Electric Vehicle (EV) global sales are predicted to grow more than 18% annually through 2025, with experts estimating that more than 120 million vehicles will be on the roads of Europe alone by 2030. Tightening of CO2 emission regulations and increasingly expensive and unsustainable fossil fuel are big factors in this market shift, along with growing consumer awareness, economic advantages, and technological advancements. As the market grows the need for charging stations is growing as well – and GreenFlux is helping to meet that demand by offering a connected solution that makes charging station transactions simple, easy, and streamlined.
When Holland’s GreenFlux first started out in 2011, the Electric Vehicle market was still in its infancy, but the company’s founders could see that the market was poised to explode and that would fuel the need for available and convenient charging stations. GreenFlux’s first foray into the market was installing charging stations in Amsterdam on a fairly small scale while gaining knowledge of this new and growing market. They soon saw an obvious problem: you want people to use energy efficient vehicles but how do you get them to pay for ‘fuel’ – and how do you handle those payments?
“Our solution was to build a platform capable of smoothly and easily handling charging station payment transactions,” says Mathieu Sanichar, Service Delivery Manager, GreenFlux. “And our solution not only handles transactions, it also optimizes how energy is used and delivered, a key factor going forward.”
The EV Charging Station Payment Solution
The GreenFlux platform was so successful the company stopped building and installing charging stations, choosing to instead focus purely on the platform – a classic IoT move from products to services. Today, the GreenFlux platform manages charging stations across the globe, acting as a partner and providing a service for other companies who want to sell EV charging station charge cards.
“We offer a solution to a complicated piece of the charging station solution,” explains Sanichar. “We install the chargers, hook the providers up to the power grid, connect them with the GreenFlux system, and then every time someone uses a charging station, they swipe their card or use an app to start and complete a charging session. On the Greenflux end, we keep track of how many kilowatt hours are used and bill the customer.”