Software is eating EV charging? OK, but what for?
What if EV charging software finds nothing to charge?
It seems that it is software, not hardware or electric engineering, the “key link to mass charging of electric vehicles (EVs)".
Why? Because, as explained with plenty of details here, only software innovation can help:
- cities, to plan placement of chargers for EVs
- utilities, to monitor strain on the grid resulting from EV charging and minimize it, for example through bi-directional charging, from cars TO homes
- EV drivers, to plan their trips
- EV rental companies, to plan deliveries of their fleets, according to the continuously charging status of each single vehicle
- owners and maintainers of EV charging stations, by predicting faults, allowing remote fault management, and generally making those stations “self-healing”
A “Business As Usual” scenario, and nothing else
All the things listed in the previous paragraphs are really important. But all the plans in that article seem based on the hope, I mean: estimate, that there will actually be “140-240 million electric vehicles globally by 2030, [that is] at least 140 million batteries with an aggregated storage capacity of 7TWh, or 7,000GWh”.
What if those numbers need, to become real, more lithium, batteries and “smart grids” that may be ever be economically and politically sustainable to make?
In general, any plan around “vehicles”, electric or not, that needs private, personal cars to remain THE transport solution for the masses may end up like Blade Runner: lost in time, like tears in the rain.
But in that analysis, or almost anywhere else as far as I know, there is little to zero mention of this. It shouldn’t be so.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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