New functions coming to Electric Freeway SmartCharge in Q4 is roaming and the possibility to connect to Nord Pool and use the hourly price as a basis for a fair price model.
Nord Pool
Many multi user dwellings (apartments, attached homes etc) today struggle with the need to charge a fair price for charging. Users who do not have an electrical car do not want to subsidize user of EVs and users of EVs often question the price of charging in their garage. The infrastructure for obtaining adequate power and deliver that to chargers can often be a shack to boards of apartment buildings. In Norway the law say that supplying the infrastructure is the responsibility of the apartment building, shared. After this cost, comes the chargers, the yearly control and the many public taxes and tariffs on power, and off course VAT on it all.
To set a fair KWH price is often a difficult thing, and yet most everybody has their opinion on how to do it. In Electric Freeway, we have published a spreadsheet for our customers free to use to help in this regard, but many ask us for the option of connecting to Nord Poll and getting a variable price through the day. Today, we offer this as a service, but coming soon is the possibility to do just that, connecting to Nord Pool for a variable price and thus giving customers the option of charging at lower prices.
To deliver on this promise is not simply connecting to Nord Pool, we need to take all tariffs and taxes into the product, and this is variable with power supplier, Grid operator and where you live (zones in Nord Pool). So, we are still evaluating if we will deliver this at a different price point at the start, but we will have decided this at start-up.
Roaming
After the pandemic, many of us would like to travel longer than from the bedroom to the living room, and some of us use the car for this. Today, we offer roaming in Norway with our solution, but coming soon is the option of using our solution as a one stop shop for all your charging needs.
Today roaming can come in many versions: Within a network (like us), Peer to Peer roaming (connecting your network to another), proprietary systems (like Hubject) and open systems like those built on OCA. Our solution will have this last built in and this will future proof the roaming experience for all as OCA is not built for one company but open to all. More details on this will be available later this year.