Q: Who is a DSO and what is their role in the energy transition?

Arjan: DSO – that is the company that takes care of the underground infrastructure. So it has to provide enough transport capacity and has to make new connections to companies and also to charging stations when there is a need.

Q: You own an EV yourself. What motivated you to buy an EV?

Arjan: My EV is a company car, that my company Enexis has provided. I think sustainability is quite important and it provides a 10% or 50% extra budget when you go for an electric vehicle. So I’ve been driving an electric vehicle for like five years now.

Q: From a DSO perspective, are EVs a boon or a bane?

Arjan:  EVs are definitely a boon, that’s a positive thing. I wouldn’t say bane, but it provides us with challenges. EVs like heat pumps, like solar panels, ask for extra grid capacity and we have to provide it and that’s one challenge. The other challenge is public infrastructure – ask for extra connections, for the extra workforce, for extra materials in a timeframe where we also need to install a lot of solar and wind farms. So it puts a lot of pressure on the transport capacity in the grid but also on the workforce making new connections.

Q: With a large amount of electricity still being generated from fossil fuels, is moving to EVs a good solution?

Arjan:  The move to EVs is always a good solution. It’s also better to drive an EV. It’s quieter. It’s nice. When you have driven an EV, you don’t want to go back. Also, in terms of pollution, in terms of emissions, it is helping the CO2 emissions, of course, but also when it’s fuelled on electricity, gray electricity, it is still the case that the pollution, nitrogen and particles, they are exhausted when they are electricity is produced in a conventional production plant, high in the air. But when it’s coming out of the exhaust of a combustion engine, it still is on the ground. It still is near to the people, near to the animals and plants. So it has much more damaging effects when it comes out of a car than it comes out of a chimney of a production plant.

Q: How do you foresee DSOs being able to handle the millions of EVs that are expected in the future?

Arjan:  There are expected billions of EVs in the future, already 3 to 4 million in 2025. That’s the estimation. Yes. That is challenging. These EVs are going to be charged in different places, so not every EV asks for a separate grid connection. There will be grid connections for fast charging along the highways and this will call for a workforce to make these connections. But it’s not per se a big impact on grid capacity because it’s on a medium voltage level when the connection is there, the capacity is also there.

When you look at the low voltage level, that is where most of the EV charging will be going on. There are public chargers and private chargers and these public chargers are also asking for new connections. And in the Netherlands, that’s quite an amount we park in our streets. So we also need connections in our streets. But the thing with private chargers, especially home chargers, is that the visibility of these things is low and the cars will be charging with 11 kilowatts some more, some less, but it’s around 11 kilowatts, and that’s a big demand compared to your regular households. It’s like ten times that much. And yes, that will be a challenge for us to firstly make visible what is the great impact and then see what we can do about it.

Q: What are the possibilities to extract flexibility from prosumers in the future?

Arjan:  Exciting flexibility in terms of electric charging we call Smart Charging with the same procedure, it has a lot of potential to say that first. I mean the connection time is much longer than the charging time. So there is a lot of room, especially at night when you do a home charging or you use a public charger for overnight charging, there is potentially an enormous amount of flexibility and that is what we want to extract as DSO – also as DSO the responsible parties need that flexibility. And that is key, I think, to decrease the need to grid extensions, we will for sure need grid extensions. But when we can do smart charging, we can postpone or delay grid extensions and also create room for better planning of the grid extensions. And that is where smart charging comes in.

Q: To manage congestion, amongst the different options, DSOs can create a market for flexibility or upgrade the existing infrastructure, or do both. What are the technical and economic trade-offs?

Arjan:  DSOs can indeed create a marketplace for flexibility or do grid extensions. But there are solutions in between. So marketplace is one way to extract flexibility, but you can also do bilateral contracts with the customer, or you can develop specific new tariffs to extract flexibility, or at least to motivate people to use their own energy for themselves and to decrease the peaks the EVs are now causing with the dump charging, so to speak.

We need grid extensions. We can decrease or postpone the number of grid extensions by developing a new tariff system in which people and consumers are motivated to do more self-consumption and decrease the peaks.

We can develop bilateral contracts or a marketplace approach to call for flexibility when a DSO is in need of flexibility and when really when we are in trouble in a real red situation, there are also congestion management rules which can also apply on a low voltage grid to decrease power demand of EVs.

So there are multiple solutions in a kind of a ladder approach that could be applied by the DSO in the future.

Q: Besides the transition to EVs, the transition to electrified heating will add a significant demand to the electricity grid. How are intelligence and integration crucial to our grids to jointly handle the two challenges at the same time?

Arjan:  Next to electric mobility, you have electrification of heating. You also have the increase of decentralized production through solar panels. And these things all come together in the low voltage grid, and this problem is integrated.

So the first thing we have to do, and we are in the process of that right now, is to improve feasibility on these challenges in an integrated way, but also separately. So in an integrated way is to know when electrification of heating and mobility are making such a large demand that the grid cannot cope with it anymore. But also separately, because electrification of heating has less flexibility or approach for flexibility extraction than EVs.

So first feasibility, I then see how these developments are increasing. Then get the picture of how we can extract flexibility in these developments so that’s insights. And for these insights, we need more measurements in our grids to have more clear visibility of what’s going on. And then to extract flexibility, the DSO or DSO systems have to be able to communicate with these devices like an EV or a heat pump or through the back of the systems of these devices. And that is where integration comes in. So that’s a very important thing to add. And that’s what we’re very working on, for example, within Enexis and Elaad.

Q: Current market mechanisms like net metering encourage the use of the grid as an energy buffer and discourage self-use of energy. Do you think this is a long-term solution?

Arjan:  Net metering indeed is not motivating for self-consumption, the way it is right now. And I believe I’m sure it will change. I’m not sure when it will change and how big the steps in change will be, but it will change so that consumers are motivated to do more self-consumption. So this aspect it’s not future proof when it’s, for example, crowded on the grid, when there is already a lot of production and when you feed in, then in the future it might be at a different price or at least different rules of the game so that you’re motivated to more self-consumption.

Q: Do we face other challenges regarding developing a ‘system’ for smart charging?

Arjan:  The consumer controls their devices. So technology is not the challenge anymore, so to speak. There is still work to do in the integration of different devices. But the challenge is, how to agree with the consumer that you can extract their flexibility for a certain amount of time or in which way. And that is like a very new approach, at least for a DSO to have this kind of conversation and this kind of agreement with the consumer.

Another challenge is that when the DSO is in a congestion situation, it needs flexibility, for example, in the evening to decrease the demand peaks of the EVs, but also the TSOs. With more and more production, intermittent production, and they look to the demand side to adapt the demand side on the production to keep the grid on 50 Hz. The balance responsible party has to be able to keep his portfolio in balance. So there are more stakeholders who are in need of flexibility and those stakeholders’ needs should be aligned or at least they should not be contradictory. So there are also some rules of the game or better algorithms too. So it’s not just integrating equipment, there are things to take care of.

Q: How can intelligence and integration help accelerate the use of renewables and EV in the distribution network?

Arjan:  Intelligence is needed in the first place to see what’s going on in grids. So we need more measurements, more sensoring to know if the demand or the production hits the capacity border, so to speak. That’s one thing.

And integration is needed to really extract the flexibility. So if we see, “Hey, we have a problem, we want to do something,” agreements are in place, consumers are okay with the extraction of flexibility for certain compensation, then integration is needed to really go from the situation ‘Hey, we have a problem. We want to ask for flexibility.’ These devices and systems of DSO and devices that can provide flexibility must be integrated. So visibility, intelligence, and integration are needed and are the basis for flexibility extraction.

Q: What is the potential of EVs to be energy storage?

Arjan:  The potential is there for sure, it increases the flexibility potential in the system. But I believe with smart charging as such, decreasing the demand, and decreasing the evening peaks, will help already a lot, and connections are there to provide energy to the consumers. So it will definitely help if you go to the grid and aggregate them into virtual power plants. But it’s also a matter of time, I would say. So if you first focus on Smart charging in the first period and after that, we see what virtual power plants can do and it will definitely help – it adds flexibility to the system. And how much that is in comparison with smart charging, that’s still to be researched.

Q: Can you elaborate on open standards for EV charging and why do you think they are relevant for the mass adoption of EVs?

Arjan:  Open standards are incredibly important, not only in the field of electromobility, not only in the field of EV but in every area where we want to do integration. So it also is important for heat pumps. It also is important for solar panel inverters.

Within Elaad, we started out with a protocol between a back-office and a charging station. It was ten years ago and ten years ago, it was kind of strange to give up IPR on an interface, but in our vision – IPR is an algorithm, is on software, but not on interfaces between devices. You need one to go for open standardized protocols on these interfaces, to make it possible that every device can connect with every back of a system. If you don’t have that, then you don’t have inclusivity.

So in terms that every device should be able to talk with every other back-office system, if that is not open, then this integration will not work. So when the DSO has a challenge or a TSO has a challenge, it can only then communicate with brand X or brand Y and not with every device. And that is not the system we want to have in the future. So in my perspective, a precondition for flexibility extraction.