netherlands are active. We have more than 700 energy communities in the Netherlands and they're also now piloting and starting to work on the local concept. The regulator is active. They monitor what's going on and they're looking into a new tariff structure. Today we have for the residential market a flat feet tariff structure and they're really considering to bring in time and volume in there. And I'm also pushing a little bit what is happening in Austria because they also bring the locational perimeter into the tariff structure. So if you use local energy, you use less grid, then the grid cost might be a little bit cheaper. And for public charging, the issue will be on the permitting process for municipality and they're pushing that municipality. If you put a charging pole, a public charging pole there, you will need to have a permit for that. The charging poles are all smart charging and what they call net aware charging. So that the charging poles help to mitigate the congestion and that it's not only working for the balancing market or for the for the internet market when the electricity is cheap, that everybody starts to load their cars. So that is where we are today. My personal, my last two points, some emphasis and then the perspective I think for charging point operators, my personal view is that more emphasis needs to be required on the communication part from the system operators. That much more shown is where is the physical congestion actually on what on what moments. I like the weather radar animations which I showed you. Then the relation between electrical and thermal load. We say the grid is 100% loaded because that is what we electrical measure. But actually the thermal load is how far can you load the grid before the cables burn down and the transformers explode. And that relation is not very clear and is different in many European countries. And I know that there is a lot of university studies going on to see whether we can increase the electricity load to a level that we still have a level of security of supply because the thermal load is not going over the over the borders. Local balancing need absolutely to be more emphasized. I see the discussion on congestion separated in congestion on load and congestion on feed in. While I would advise also to to correlate those two types of congestion because that brings you to new type of solutions. And then in the local grid you saw that in one of the pictures we have also voltage problems. If the feed in from solar panels from consumers in the right picture. The solar panels from consumers start to feed in the grid more than the grid is capable to handle. Then the power voltage goes up and on the moment the voltage goes over 253 volts then the smart converters just switch off. I show this because that could be also for for CPOs relevant if you say well where will I start to do some business. And if you would start to do adding load to the grid in those areas and loading cars on the moment when the sun is very hard shining then you could help mitigating the grid to grid congestion. The relation to heat there is no strong relation yet to heat. The discussion on heat as we phase out gas and electricity is still very weak and there are some DSO governance issues because also how do you manage this whole thing. Now to conclude my perspective for CPOs would be identify your business case when you are in the market or come in the market. Then you have two options via the market and work with BSPs or CSPs and BRPs on the GoPax platform. Then you are in the in the redisput type of business or you make directly non-firm connection agreements or limited connection agreements with the DSOs. Well I said again push the DSOs to to be more transparent on when is what capacity available and also consider solar car ports in cooperation with municipalities and energy communities in the in the in the congestion area. Then together with the energy hubs it could be interesting there is an initiative I think there's more than a few thousand energy hubs in the Netherlands identified. If you would find out where the energy hubs are because that's where the industry is sitting then you might see that there are also trucks which will charge and if you figure out which of these energy hubs also have generation capability then that would also be a good match to work to work together with. So in in baseline that that would be my my perspective. Excellent very thorough thank you very much Peter. It's yeah it's a complex market I'm at least highlighting that you said we haven't seen the peak of the problem that's quite worrying and and yeah hopefully challenges, grieves, opportunities and solutions so that's the topic now. So I think yeah we can come back we'll probably ask questions later on. I'd like to then hear so on this backdrop very detailed so if we move to the deployment of charging station maybe let's move on with you Bart. So can you tell us a little bit about Fudora's activities type of projects charging hubs and what kind of challenges you're facing so tell us a bit. First of all thank you Christophe for giving me the opportunity to be to be an expert. I joined the energy sector and the EV market exactly 12 months ago so honor to be invited here. So yeah maybe first some background on Fudora we used to be part of Anexis the grid operator and that we were responsible for b2b market so certified metering services and medium voltage infra then in 2022 we were acquired by a diff capital and pgdm and we have now let's say developed additional capabilities on ev pv battery power quality like capacitor banks harmonic filters what we do we really focus on the entire energy system of a company of a customer and with our main play in the market being operational lease of capital intensive assets so we engineered a solution we managed the implementation and then we use our nationwide coverage of service engineers to basically serve our customers yeah what are the main challenges i see that our customers are facing yeah first of all it's a relatively high upfront investment what i see in the ev market is that we often first speak to let's say the innovation manager of a company or if it's a small company like the the techiest the techiest guy in the company and then from their side is often like a big eagerness to move forward very quickly in implementing and closing contracts but they also have to convince their manager or their director so that really means that like we have to have to make a shift from let's say more transactional selling like someone gets an upgrade on their grid connection and then we sell them a transformer to like more like a having establishing a partnership so we really help our customers to build a business case and to basically help them to also convince their management management and these can be like logistics companies comparing tco of fossil versus electric it can also be like more b2c focused cpo and gas companies what we basically look at expected revenue versus investment but also what we see more and more often is let's say on business parks there may be one or two companies that actually have spare capacity and they want to use that to deliver fast charging to to their neighbors that might be logistics companies so what we currently see is that most of our customers still want to buy their infra many of the first movers have quite heavy innovation budgets and if we are talking to smaller customers they often start with like one charger just to test one e-truck but on the other end like i was speaking to a major truck sales company last week and they told me that 90 percent of their trucks are leased either operationally from them or like financially from like the various banks in the netherlands so we do expect that in the future if once the footprint of e-trucks grows that also let's say the energy infrastructure will be more and more financial or operational lease yeah and then like the biggest challenge of course that we see with our customers now is net congestion and that basically affects all of the above because your your business case changes timelines change and and we really see examples of customers that have ordered an e-truck and then last minute they find out oh yeah i need charging infrastructure they they call the the grid operator can i get an upgrade no oh shit what do we do now so then basically they they contact us and then we use our let's say solution engineering expertise to calculate for them like how big the short battery need to be how many charges do you need and basically like what what does your business case look like and like for charging infra like adding a battery actually changes the business case quite significantly significantly it can make it like easily twice or three times as expensive on the other end like we also have like let's say more simple use cases so a customer might have placed like 10 ac charges a few years ago but like in the first few years they were like very sparsely utilized but like with the growing usage of evs utilization goes up and then like the letters from the grip grid operators drop and then they ask us like please can you just do some dynamic balancing on our on our main meter and then we yeah we just implement and it's a relatively simple ems solution like from a product or technical point of view i would say like the the main challenge for us as a company is to just get everything working plug and play out of the box and like improv is so so important and you see that in the let's say the the evdc market like through institutes like ala there has been a lot of standardization you you have ocp but in the battery market like these standards are still not uniform so a lot of different battery manufacturers use slightly different standards but all right like that also provides like an opportunity i would say to parties like flexi charge who are basically i would say committed to removing a lot of that complexity and yeah basically offer a plug and play solution for companies like fedora or if it's not plug and play like you would work with us and basically make sure that it works yeah maybe the last one to briefly touch on what we see with a lot of our customers who are in dc charging and they need battery is the the choice between like integrated battery charges or let's say using a standalone battery and standalone dc charges we offer both options but so far we've seen that most customers actually opt for the like the standalone stationary stationary battery because it's not yet possible to share battery capacity between multiple let's say integrated chargers and then you will see that one charger is always used and the other one is not and then actually you have you have some battery capacity on another charger but that one is not being used also in the future it would like if we used like a separate battery we could always like once the grid connection comes in we could always like swap it out and replace it with a transformer once it becomes available exactly and maybe moving on to the next site yeah thanks for this for this presentation and input Bart yeah maybe before moving on there was a quick question from you Peter we want to ask it yourself hearing what you what you thought is let's see when we talk about energy hubs there's a need for what they call the park manager who manages the joint contract on behalf of all the participants on the on the industrial area towards towards is fedora planning or doing already themselves to position themselves in a in a park manager role uh towards the grid operators yeah so like we have several uh partner managers actually uh focusing on this so in uh like our former head office was in swolos so they're on a business park we are um i forgot the name now but uh yeah like we are working together like with these business parks and taking uh let's say a leading role in yeah basically bringing everyone together doing the negotiations etc and providing the metering sub metering uh everything required to uh to make it work no all right interesting uh specialty of uh specificity of the dutch market so so batteries let's come back to batteries let's type uh let's dive deeper now we talked about the business case so i hope that new shores can enlighten a little bit to give us a real deep perspective on this so tell us a bit about so uh when did i well start to install battery storage according to the grid you know have you when did you start work with CPO and charging give us a bit of history and tell us a bit uh are you working yeah sure uh well thanks as well for inviting us um to give some perspective on uh on the battery side and the dutch market, iWell started about eight years ago um placing batteries behind the meter of our clients and it's always business business uh that we focus on and the first couple of years the the main focus has been peak shaving batteries so there were some locations where you could install the battery and you can provide short spikes for instance in the apartment buildings to uh to provide power to the elevators which only come in every once in a while and thereby lowering the grid connection in such a way that you actually could um yeah lessen your uh your the bill of the the DSO um and that started with 10 kilowatts batteries it improved a bit to 30 kilowatt batteries and then up until three and a half years ago we really saw a big spike in the the size of the batteries and also the challenges that our clients are facing so we we moved up a big step and we meant it to the megawatt size so so we installed our first battery one megawatt then it had one megawatt hour so it wasn't one one c battery at a distribution center and there directly we also had to do a coupling with dc chargers because there were dc charges installed there uh there was a lot of solar uh installed at the location and next to our battery solution we also have a energy management software that can couple to all these flexible assets so we started connecting to dc chargers for the first time and we wanted to limit their available power to chargers at certain points because of grid limitations and um well grid limitations are a big challenge for a lot of clients um for iWell it's actually a bit of a it's been an enabler of our of our growth since uh the fact that our clients are facing these grid limitations sometimes pushes them towards battery solutions since they don't have any other option available and this means that for instance transport companies they they have traditionally only had a quite small grid connection and could easily run their entire operation all of a sudden once they start moving into electric charging they need to go 10-fold uh increase perhaps on their on their power consumption so then they call the grid operator of course there's no uh available capacity and they run into an issue um and that's where we come in and do we collaborate them with the CPO well these bigger transport companies they usually take on the cpo role themselves they of course supported by backend providers um but we install a battery on site and when you're talking about a business case is it good well the the investment costs of course go up like bart said but also your potential profit or income can go can increase greatly you have the opportunity to charge locally produced pv energy at the very cheap sometimes negative priced moments and if you're if there's a good mismatch or a big mismatch between the the moment of production of of pv and the moment of charging of your your your evs you can actually utilize the battery to make a big value step in the kilowatt hours that you're storing during the day you're discharging during the night to watch your your evs the nanos has a bit of a subsidy type of scheme in which locally produced kilowatt hours if you use them to charge your own evs you get a uh some something called a renewable fuel unit which can also stack on top of your uh your revenue model so in such a way you can get a very good business case if if the uh the circumstances are right you can easily have a payback period under five years sometimes under four years battery price is dropping uh quite a lot as well um but in a lot of instances the payback period really isn't that much of a factor because the battery just becomes an enabling technology to switch towards electric charging without the battery maybe a company can charge one or two trucks overnight but once they start moving into higher numbers there just isn't enough power to go around so they need to install the battery um because it cannot get more capacity from the grid and where bart just mentioned well we the battery can be installed for a couple years maybe the bigger grid connection becomes available and we can replace it by a transformer that's one way of looking at it sometimes you also can look at it once a bigger grid connection becomes available you can start usually utilizing your battery for energy trading behind the meter so instead of having a technical uh asset that's actually providing peak power you now have a financial asset uh that you can monetize on all the energy markets that are available and you can start making money from your from your investment as well so we're always looking at this combination of these local services and trying to maximize also energy trading value from that and then CPOs we also work with CPOs that do public charging we're starting to do that more and more in which they are moving towards dc charging stations on unlimited grid connections and then we install batteries that are able to of course provide this peak power for short instances and then when there's no charging we start uh no evs coupled we we start refilling the battery either from bv if there's a solar car or instance or from the grid if there's still a bit of room in the grid connection at that point well yeah so in all these different flavors we we work with the ev charging infrastructure we work with cpo's and one of the challenges that we see from our from our ems point of view from energy management software is there the very big diversity in different brands of chargers different type of chargers different capabilities of chargers can we can we connect to them is there a mudbus interface is there an interface is there something available to which we can actually send set points for charger to follow or not it's just it's a very diverse field um and yeah that's that's one of the things we will also talk to flexi charge about of course they can enable yeah this this step for us so we can connect to flexi charge and they can connect to all the different brands and types and we can give a full service without having to do all the development for each single asset ourselves which of course comes down to a lot of hours of our developers but also keeping it all up to date if there's a firmware update functionality might be different so that's a that's a big challenge for us at the moment and i think the one someone serves that tracks you charge offers it's very beneficial for us as well yeah thank you for thank you for mentioning yeah thanks a lot for the um maybe one thing i christoph i think there was a question here how do we optimize the size of the batteries needs for a given project yes it would be nice to hear your thoughts yeah how do you approve that yeah so so there's a there's a bunch of uh um metrics that go into that uh evaluation i say the grid connection is always one of the start starting points what is your current grid connection and what is your current energy profile um and what do you want to add in the future so what's your growth path of of uh evs coming in how much are they gonna consume when do they arrive at your at your hub when do the when you're gonna leave how how much kilowatt hours you need to uh receive in that period do you have a pv roof how much does it produce can you expand it all this uh goes into the uh our variables that we use and then we can look at just the purely local optimization so how big can your battery be that it can be charged most of the days that it will be discharged most of the night so you have a full cycle each day so it's not oversized or undersized and then the last one step that we always take as well can we uh perhaps um oversize the system in such a way that you can still utilize it for local optimization but part of the system is also available at times for energy trading in a such way maybe you increase your investment right now a little bit but your payback period might be more interesting and there's of course different companies that are a bit more uh risk averse or they more they like to take risks so because there's no guarantees for the future in these energy markets and they want to either go for a big investment and take a bit of risk on that with the high upside or they want to to decrease the risk and go for a low for a more sure investment and you go for a more local uh let's say optimized system so we offer both always to a client and they have the final say it makes sense I mean thanks absolutely yeah great so yeah well so I think we'll um we'll come back at Peter do you have a question now you want to ask yeah one question the choice when you talked about the business case how strong is the the business case dependent on revenue which is coming out of the the the balancing market because what you see in the nasslands that cryptopolis we connect you but we do not allow you to participate in the balancing market because you might deteriorate the situation around congestion right so a business case bank can be perfectly good very healthy without the balancing market income as long as there's a local production so if you have a solar roof if there's a indeed overnight charging and if your grid connection allows for a bit of charging discharging and needed uh to to fill up your energy your battery so we then have an optimization algorithm running to determine the best moments to charge your battery well if it's sunny day of course it's it's it's between 12 and two or more or less it's given and when to discharge your battery so we we have a forecasting of your ev charging and we also take into account for instance the apex day ahead prices and based on that we make a discharging profile which is optimized and with the current apex deltas that we see in the netherlands which are have been increasing lately again combined with the let's say the local consumption of of energy of pv will give you renewable fuel fuel units and also you don't have to pay energy taxes because you don't you're not taking energy from the grid that if you have a good combination there also then you can have a business case with a period under five years without any balancing market income okay yeah thank you yeah robert before you come to me i have a question to peter about the uh you you mentioned fcr so frequency curtailment reserve markets for batteries can you elaborate a bit on that why why you are not allowing batteries to participate in that in the netherlands because that's a bit special yeah that is the there's a discussion between the tso's and the dso's the the dso says well we we need to manage that the load is not going beyond the capacity of the grid and that is for the dso on their grids and that is by the way also for the tso on the whole voltage grid but in the other end the tso has a second task is balancing the system so at some times they might say hey uh we we we need more feed in or we need more load to balance the system and if they would request uh an asset to generate more feed in to keep the balance upright that might deteriorate the situation on on congestion so that is the discussion which has been held between the azores and tso's that every battery may may work also in the balancing market except for those situations where it creates a deterioration on the congestion and that is limited in the in the contracts when you connect to a dso grid right but the the thing is if you are placing a battery behind an existing connection and you're you're staying within the boundaries of the existing connection right now i don't think there's much of a let's say a limitation by the dso of course they don't if you want to get a new connection or you want to expand your connection then there's there there might be some regulations you do have to uh let's say uh sign up your your battery with the dso as well so they know what uh batteries are placed there and there's new regulations coming in in which these also get more control over your flexible assets an interface in which they can actually limit your power output or your powder at moment of critical times that is it's not not completely completely true because if it is in a battery on an existing connection if the area is becoming congestion then the first phase is what the crypto will say i need voluntarily that people bid into the market to for redispatch or for flexibility to reduce but if that volume is too less then it becomes a mandatory mandatory business and then also the the grid operator can request actually that is in the in the latest grid uh dutch grid code which which was actually published the last last last week on that that the the grid operators can you can interfere also on existing situations yeah it will make for also an income stream for the batteries then to use the battery in the local grid management which that's actually beneficial it can be beneficial as well one one more one more thing to add here uh you you mentioned earlier peter the demand response so that is mandatory or that is also on a sort of optional i mean it is it is a phased phased approach so uh when the the the grid operators expects congestion in a certain area and then they start an inquiry or research in that area already everybody is voluntarily invited uh to offer flexibility flexibility yeah via via redispatch or via restricted uh transport contract and if that's fine then it's fine those but if that is not sufficient or when the price prices for those voluntary bids are extremely high then there is some kind of a financial financial border and then the the grid operator is is allowed to declare the next phase and then you enter in the mandatory situation situation that's interesting there's a there's a very nice dutch picture on that where you see what what these faces faces are good so robert we've been listening now for almost 50 minutes uh painting this picture of the dutch market you've been actively visiting the last 12 months uh how does that you know align with your picture and how do you see the some of the opportunities and solution moving forward yes i'm i i have been visiting the netherlands quite quite frequently the the last 12 months almost every month i have been there for for visiting customers but also some some exhibitions and and and conferences and i mean under the bottom line what what you can hear is basically it's a one of the main challenges i mean we can talk about load management we couldn't talk about energy management and and these things are not new um i've been working at university for 15 years before before we started FLEXECHARGE and all these you know energy management these these algorithms integrating batteries microgrids local for local local energy usage and so on and so forth that's i mean from from from algorithm or system perspective that's that's that's pretty clear and that's not the challenge what the challenge is and i think everybody here mentioned it is this interoperability of systems and intercommunication of systems so integration of different EV charges different types of EV charges different manufacturers different even interpretation of a common communication protocol in EV charging which is OCPP integration of power meters of different solar inverters by Modbus by MQTT by different protocols integration of batteries and then finally also the integration into into systems from the dso for demand response um that's that's a big challenge and and for that you need technology um to to do that and that's what we're actually doing with FLEXECHARGE so there is a there's a backbone layer um in our system which which can integrate and and provide a brokerage between between different system components and an overlay which provides then load and energy management including all these things which which which have been mentioning here load balancing battery integration peak shaving load shifting and so on and so forth and that's what we're that's what we're doing at flexi charge and and the beauty i mean i know the situation is bad and it's a big challenge for the netherlands but i think it it is also a great study case for what's what we are going to see in other european countries in the future so so therefore it's great to to to grow with with the challenges in the netherlands and and be able to to work together with our customers on on solutions how to to overcome this and actually how to to implement what has been the the the plan now until well grit will be will be reinforced yeah peter no may i may i add to what you say because it's really an integration issue but it goes even beyond the levels of technology what i what i see it's the market is changing the regulation is changing the technology is providing new solutions i think the market regulation and technology are very strongly intertwined so looking into good propositions you really have to address also what is happening in leg legislation what is what is happening in market and and there is for some of the things i think the technology is there it's only legal barriers or resistance from existing market parties which which which blocks blocks the transition absolutely absolutely yeah yeah maybe one thing to add we also see that a lot of customers they may already have like three or four locations live they have their own back end like me for instance we use road but they may have another back end then it's also really important to make use of the OCPP proxy that FLEXECHARGE is using because then we can still manage the chargers we can still serve them but like we can still use the back end that the customer customer wants and maybe i had a question to you as well peter because we have a lot on the ev side what's the equivalent of a lot on the battery side good question good question i'm a mod boss ask ask barter the barter the brain maybe maybe he can give the answer and if there is no one there well somebody should set up something like but but i can say something to it and i know that with the with the newer versions of ocpp 201 and even now they are they are doing 201 they're actually thinking these things in so that you can also use ocpp i'm i'm i'm not actually sure whether it is in particular for batteries but i know for example for local like power meter data or even integration of heat pumps they are they are thinking that into into ocpp whether that is a good solution or not i i can't tell yet but but i know there are there are people looking into that but but you're completely right and that has in not only in our industry that in in every industry this is the biggest challenge the standardization and intercommunication between systems and and we we see that and i see it as a one of the biggest challenges as peter also said i mean also market integration and all that that's that's a challenge yeah dc networks i mean yeah you could just save all the from all the power conversions and and then if you say yeah what what peter said what what i also found quite interesting at the beginning is this like local for local i mean that's that's sort of concepts of local microgrids i mean grid integrated local microgrids which try to optimize energy usage to to minimize flow into you know the the the transportation layers um but i mean you you need these systems these batteries these solar panels distributed in a distribution grid you need to have them communicating somehow in order to provide that and it can be done it's all optimization mathematical optimization that that that's all fine but the the technical communication layer underneath it and the yeah as i said this brokerage between the system that's that's a big challenge if we if we transform from the world of a to the world of b and we transform from one centralized system to a system of systems a system of decentralized systems where local balancing become an important play and of course if you then go for local for local that means that it's local for local at real at real time well you never will meet real time so there the batteries come into place because i see examples in the netherlands where well the the simultaneously will be 70 percent but you increase it when you when you put a battery to the scheme yeah maybe if you could ask like add like a last point like i also see it like on the on the human side like personnel because uh heavy energy and assets electronics uh telecom and it have been separate worlds until now and now suddenly you need to implement an entire system that makes use of all these three and it's really hard to find people who have the let's say the total picture of these three worlds coming together fully agree you know and then it's important because i had before entered in the energy sector i worked for 23 in a telecom sector when you start with a digitalized future energy system then to to manage the interdependence between the telecom networks and the in the energy network because we don't want that the energy network will go down because the telecom network is hacked and we don't want to get the the telecom network to get down because somebody hacked the the energy network yeah i have a question to bart just curious um this use it or lose it uh i've i've heard that many times in the in the netherlands also from others but is that actually a selling point for for for charging infrastructure i mean if you have a building and you only use like 60 percent of the maybe 50 years old grid connection i mean that that that must be a selling point to them say okay put put a public charging infrastructure there and use the other 40 use dynamic load balancing um you know to balance out the the building it's is that something you see people are doing or is that you have 10 seconds to answer we need yes yes yes okay it's you know it's uh luckily we're not flooded by questions because i think it's been so thorough but uh um we're gonna have to wrap it up um thank you very much for joining i think this calls for a follow-up in some months because the market is so dynamic yeah regulatory and technology and market needs to work hand in hand we can see that luckily there are some solutions but we need to continue that discussion in a few months i'd love to have you again in this panel so thank you very much for joining and have a very nice day all of you thank you bye for now thank you bye bye