Best of LinkedIn: Electrification & Battery Technology CW 16/ 17

00:00:00: Brought to you by Thomas Allgeier and Frennus, this edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on electrification and battery technology in weeks sixteen and seventeen.

00:00:09: Frenness is a B-to-B market research company that supports automotive suppliers with building featured by feature competitive intelligence that shows exactly how their product stacks up against the competition.

00:00:20: You can find more info in the description

00:00:23: Right, so welcome to the deep dive.

00:00:24: everyone today.

00:00:25: We're we're cutting straight through The Fluff to analyze the absolute top mobility and electrification trends.

00:00:31: exactly were sourcing this strictly from professional insights shared across LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks.

00:00:37: So if you're a professional in the mobility industry This is your smart fast-paced look at what's actually happening on the ground.

00:00:43: Yeah

00:00:43: No textbook theories today just the reality.

00:00:46: And I mean let's just jump right into the first major theme which is the whole bidirectional charging in VTG situation.

00:00:52: Oh man, the reality check on this one is intense because there's massive industry hype around bi-directional charging right?

00:01:00: Yeah!

00:01:00: But the Omegrand reality is well it's a bit of a mess right now... It

00:01:04: totally is.

00:01:05: just look at Haseep Hassan recent post about that five hundred million euro charger subsidy rolling out in Germany

00:01:10: Right.. The multi party building one yeah

00:01:13: so to get the premium two thousand Euro subsidy tier developers have Out of a hundred and sixty-eight products listed from forty seven different manufacturers.

00:01:24: Hassan found that exactly two.

00:01:26: Wait, two?

00:01:27: Two!

00:01:27: Just two.

00:01:28: they're actually certified to do the job.

00:01:30: Ambibox and LADE.

00:01:31: That's two out of one hundred and fifty

00:01:34: eight.

00:01:34: That is frankly embarrassing for the sector.

00:01:36: I mean, installing any of the other hundred and sixty six products basically leaves you holding these incredibly expensive stranded assets

00:01:43: exactly which Is why Hassan's advice was just to completely ignore The V two G hype For now And stick To the standard fifteen Hundred Euro subsidy tier?

00:01:51: The industry is selling this you know, concept of bi-directional flow without preparing for the computing power.

00:01:57: You actually need to execute it

00:01:58: securely.".

00:01:59: Yeah and Arnish Lowak and Dunstan Power both raised some pretty serious warnings this week about a looming twenty-twenty seven hardware crisis

00:02:05: which most charge point operators are just completely ignoring right

00:02:08: now.

00:02:08: Let's unpack that crisis, actually.

00:02:10: Because it exposes a major misunderstanding.

00:02:13: A lot of operators assume a charger is just like a smut electrical relay Like oh and new standard comes out Just pushing over the air firmware update

00:02:20: Right...like updating your iPhone Exactly.

00:02:22: But Schlowock & Power are pointing out That true interoperability The kind you need for a vehicle to securely trade energy with the grid Requires this highly specific cocktail Of encrypted standards.

00:02:34: We're talking about ISO one fifteen eighteen twenty interacting seamlessly with an OCP-P, two point one backend.

00:02:43: And tying all that together is the requirement for MTLS.

00:02:45: One Point Three security certificates?

00:02:47: Yeah

00:02:47: and that's where the physical hardware fundamentally fails older AC chargers and honestly even a lot of ones being bolted to walls today.

00:02:54: they just lack the microprocessors to handle that cryptographic overhead

00:02:58: because of the continuous secure handshake protocols.

00:03:01: right prevent grid hacking

00:03:02: exactly.

00:03:03: you need significant edge computing headroom A basic microcontroller from twenty-twenty one literally chokes on the math.

00:03:09: You just cannot push a software update to a chip that physically lacks processing power,

00:03:15: which creates this massive economic trust gap.

00:03:18: Mark Moulton broke down financial reality for early VTG adopters and it's rough.

00:03:23: consumers are paying you know seven hundred nine hundred euro premiums But the actual grid arbitrage, like buying cheap overnight power and selling it back is only netting them around ninety euros a year.

00:03:38: The payback period stretches way past the warranty of equipment itself!

00:03:42: Yeah...it's basically margin air.

00:03:44: Alexander Ruipolsky framed this perfectly actually…he argued that V-two G needs a Red Bull moment.

00:03:49: Oh I liked that!

00:03:50: Yeah because Red Bull didn't win by calling himself A Better Cola you know, to invent the energy drink category.

00:03:56: Yeah!

00:03:57: Miropolski says V-II G is being marketed as just a premium feature on a standard charger which guarantees it'll fail in the mainstream.

00:04:04: It has be an entirely new category of home energy management.

00:04:07: Exactly Okay but let's take step back.

00:04:09: If hardware isn't ready The standards are a mess And costs huge premium for only ninety euros per year.

00:04:17: Why should you As industry professional even care right now Like, why are the major OEMs pouring R&D capital into this sinkhole?

00:04:26: It's all about scale and specific use cases.

00:04:29: Giovanni Palazzo and Jav Berger highlighted this huge move by Volkswagen and LE.

00:04:34: They're launching a V-to-G service by twenty twenty six but critical detail is target

00:04:39: Right.

00:04:40: they activating it for existing vehicles

00:04:41: Nearly one million ME platform vehicle that already on road.

00:04:46: By unlocking this backward they instantly create one of the largest aggregated battery networks in Europe.

00:04:51: They're just brute-forcing standard by deploying the fleet first, daring the grid operators to catch up.

00:04:55: Yeah

00:04:56: and Matthew Downey and Eduardo Guri have noted that the smartest immediate play isn't even vehicle to grid.

00:05:01: it's Vehicle To Home AC based V two H

00:05:04: bypassing the wholesale energy markets entirely.

00:05:06: Exactly keep it behind the meter.

00:05:09: use it to run your own appliances during peak hours to lower your bills.

00:05:13: You get immediate resilience without needing a master's degree in utility regulations.

00:05:17: Right, keeping it behind the meter works for passenger vehicles but let's bridge that gap here because heavy duty and fleet charging are facing completely different reality.

00:05:26: Oh yeah they can't hide behind the metre.

00:05:28: their energy demands literally rewriting the physics of local grid distribution.

00:05:32: Frederick Zohm and Sven Stechhan shared an incredible milestone from Mann's Spirity project.

00:05:39: They successfully executed the world first heavy truck V-to-G moment under real logistics conditions,

00:05:44: pushing three hundred twenty five kilowatts of power straight back into Three hundred and twenty-five

00:05:50: kilowatts.

00:05:51: A whole residential neighborhood doesn't pull that much power, an M estimates this could slash fleet energy costs by ten to twenty

00:05:58: percent.".

00:05:59: But fleets need guaranteed uptime right?

00:06:01: Which explains the data from Philippe Vengeel & Christian Halleleve?

00:06:05: They show heavy duty charging hubs across Europe are actually scaling faster than the adoption of electric trucks themselves

00:06:11: which is such an anomaly for this industry that infrastructure is actually outpacing the vehicles.

00:06:17: It's an absolute prerequisite for commercial fleets, though.

00:06:20: Stian Matheson shared how Norway is building a coherent electric truck network in the south using public private capital ahead of demand

00:06:27: and The power density of these nodes is just staggering.

00:06:31: Henry Johnson noted that Bollett Pulse just launched Germany's first public megawatt charging system network.

00:06:37: They're using alpatronic hardware capable of one thousand kilowatts per plug,

00:06:42: A THOUSAND KILOWATTS!

00:06:43: Okay wait... a MEGAWATT OF POWER for ONE truck?

00:06:47: That's like dropping a small factory power demand onto highway.

00:06:50: rest

00:06:50: stop?!

00:06:50: How on earth does the grid handle a whole fleet doing that at once?

00:06:54: It doesn't…that is an issue.

00:06:55: RasmusPasterCackRosenbull pointed out that truck-charging as a power problem not energy problems.

00:07:00: Right because of the software.

00:07:01: Yes Every fleet manager uses API-driven software to hunt for the cheapest overnight electricity prices.

00:07:08: So if they all set their algorithms to charge at say, two point zero zero

00:07:12: a.m.,

00:07:12: thousands of trucks hit the grid at the exact same

00:07:15: millisecond.".

00:07:16: So instead of using off peak capacity They're artificially generating these violent hyper localized grid congestion spikes.

00:07:24: Exactly!

00:07:25: The legacy medium voltage grid just melts under that instantaneous thermal load Which

00:07:29: means the CPOs have to step in.

00:07:32: Nicholas Lurch argued that charge point operators must evolve into energy operators.

00:07:36: They have to, they're integrating massive battery-energy storage systems BS directly in the hubs.

00:07:43: so you trickle charged a battery from standard grid connection all day and when truck arrives... It

00:07:48: just dumps megawatt load on the battery buffer.

00:07:51: it completely shields local grid

00:07:53: and you bypass those multi-year utility upgrade approvals.

00:07:57: We're also seeing software optimizing existing infrastructure.

00:08:00: Dr.

00:08:00: Marcus Dick highlighted depo charge in Switzerland.

00:08:03: it's a B to B marketplace where logistics companies share their private depot stations during idle hours

00:08:08: cutting operational costs by twenty percent without pouring any new concrete

00:08:12: Exactly.

00:08:13: And when you look globally, Deepak Chandra and Jacques Adienel brought up a fascinating point emerging markets in the Caribbean Central America and Africa.

00:08:21: they are completely bypassing legacy grids

00:08:24: leapfrogging them entirely right.

00:08:26: using solar plus off grid BES is charging their driving costs down to near zero like two point five zero to four dollars per hundred kilometers.

00:08:35: Christopher Freud echoed that was South Africa.

00:08:38: You combine high diesel costs with abundant solar and is the ideal setup for semi-autonomous microgrids.

00:08:45: Here's where it gets really interesting to me, its exactly how developing nations completely skipped landline infrastructure and went straight to cell phones.

00:08:53: but instead of phones we're seeing entirely self sufficient solar powered truck

00:08:57: stops.

00:08:57: It's the exact same dynamic, but you know bringing it back to the end user whether its an off-grid depot or just a suburban driveway?

00:09:04: The final hurdle isn't really technology anymore.

00:09:06: Its economics policy and user experience

00:09:09: Exactly!

00:09:10: Simon Smith had this brilliant post where he debunked range anxiety as merely first kiss problem

00:09:16: A First Kiss Problem.

00:09:17: I love that

00:09:18: Right...it is just an unfamiliarity completely disappears once users realize their daily driving is mostly short predictable trips

00:09:25: The psychology shifts really fast when the economics hit your wallet.

00:09:29: Michael Loscheller contrasted the fading range anxiety with a very real pump anxiety in Sweden right now.

00:09:35: Oh, the cost difference is insane!

00:09:37: Yeah, SEK-Fourteenhundred for diesel compared to an SEK fifty five home charge for a Polestar.

00:09:41: three A twenty five two one cost differential overrides any hesitation about plugging it

00:09:47: into car.

00:09:47: But that massive economic shift has actually happening at the network operator level.

00:09:52: Jens Rummer talked about the THG quote In Germany their greenhouse gas mandate, which

00:09:56: is rising to sixty-five percent by twenty forty.

00:09:59: Right

00:10:00: oil companies are legally mandated to buy CO two certificates and because a heavy duty truck displaces so much diesel A single public truck charge generates sixteen point seven times the certificate value of a passenger car.

00:10:12: So you're not building it charging hub?

00:10:13: To make a three cent margin on electricity You're building a compliance trade in floor.

00:10:17: It's a localized factory producing highly lucrative regulatory credits

00:10:21: And policy wins are finally unblocking the deployment side too.

00:10:25: Neil Langston and Andrew Bowles reported on this massive win.

00:10:28: in the UK, local governments drop The Street Works permit fees for EV chargers from one thousand pounds down to just forty five pounds

00:10:36: which is huge.

00:10:37: people don't realize that a thousand pound upfront fee per node completely destroys the ROI for deploying slow charging lamppost units.

00:10:45: Dropping it to forty-five pounds overnight makes urban deployment actually viable.

00:10:49: But as The Footprint expands, Chris Kaiser and Simon Vogt emphasized that CPOs really need a shift their focus to reliability.

00:10:57: Yeah!

00:10:57: You can't just drop hardware in parking lot claim a subsidy and vanish

00:11:00: Exactly!

00:11:01: Vogt's company In Charge Just raised five million euros to physically verify and fix broken chargers using crowdsourced intelligence.

00:11:09: Success isn't about ports deployed anymore It's about successful sessions.

00:11:12: So putting all this together, what does this actually mean for you listening?

00:11:16: If your looking at the data from weeks sixteen and seventeen The clear signal is maturation.

00:11:28: Consider this, as vehicles become mobile megawatt scale energy storage units and off-grid microgrids becomes the norm we might be witnessing end of traditional power grid.

00:11:40: The vehicle isn't just transport anymore it is infrastructure.

00:11:47: Wait, no.

00:11:48: Sorry I'm skipping ahead.

00:11:48: let me wrap this up properly.

00:11:50: if you enjoyed This episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:11:53: also check out our other editions on future mobility and market evolution next-gen vehicle intelligence And commercial fleet insights.

00:12:00: and a huge thank You for joining us on this deep dive.

00:12:03: definitely keep pushing the industry forward.

00:12:05: Don't forget to subscribe.