good morning ladies and gentlemen welcome to this new webinar and virtual panel hosted by flexi charge my name is christophe and i have the pleasure today to moderate the panel grid capacity constraints are progressively becoming a critical bottleneck across europe showing the deployment slowing the deployment of renewable energy and the electrification of transport nowhere is it more evident than in the netherlands where high and medium voltage grids are already reaching their limits the situation serves as a cautionary tale for other european nations where similar ambitions for climate neutrality and rapid electrification could face substantial delays if the grid is not strengthened and smart solution deployed in parallel the netherlands leads in europe in ev chargers per capita showcasing an impressive rollout of ev infrastructure however this expansion is now threatened by grid congestions which has reached critical levels and other countries like germany denmark norway are also grappling with grid challenges particularly as industries and transport electrify faster than anticipated so as announced today we are going today to discuss how dynamic load management solar curtailment and battery storage integration can help ev charging thresholds overcome grid challenges in today's panel we have the pleasure to have three experts with deep technology skills and advanced market knowledge so first a warm welcome to you peter brockhoff peter is the cto of floating an innovative charging solutions provider based in arnhem in the netherlands which has a strong focus on e-trucks charging peter is a visionary professional who was actually the first one in europe to really spot our cutting edge technology in the early days thank you peter yeah sure welcome to you stephen stephen ackman is the lead of ev charging at pixi a leading manufacturer of battery energy storage mess out of norway stephen has a deep understanding of the ev charging markets industry and collaborating with and servicing professionals across europe and beyond and finally welcome of course to you robert our own cto and co-founder robert is basically the mastermind as you know behind all of flexi charge innovative services and the harmony platform as participants you can post your questions all along the way in the chat and we will pick them up later in approximately uh small 30 minutes without further ado let's dive into today's discussions let's start with you robert so when ev charging professionals are facing the challenges that we described earlier tell us how do you approach what are the solutions that they can deploy to address them yes thanks for the introduction chris and hi to peter and stephen i mean we we know each other for for quite some time so it's a pleasure to to have this webinar together with you yeah um yeah how how do we approaching uh the problem i mean um i think one of the of course we are we talk about load energy management but one of the core issues when you look out in in technology stacks these days is actually to um yeah combine all these different assets which are needed for ev charging energy management as such so i'm talking about charging stations i'm talking for example batteries i'm talking about building load integrations through power meters i'm talking about solar inverters i mean it's a it's a big challenge i mean yes we have a standardized communication protocol between charging stations and charge point management systems which is open charge point protocol but we don't have any standardization yet for integration of batteries for integration of solar panels for integration of power meters but also on the other side now i've i've covered the hardware part and there's also not a standard on integration of third-party services for example for data analytics data analyzes or maybe even grid integration of energy assets so our goal to to to to get actually our load energy management solutions into the market and and make it accessible for our customers was to build a platform where we can actually easily aggregate and integrate all these these different assets so it has all been started a few years ago with integration of ev chargers of course as first step via ocpp but then we we extended our architecture towards adding buildings solar systems batteries and so on and so forth so from the beginning we have built the architecture to make it really really scalable and to make it adaptable to specific needs of our customers and chris you asked me to to prepare a little presentation so i've i've done that and i have a few slides which i which i would like to show now for the next maybe five seven minutes um just have to find it yeah it's here so let me share my screen yes can you see it yes yes make it as big as possible yeah yes i will yeah so um i mean we are we are selling or we are providing our technology stack or our architecture under the name or under the umbrella of what we call harmony so basically the the core idea behind the name is to harmonize energy flows between these different assets so that's what the the solution is being built for to master load and energy management solutions and as i said one of the core um architecture features or one of the core layers we've built into our architecture is this central data broker so we are able to connect the charging infrastructure so you can see that here on the left hand side to our data broker we call it and from there we can forward the ocpp connection to the classic cpms which is the charge point management system so that's the technology stacks you you typically see now so you have a charging infrastructure and then you have a cpms but then you have customers approaching saying okay but i want to have dynamic load management i want to integrate a power meter at the grid i want to measure solar production and i want to do pv based charging or solar based charging i want to integrate for example a battery locally or i want to integrate a third party services for for for charging and so we as our architecture not only provides a link between the the classic the classic link between the the charging infrastructure the charging stations and the back end system the cpms but through our platform we are also able to integrate distributed energy resources and this is for example as i said building consumption pv system and for example batteries and that is only possible because we have built the architecture as it is um where the fundamental core of it is this message broker which basically um yeah gates messages between the different uh services in our architecture so that load energy management can actually be provided you can see that here the flexi charge services um this is very abstract of course but um it boils down as i said to some simple topologies which we are which we support with our platform um it's basically made to to to to be really flexible and generic so we can cover like basically all of the cases which we see out there in the field and the simplest case is what we call a cloud setup where you have the charging stations directly connected to our platform and then we provide the load management from our harmony platform this is typically for public charging infrastructures or charging infrastructures which which needs static load management or some some scheduling or some sort of grid integration um and then all the part of that is always of course that the that the connection is forwarded to to a cpms system as i said so um our platform is not the chart point management system it's a load energy management solution on the basis of our central ocpp data broker um we can also provide local load management we have a gateway we call it our gateway connect in that case the charging stations they are locally connected to our gateway connect you can see that here it's a it's a local network um and the typical application for that is then um integration for example of building load so you have a charging infrastructure and you have a building both are connected to the same grid connection point and then we use the local gateway to talk to a power meter and we combine it with the um cloud-based load management the other way the other one was the local load management what we can also provide is we call it semi-hybrid setup is that the charging stations are connected directly to our harmony platform and for example building consumption or battery are connected to the harmony platform through our gateway and so we combine basically cloud-based load management with with the gateway so if you have chargers for example with sim card and they are typically directly connected to the cpms then you can connect them to our harmony platform and within the harmony platform we aggregate everything and provide the dynamic load management for site outside of the cloud um all that is of course um visible through our um platform our user interface so we have a we have a quite nice user interface where as a customer you can see all your sites you can see what is going on at the site what is the current load you can configure your your load management you get a complete overview about what is going what is going on at the site what is the external load what has been allocated to the chargers what are actual charge currents you can set up schedules and so on and so forth um and then of course you can do the same for for dynamic load management to configure your power meters configure your batteries um and then get all the information and the monitoring and the maintenance of the site at at a glance um through our harmony platform um as i said um battery integration is something we we are doing since the beginning of this year we do that very um a very close collaboration with pixie integrated their battery so with just three four five mouse clicks you can actually integrate a battery and then we can provide shaving and and and other battery um based features so this gives you just a quick overview about the the some of the features we provide as i said dynamic allocation prioritization we have dno control that's very important in germany um peak shaving multi-clustering so we can basically also um how to say mirror the the electric entire battery responsible now there's a separate dopemory management unit so that uh also there's a only one solution for each direction for each range and solution and what has been the basis of our solution. Great. Thank you, Robert, for this first walkthrough. So concretely, now that we've been seeing it on slides, how do they work when applied in real life cases, right? So let us now turn to you, Peter. So floating secured Volvo trucks in Netherlands as a customer. Can you take us back to how it started? How did they approach you? What were the problems that they were presenting or what did they want to achieve? And how did you solve the challenges that you met on your way? Yeah, sure. Sure. Hi, Peter Brokhoff, CTO of Floating. For people that know Floating, Floating is a system integrated that plans, installs and operates charging infrastructures for electric truck fleet owners. And we've built a ring of partners of which FlexiCharges is one. And we usually have projects that have one or more challenges like contracted power, combination of AC and DC chargers, solar panels or batteries. And we have been working with Volvo for a long time, since 2022, when they had their first truck in the Netherlands. And they had some problems with charging. And it's just communication between charger and vehicle. And from that dive, we've then elaborated on that collaboration. And then there came the question from Volvo trucks, service locations, Volvo group truck centers. Those are the service locations from the Volvo mother in Sweden itself. We want to have charging infrastructure on all our 10 locations. But there is a constraint. Most of the locations have a limited grid power, but they have solar panels and they still want to charge with DC power, if possible. So we secured that project in early 2021, 23. And yeah, we were planning and we executed that. And we started with a different EMS. And from that, we came across, we had some issues with the EMS and we came across FlexiCharges on the Power2Drive 2023. And we clicked on that. Volvo liked the experience because they want to experience every problem their customers experience when buying a truck, because they have to buy organized charging infrastructure as well. So they wanted to have those experiences and they liked the experience. Okay. There's a lot of problems. Every customer of ours goes through in the road to electric transport. So in June, we met June, 2023. We had some problems and within a month, the first site was working. So from zero to a complete setup and it was a solar panel, DC, AC, grid connected, limited screen. The whole setup was set up within a month, including all the power meters that are needed for, were needed on that site. So we like the speed. I know the agility of them to do this. Having this, we then stepped into the other locations, which were very easy to do afterwards. So on that basis, we secured every location and they're running smoothly because we are also operating those locations as well. And since that date, we are directly working with FlexiCharge EMS. And we learned that we can do much more with the FlexiCharge controller than just let them organize the low bands. We also, we currently use it without a safe limit to the contracted power because it's so reliable. We push it to the max. This is the limit. And we push it right near to it because we know it will not go over the limit for a longer time that the fuses blow or the grid operator will call. And we use it with solar powers to boost the power of the DC chargers on sunny days. And it works flawlessly. It ramps up beautifully and goes down as well when there's a cloud. We even use it to extract data from the energy meters that are in there. And we extract also data from the chargers through their controller to put in our dashboard that we use for customers that has more data also on the transactions that are on the site. And we're planning to use it. With batteries, as these are coming in high demand, because we need to have some solution to boost the nightly grid power when there is no grid power. So they absorb the energy during the day from the sun or from the grid, and then they push it at night at depots. So there's a lot of locations where batteries are coming into high demand area. Just installed on one location, a battery. And there are two, three projects going, are in the process of realization. So it's a very hot topic. And it's nice that two years ago, batteries were not that interesting before because they were very expensive. And they're coming to a point as it's economically viable to have a battery as a boost or even as a grid limiter. So you don't have the full grid and you just use the battery as a booster on your grid. Great. Getting main points to take away in installing, main points of failure is that an installer is just an electricity installer. He knows everything about the electricity, but data you need for an EMS is something different. And so you have to have some know-how of data to make, to use it to the max like we do. But with the support and cooperation with FlexiCharge, it's great. We even invited them to an event in the Netherlands that we were hosting to make sure that everybody in the Netherlands could enjoy their solution. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, we can always come back. Maybe there are some questions about the Volvo case. Thank you. And yeah, you can always jump in again if there are some more details you wanted to share. So yeah, so you alluded a bit about the batteries that are starting to become part of the solution. We're not in the beginning. And it's a great transition, of course, to move on to you, Stefan. And so tell us how, you know, tell us more about BSS and how they make up a great duo with EV charging, the core of the business of Pixi. So please walk us through. Yeah, I'm happy to do this. Thank you very much. And thank you for the opportunity to participate in this webinar. I will share my screen. Answer your questions. Okay, something should pop up now. Okay, I can hope I hope you can see my screen now. Yes, go ahead. Okay, so we in Pixi, we established the contact or the contact between Pixi and FlexiCharge was established in the end of last year or beginning of this year. Robert, if I remember right, it was a joint customer who provided the contact to me and I gave you a call and we decided to schedule a meeting here in Darmstadt. Yeah, in our sales office. In January, of course. In January, yeah. It was in January, yeah. And we had a short introduction of the Pixi system. Robert introduced the FlexiCharge system. And when we discovered that both systems are following the same idea by communicating via MQTT, it was a match, a technology match, and also a match with characters. So we decided to kick off the implementation between FlexiCharge and Pixi. This was done with one of our systems, which is installed in Slovakia. And the guys from FlexiCharge, they dialed into the system via MQTT, started the implementation and boom, implementation was done. And we had a product and solutions that's available and proven. So before I start talking about the business cases, and opportunities you can utilize with batteries, I would start with a short introduction of Pixi, because I'm not sure if everybody is aware of Pixi and what we are doing. Pixi is a Norwegian company. We established the company in 2018. The main headquarters in Norway, Kristiansand, so it's a Norwegian company. And our senior management, which established Pixi, is working in power conversion systems for telecommunication markets before. We have a very long history and a lot of experience in power conversion systems. And also senior management decided to establish Pixi and create a battery storage system, which differentiates from many other battery storage systems in some USPs, which I will also highlight in later stage. We are right now 170 people working in Pixi. When I joined Pixi in the last year, June, we were like 60 or 65 people and we are growing quite fast. Take a look to our system and just explaining what exactly we are doing as a battery management system, a battery energy storage system manufacturer. We are building the whole battery storage system. Means there are three main components in battery storage system. We have the PCS, the inverters. We have the batteries. We have the solar and we have the housing around. And Pixi is doing everything except of the batteries. So we're not a cell manufacturer, but we are manufacturer and engineering company or technology company for power conversion systems and for the whole battery storage system. And on this slide, you can see the three main components in the top of our cabinets. We always have the Pixi boxes. It's our power conversion system. And it's in 3.3 kilowatt, one phase bidirectional inverter with 48 volt DC. 400 volt AC. It's coming from telecommunication markets. And that's actually the first USP in our system. It's built for telecommunication customers. And due to this, it's very reliable and redundant. We have the gateway. That's how we call the controller sitting in each cabinet. The gateway is the main interface towards Flexi Charge, for instance, and towards the grid and the related services. And in addition, we have the batteries connected in parallel, 48 volt DC, which is an other USP of Pixi. So what we are building is not just a battery storage system, but we are building a whole solution which provides you the most reliable battery storage system and safest battery storage system when it comes to operation on the market. Systems are installed in front and behind the meter. And on this slide, you can see what we understand with in front. Before and behind the meter. Before the meter, especially DSO applications. And behind the meter are different applications for improving your energy cost or your grid quality. We are present in very many markets. One of them is EV charging, what we are talking about today. Okay, that was a very brief introduction of Pixi in a nutshell. And I would like to move over to the EV charging applications and uses. In this case, on this slide, you can see a system which we built with one of our partners in Malaysia. It's a storage system with six of our cabinets to provide 300 kilowatt power and 300 kilowatt hour energy. It's a solid 1C solution. And it's boosting the grid capacity from a low grid capacity up to a high grid capacity to enable the chargers. These are chem power chargers, stationary chargers. And provide sufficient power to the cars and offer the experience for charging the cars with high power. Just some words on this installation. What you can see on the left side of the picture is our battery storage system. It's six of our cabinets with air conditioners. And one of these cabinets is used to improve the grid quality. It means when we went over to Malaysia and installed this system, we figured out that the grid imbalance is quite serious and that harmonics and voltage drops are stopping the chargers and batteries from being operational. So what we did there is we took one of our cabinets and activated these services for voltage and frequency stabilization. And by doing this, we enabled the CPO or the end customer who's running the site to offer a reliable charging experience to the customers. The other batteries or the other battery storage systems, the other cabinets are providing the power to boost the grid capacity. The typical use case for EV charging is, and I think that everybody knows this, we have some grid constraints. Christoph, you introduced the grid constraints in Netherlands in the beginning of this webinar. So I think I do not have to talk a lot about this. And when we install batteries or when the customers install batteries, they can boost the grid capacity, provide additional power to the chargers, combine it with PV panels, and in the end also utilize the flexibility from the batteries in other markets to not only save costs for reducing the grid traverse or reducing cost from the grid, but also to gain revenue from other markets like the energy markets and power markets. The structure on a very high level, how the system is combined or connected to the site is that we are always coupled to the AC system. So we always AC coupled on 400 volt. And the energy management system is controlling our system, the chargers, and is reading from the smart meter. In addition, the energy management system can act as an aggregator and has interfaces or act like a trading responsible party to utilize the flexibility of the batteries, not only for boosting the grid capacity, to provide sufficient charging power, but also to participate in the energy markets, do some intraday trading, arbitrage, and offer flexible tariffs with batteries. When we discuss the use of battery storage system with customers, we often see that most of the customers start discussing about battery storage system for the primarily use to increase the energy sales and gain more revenue from selling the kilowatt hour to the car owners, but also to avoid grid upgrades. So they're using the batteries primarily to reduce costs. But we also have customers looking into other revenue pools like trading the energy on the spot market, doing some arbitrage business, and participate in the frequency market. In addition, and that's feedback from some of our customers, which installs batteries on a retail station, they saw that they have an increase of retail sales, which is totally obvious because when you're charging your car at an HPC for 20, 30 minutes, you might want to have a coffee or Snickers. And in addition, they increase the attractivity of the charging network. So that's actually what the customers are doing. We're dealing with. They're using the batteries to reduce costs, but also to gain revenue and increase the activity of the whole charging network. What we're doing right now when it comes to truck charging, and I think that's the elephant in the room when it comes to charging of vehicles, we are contributing in the project Mega Charge. It's a Norwegian project which brings together different stakeholders over the whole value chain, starting from grid operators, technology providers, CPOs and energy providers. And the project has the goal to develop the most mature and stable infrastructure for heavy vehicles or for heavy vehicle charging. Pixi as a company is contributing in this, and we are very looking forward to which results we can expect from this project. Yeah, that's pretty much all from my side, and I'm happy to answer your questions. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Stefan. Just to mention, I mean, one person asking, so there is a handout section in the right or left corner. I don't know exactly as an audience, but please check out the handouts sections where we have shared with you Stefan's presentation, Robert's presentation and a two pager on the Volvo truck by floating case. So that's for the handouts. That was the only question I had for now. So I'm going to go back to the chat. So it seems, I guess, pretty clear. I don't know if on the speaker side, there's something that you wanted to add as an extra information for today. Otherwise, I guess people can get in touch with you. Are you all available on LinkedIn? And we're happy to make the introduction otherwise by email. So then we'll just yes. Yeah, you muted Robert. And I know also you, Peter. Peter, sorry, you also muted somehow. Yes. I can't hear you. Yeah, we can't hear you. We can't hear you, Peter. So there's something with your sound. So but in the meantime, oh, there's OK. Maybe there's one question before you say something, Robert. The question, so if compared with Elise by Volkswagen ESS charger, would you say, what would you say about the process? I mean, we see a lot of these in battery integrated chargers now. I mean, it's that's not the only one. I don't want to mention the names, but there's a two, three in the market right now. And obviously, I mean, from our perspective, what you get with integrating a battery via our platform is obviously the vendor independency. So we make a Pixie battery compatible with any charger. So whether using an Ipetronic, ChemPower, Tritium, ABB, whether it's AC, DC chargers combined, when you connect them to our platform and we aggregate or also connect the Pixie battery and combine these two, then that's a major advantage with respect to charger integrated batteries. So what we see a lot these days is also, I mean, we are even integrating some of these chargers, like it's a ADS tech or a W automotive and these guys, because they customers buy a charger battery integrated charger. But then they have, for example, 20 AC chargers next to it. And they wanted two systems to be combined. So they want the battery integrated charger be combined with the AC chargers and provide overall peak shaving for the grid connection with the internal battery. So that's also something's possible. So again, the major advantage of using us, our platform in the middle is that you have a complete vendor independency. And we know, okay, Pixie is not the only battery in the world. We have other batteries as well. But you have one solution, one platform to basically manage and operate them. Even so, you have different chargers and different batteries. And that's the advantage. Thank you, Robert. Now, Peter. Yeah, Peter, you're back. It's here. Am I back? Yeah, I'm back. I was trying to get back to the mega charge that Stefan presented. We see a lot of movement into the electric truck plazas in all over Europe. We have now two or three projects in the south of Germany, where there'll be a big battery with chargers because of the it is irresponsible to have a truck plaza with huge peak loads directly connected to the grid. And the over of the peak shaving battery is very well. It's a good solution to sorting that. And with the flexi charger solution, it works like a truck. So we together have a solution to accelerate the zero emission transport market. I mean, adding to that will go nuts the next year, two or three. If you saw, I don't know if you saw the news in Germany, Pixie or Stefan probably saw that they have 160 gigawatt applied for connecting to the grid in Germany. I mean, this is, I don't know what factor. It's a factor five more than they actually planned for 2045. So you actually see that batteries are coming and with the prices and availability, we'll see a lot. We'll see a lot. And many of these will be used for mobility applications. That's for sure. Thank you. And the benefit of this is if you are able to control different battery sites as a decentralized battery storage system and utilize the flexibility in other markets, you can be part of this very big installation, which is required, right? So this reminds me to 2017 when I wrote my master thesis for battery applications. And EV charging was not a typical application for the use of batteries back in those days. It was peak shaving. It was PV self consumption, arbitrage, intraday trading, but not EV charging. And from our Pixie perspective, it started in 2020 or 2021 when a company called Green Station reached out to us. And they are actually, they have been the very first mover for using batteries on limited grid capacities and combine it with HPCs to offer high power charging at rural areas or areas where you do not have sufficient grid capacity. And from that point on, we figured out that there have been many, many different applications where battery can be used for EV charging. Of course, it's a challenging business case to get a return of the rest of the batteries. But if you do it clever and combine different markets, you can do great things with batteries. We see in the Netherlands payback times between three and seven years. You can use your batteries for longer afterwards. So people can even start with the battery, even when they're not fully charging yet. So it's the first thing they can use to earn some money from their grid connection. Yeah, very convincing. No doubt. And I like to always think of the Netherlands being the crystal ball of Europe. So I think that is definitely laying the path for Europe. Okay. We don't have any more questions for now. I think we will start to wrap it up. So hopefully the webinar has given you some insights on how does advanced vendor independent dynamic load management solution work, how to seamlessly integrate charging sites with the grid and local energy assets, how you can leverage any equipments like chargers, batteries, backend system for a smoother experience. Don't forget to check out again, the handout sections where we have shared some documents. If you're interested in knowing more about the Dutch market in particular, you know, I invite you to check out our previous webinar from early September. You can find it in our website where we addressed really in particular the Dutch market and dive into it. We also have a webinar entirely dedicated to battery storage and EV charging as the magic duo with Stefan also, which was recorded back in May, but still very actual. So please check it out. And don't forget that we also have our charge point podcast. If you want to get wiser while running or doing the chores at home, we are receiving several guests talking about grid challenges, battery storage, markets, deep dive, and so much more. So please check it out. Available all the platforms, the way you're listening to your podcasts. So thank you for participating today. Yes. Final word from the speakers. No, we're good. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Chris, for, for organizing. Thanks a lot to Peter and Stefan. It's always great to see you guys. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Always. Yeah. In live and flesh and also here on the screen. And thank you for everybody for joining today and asking questions and listening in and have a great afternoon. Bye for now. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.