Ensto EV charging solutions integrate data and connectivity into a customer’s processes. Historically, charging poles have been what you plug into to charge a vehicle. But as digitalization envelops the world, smart charging systems connected to a cloud based back end system become a tool to give business a competitive advantage and directly impact the bottom line.
Ensto EV charging solution clients are parking operators, hotels, business parks, shopping centers, and EV operators. This article presents some of the first to gain advantage from digitalization and its possibilities of the integration of services.
EneRSIEIL, France’s energy syndicate, has entered into a partnership with Ensto and Ensto’s partner company Virta in order to provide end users with a comprehensive EV charging solution giving them real-time information. Hundreds of new smart Chago charging points dot France’s Centre-Val-de-Loire region. The system’s infrastructure management and the entire charging service process are operated digitally and automatically from the cloud.
Spark, an electric car rental service, uses a mobile application to reserve and locate cars at ten Chago EV charging stations in Vilnius, Lithuania. Spark chose Ensto as its charging partner in part because of the reliability of Chago chargers – but as importantly because Ensto was able to integrate cloud management system their existing Spark mobile app.
Greenway Otomobil in Antalya, Turkey, is a EV-as-a-service operator, which rents EVs to taxi companies, corporate customers, and government clients. Integrating Ensto EV charging solutions with their own system, Greenway is able to manage their fleet and its eight charging locations throughout the Antalya region, monitoring the physical location of cars and how much charge each has left.
Pohjolan Liikenne, a Finnish bus company which operates close to 300 busses, gains efficiency by making driver shift changes on bus routes themselves. A bus arrives at a stop, the driver exits and is replaced. To transport its drivers, Pohjolan uses a fleet of electric vehicles charged with Ensto EV chargers. Naturally chargers are connected to Ensto cloud EV charger management system to get better visibility of the charging events, perform remote services and improve reliability.
Prior to adopting the EV fleet, the company employed a person whose sole job was to keep the fleet cars full of gasoline. Now, cars are charged at the bus depot and the smart charging system alerts them to which vehicles need charged when, and makes sure the fleet is always ready.
Fortum, a leading clean-energy company, with focus on the Nordic countries, Russia, Baltic Rim area and India, has chosen factory precommissioned Chago chargers for its Charge & Drive service. Chago chargers used by Fortum are plug and play, and arrive preconfigured to a site so electricians may install them directly out of the box.
Fortum Charge & Drive is a pioneer in electric vehicle charging and has a network of 1 200 affiliated smart chargers in the Nordic countries. Charge & Drive Cloud provides an intuitive end user interface and a comprehensive back-end system which supports Charge Point Operators in the remote management of Charging Stations.
Fortum Charge & Drive, like all Ensto Chago clients, is enjoying a great reduction in operating expenses. Fortum took part in a recent Aalto University study which demonstrated the operating cost of the EV charging infrastructure is 80 percent of the total lifetime cost over a charging network’s ten-year life.
“A system like Ensto EV charging solution that enables you to remotely manage, monitor, fix, and update, report, and perform preventive maintenance without site visits, can result in amazing operating expense savings,” says Juha Stenberg, President of Ensto Solutions. The operating expense cost difference between a high-quality and low-quality system over that period was calculated to be 9,000 euros per EV charger over 10 years lifetime.
The study was based on interviews with companies controlling more than 1,000 charging points in the UK, Austria, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
“Results like these,” says Stenberg, “are the reason why we are committed to make EV charging smart business.”
Author: Scott Diel