Industry
Energy, Resources & Utilities
Rebalance the energy equation
Sustainability Services
Ecosystem-led Approach to Power Your Sustainability Strategy
Highlights
- E-mobility, or the electrification of various modes of transportation, has become a global focus toward achieving net-zero targets for carbon neutrality.
- Orchestration of services and democratisation of data are key components for unlocking future potential in the transportation space.
- A federated e-mobility platform, with cohesive participation among cross-industry partners and secure data protocols, can inspire efficient and effective collaboration and lead to new distributed energy opportunities.
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A federated approach
Bringing together key players through a federated approach is the best way to advance e-mobility solutions.
One of the first and most important steps governments can take in achieving climate goals is to promote e-mobility—from the increased use of electric vehicles for all types of transportation and the advocation for energy optimisation to the reduction of carbon emissions across the value chain. But the transportation industry encompasses products and services beyond electric vehicles (EVs).
Manufacturers of charging equipment, charging station operators, transportation fleet managers, utility providers, financial institutions, and service providers are all involved. While each must conform to domain-specific standards and periodically measure and report their carbon footprints, they tend to work in siloed environments with little to no collaboration. This segmented approach hinders the implementation of better policies and processes that could facilitate wider adoption of more efficient and effective e-mobility solutions.
To aid collaboration and eliminate discrepancies, e-mobility requires a federated approach to help unite the efforts of multiple organisations, public and private stakeholders, advisory councils, governing bodies, and local and federal governments. With a platform solution that helps democratise data, involved parties could more effectively collaborate and provide informed decisions about policies and processes as well as enable more efficient coordination and delivery of services.
Developing such a platform requires an end solution that is overseen by a legally designated council of authorities along with adequate data protection measures in place. But the benefits are immense, including better customer experience, new ways to distribute energy, and expanded product or service lines.
Orchestrate services
All parties involved in an e-mobility solution must align their efforts to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
Since the parties involved in e-mobility cut across different industrial sectors, the essential services they provide require seamless integration across all touch points. Key players can be categorised into one or more of the following categories.
Providers define, incubate, build, and continue to offer services to subscribers in an e-mobility ecosystem, operating in a legally protected and versatile environment. Utility service providers and original equipment manufacturers—including vehicle and electric charger makers—fall into this category.
Subscribers offer the respective services from providers based on mutual consensus. Fleet and transport operators, ranging from single vehicle owners to large public transportation and charging point operators, are key participants.
Facilitators help ensure the integration of all necessary technical/non-technical, functional/non-functional, process, and data elements into operations. They guide and support continuous operation in accordance with predefined norms and standard operating procedures bound by legal and ethical constraints. Government and regulators, researchers and academic institutions, hyperscalers, and cybersecurity providers fall into this category.
To provide needed services to end users, whether they are individual customers, businesses, or institutions, a central entity needs to be designated to help ensure the seamless integration of services with geo-fenced, location-specific data and easy-to-use applications. This can be achieved by establishing a federated platform that is highly secure and protected from cyber risks. Such a platform could be developed by a hyperscaler and steered by the designated government or a body such as a regulatory committee made up of policymakers and legal experts.
Democratise data
Data democratisation and governance are critical to enable better, more timely decision-making.
In the context of e-mobility, data democratisation facilitates the seamless delivery of error-free data to all participants at the right time and in the right volume so that everybody, regardless of their level of technical capability, can make informed decisions with increased efficiency for their respective areas. Plans must be made for envisioning access privileges, role permissions, and safe storage of personally identifiable information throughout the data life cycle.
Federating data and processes is essential for the global energy transition in general and sustainability and decarbonisation in particular. At each step along the way, those involved should understand the overall purpose of the action being taken (why), the specific need being addressed (what), the implementation journey (how), and the required time frame (when and how long) to enable data democratisation.
Doing so will dramatically enhance the efficacy of e-mobility by liberalising transactional and meta data to globally accepted standards, with a controlled platform-like environment containing adequate data protection measures. With this flow of geo-fenced information, the cohesiveness, coordination, and collaboration among different ecosystem players will allow for the seamless implementation of e-mobility across all touchpoints and be made accessible to all eligible users.
Integrated operation
Seamless service delivery provides an overall better experience for consumers.
A net-zero carbon future rests on e-mobility that is made broadly available and rendered in a seamless manner across all industry verticals and in different ways depending on the services being offered. A federated platform offers a foolproof ecosystem to support multiple roles, from production of vehicles to selling, leasing, lending, and operating in ways that meet demand on different scales and sizes in both commercial and private sectors.
Because industry players currently operate in siloes, a unified, federated platform that is industry-agnostic and caters to the needs of both B2B and B2C markets while adhering to global standards can deliver exponential benefits. It can also increase customer satisfaction, industry support, and overall cohesiveness.
Energy distribution
Distributed energy opportunities await industry players who support a collaborative approach across the value chain.
Beyond customer experience, integrated operations, and better policy and process planning, a cohesive e-mobility ecosystem also provides the basis for distributed energy resources. Electrified vehicles largely participate in advancing the overall energy distribution objective. But individual users can also help in forming standalone power systems—or micro grids—by catering to their communities and helping to energise rural parts of a country that are in remote proximity to distribution system operators or energy retailers.
By implementing bidirectional charging based on EV batteries and virtualised battery banks that store energy, portable energy that is available anytime and anywhere can be available instantaneously across a nation. However, it will depend on the ability of industry players to coordinate their efforts efficiently and effectively. A federated e-mobility platform can help enable such coordination.
The way forward
A federated e-mobility approach is a win-win for all.
In a vastly scattered and highly segmented environment, e-mobility solutions have struggled to gain a toehold. To advance their adoption, key players must work closely together.
The best way forward is a unified, free, federated environment that is accessible to all involved through the cloud, highly secure, and easy to onboard and operate, with reduced total costs for all stakeholders across the value chain. Such a solution would affirm the efficient and effective participation of all stakeholders in attaining their business goals, satisfy the net-zero targets of different nations, and provide an overall better customer experience while encouraging the development of new products and services.
