Stuttgart, Germany, December 13, 2023. Fill up, pay up and drive off – an everyday routine for cars with internal combustion engines at about 14,500 gas stations in Germany. By comparison however, the goal of recharging electric cars simply and quickly still falls short of this routine. The German government aims to see more than 900,000 additional charging points by 2030 to offer a greater incentive for purchasing electric vehicles. By that date, it is also hoped that 15 million electric cars will drive on the streets of Germany. This goal is criticized by the energy industry, which claims that the public recharging grid for electric cars already exceeds the current demand. Marco Albrecht, Head of Smart Charging at the consulting firm Drees & Sommer SE also believes that there is a different major factor which limits successful growth in the e-mobility market: “What keeps most people from purchasing a purely electrical vehicle is especially the lack of a reliable way to recharge their vehicles in their normal everyday routine. Ideally, people who cannot set up a charging station at home need a reliable option to recharge their cars at work.”
Audi shows how this can be done. In 2020, the company announced that it would invest up to 100 million euros in the recharging infrastructure in its own business locations. The goal is to ensure that every tenth staff parking space in its German factories is equipped with a charging station. “Without the all-important involvement of business companies, the aim of creating a universal user-friendly recharging grid in Germany will fail,” Marco Albrecht comments. This is why, in the past years, his employer Drees & Sommer has been optimizing the charging infrastructure in the company’s locations. The firm specializes in advice on real estate and infrastructure. Like Carl Zeiss AG (ZEISS), a global leader in optical and optoelectronic technology, more and more companies of different sizes avail themselves of the services of Drees & Sommer’s dedicated experts to help design sustainable mobility concepts with a recharging infrastructure for staff members.
Assessment of Individual Requirements
At the company’s legal seat in Oberkochen, which is located in the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, ZEISS has two premises with more than 10,000 staff members. In the framework of a mobility concept, the experts from Drees & Sommer examined the question of which recharging options – such as pole-mounted charging stations, wall models or possibly direct current (DC) fast chargers for short stay visitors or employees – and which operator models are most suitable for each company. Fundamentally, proprietary recharging infrastructure can take different forms, including full operation via a service provider. The billing structure can also vary – ranging from flat-rate free charging to precise measurement of the actual kWh output via a service provider.
In addition, a smart charging infrastructure requires intelligent prior planning. How many charging points does a company need for a specific number of fleet vehicles and private staff cars? This must be calculated individually for each company. The potential demand depends on how likely it is that all vehicles will access the charging grid simultaneously, how much energy they each require and how long they will stay there. Ideally, the installed charging infrastructure can communicate with the building's central mains connection and distribute the available energy in the best possible way. Depending on the battery capacity and the distance traveled, one or two charges per week will be enough in many cases, so that each recharging point can provide sufficient power for three to four staff electric vehicles.
For the ZEISS company, headquartered in Oberkochen, the experts of Drees & Sommer calculated that 120 stations would initially be needed for charging the company's fleet of electric cars and the vehicles of employees. The recharging points started to operate in the fall of 2021 – and thus became one of the largest charging parks in Germany. 350 charge points can be used by staff members nationwide now. The company plans to equip ten percent of the employee parking spaces with charging points by 2030. “Making electro-mobility easy and attractive in everyday life is a step on the way towards our ambitious goal of becoming CO2 neutral in all of our own activities by 2025,” adds Andreas Hack, Managing Director at Carl Zeiss Energie GmbH.
Intelligent Charging Ensures Efficiency and Relieves the Pressure on the Infrastructure
Currently, Drees & Sommer has around 250 charge points at different company locations. The new OWP12 office building, which is part of the company’s headquarters in Stuttgart, the company's experts are also testing an intelligent charge management system. The users enter their probably parking time in a proprietary app. The system analyzes these times in correlation with the current charge level of the vehicle, communicates with the mains power connection, for example the power grid in the building, and checks how much power is already being downloaded. An intelligent load and charge management system then uses the data to optimize the charging cycles. As a result, the cars belonging to the people who need to leave early are charged with the highest priority, and the people who will stay until evening may have their vehicles charged to the desired level later, but still in time for their planned departure.
The relevance of such a load and charge management system becomes particularly clear if we consider the manufacturing industry as an example. Here, the intelligent system could ensure that the vehicle charging output is reduced or even paused in the morning when many machines are started and use power in the factory.
But in the middle of the day, when the company's photovoltaic installation produces more energy, the charging output could then be increased. “This takes the peak loads out of the system and enables renewable energy to be used efficiently,” comments Marco Albrecht.
Benefit from Subsidies and Contribute to Sustainability
Government subsidies create incentives for both employers and employees to move over to e-mobility. Until the end of 2030, for example, employees will benefit from reduced taxation of electric company cars and plug-in hybrid cars with a sufficient minimum range. Moreover, free or low-price charging of private or company cars by the employer does not need to be taxed as a benefit in kind up to the end of 2030 – but this does not apply to fossil fuels. This exemption also applies to a wall charging station which is installed at the employee’s home but remains the property of the employer. If the employer provides or subsidizes a wall charging station at the employee’s home, the benefit in kind is taxed at a flat rate of 25 percent. This means that employers can offer free or reduced-price electric car charging as a benefit to promote employee loyalty and encourage recruitment.
KfW, the German state-owned investment and development bank, subsidizes up to 100 percent of the corporate investment in public or non-public charging infrastructure – provided that the project is in line with the EU taxonomy. Investments in e-mobility could have a positive impact on sustainability ratings too. In the coming years, sustainability reporting will play an increasingly important role. Starting from 2024, large EU public interest entities with an average of 500 employees during the financial year (generally including banks, insurance companies and investment fund entities) are required to report on sustainability-related issues. Net turnover of the companies concerned must exceed 40 million euros or their balance sheet total be higher than 20 million euros. As from 2025, the reporting requirements will apply to all large undertakings that meet two of the following criteria (either as a single entity or on a consolidated group basis): a balance sheet total of 20 million euros minimum; net turnover of at least 40 million euros; and/or an average of 250 employees during the financial year. Small and mid-sized capital market-oriented companies with ten and more employees will be required to report on sustainability from 2026 on.
Planning Private and Public Charging Solutions Together
Even if employers increasingly provide charging stations for their employees, there is nevertheless no alternative to the extension of the public charging infrastructure, because “people who cannot recharge their cars at home or at work are dependent on the public charging infrastructure, and this also applies to commuters and visitors,“ says Marco Albrecht. For cities, towns and municipalities it is important to assess now what will be needed in the future in order to define a basis for long-term planning. “Realistically and seriously, we can currently plan for about eight to ten years in the future, partly due to the goals for 2030 set forth by the German government,” adds Drees & Sommer’s infrastructure expert Martin Huber, who has participated in the design of an implementation plan for the development of a public charging infrastructure in Wiesbaden, capital of the German federal state of Hesse.
The demand for the public charging infrastructure is generally highest in inner urban areas where the residents of apartment and tenement blocks only rarely have access to private charging systems.
What is important: the demand for charging points in public and semi-public settings – for example on supermarket car parks – and in private areas tends to be inter-dependent: “If availability increases in one of these areas, the demand in other areas falls. To ensure that the extension of the charging infrastructure meets the demand and is economically viable throughout a local district or a whole town or city, the existing active operators of charging infrastructure, large employers, car park operators, retailers, players of the real estate sector and the power grid operators must be brought together around the table as early as possible,” Martin Huber emphasizes.