Blockchain: A future technology for electric mobility
By Admin |10 October 2022
Today, many European countries are replacing from diesel cars to electric cars with the goal to curb 100% carbon emission. However, to achieve this target requires the active participation of citizens along with the corresponding suitable incentives from goverments. Following European Council For An Energy Efficient Economy, EU aims to have 30 million electric cars on the road by 2030. And to accelerate the EVs revolution, European countries need to tackle the challenges that hinder automobiles users hesitate to shift to EVs. These barriers can be the shortage of electric vehicles infrastructure, charging stations, hassle charging payment methods, extreme cost of buying new cars, lack of subsidy program from govements and many others issues relating to energy consumption and consumer's habits. However, the timely advent of blockchain technology can be regarded as a promising solution partly tackling the challenges that European countries are trying to solve. A lot of benefits that can be leveraged from this kind of technology to bring electric vehicles closer to the automobile users. This article will give an insight into the help of blockchain in EVs industry.
Table of contents
Understanding blockchain technology
Blockchain technology is known as a distributed ledger technology (DLT) storing data and sharing it among a network of many connected computers.
Blockchain consists key components:
Node: User / computer inside blockchain architecture
Transactions: Play as the role of information, records.
Block: Data structure keeping a bunch of transactions distributed to all nodes in the network. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data.
Chain: Sequence of blocks
Miners: Special nodes that execute line codes to encrypt new information, transactions or events before being added into the network.
How does blockchain work?
Blockchain is truly famous and well-known with the concept of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. However, blockchain has much more potential applications than that. Their potential competencies are clearly presented in the cost reduction, data security, data governance, transparent and high security payment and especially. In the field of mobility, Blockchain is increasingly asserting its role in solving problems related to charging stations and charging payment methods.
Current Challenges For Electric Vehicles
European countries have an ambitious goal to become a climate-neutral continent by 2050. Therefore, many legislations are proposed to tackle the issues relating to carbon emission. Estimated that 27% of carbon emission source comes from transportation according to the European Environmental Agency( EEA). Thus, to push forwards in the race to achieve zero carbon emission , many European countries accelerate their investment in the electric vehicles sector. EVs mobility is considered as the main drive that gets the most attention from every country compared with other energy sectors. In 2021, electric car sales reached the highest record at 6.6 millions and it has been growing robustly after the record. It can be seen that the demand for electricity care is thriving but there will be many issues that go hand in hand with this growth. The following problems includes:
- The insufficiency of charging stations.
- The big gap of EVs charging stations distribution in east and western Europe, between urban and rural areas.
- The complexity in EV charging payment.
- The imbalance of electricity supply and electricity demand.
Blockchain - A promising solution for EVs industry
There are many key benefits that the EVs mobility industry can leverage from blockchain technology. With the adoption of blockchain technology, EV charging payment becomes easier and less hassle. EVs users can directly pay by mobile app or RFID cards and the charging providers easily receive payment instantly. This kind of hassle-free payment is successful thanks to the features of blockchain. Blockchain platform enables all of the charging providers participating in the blockchain network to receive client’s payment without any centric control of intermediaries. The removal of third-party control ensures the high security, privacy and transparency for the transaction.
Blockchain is also applied to maintaining trust, privacy and security of EVs data. In detail, V2G is the technology that allows the participation of vehicles into the power grid to tackle the issues relating to rolling blackout, electricity shortage and high demand of electricity at the peak time. In V2G, electric vehicles can balance the power grid by selling their unused electricity stored in the car's battery into the grid in the time of high electricity demand. The participation of electric vehicles into the grid requires the necessary protection of user’s data, personal electricity consumption data so as to enable efficient controls to manage pool capacity. Thus, to achieve this purpose, blockchain technology or in detail, Digital Ledger Technology will take responsibility to provide data trust, privacy, and security, and must be a core component of the solutions.
Case study
EuroPay is an on-going project of BescoInc Oy. EuroPay utilizes blockchain technology in order to solve the problems relating to the complexity of EVs charging payment and maximize the electricity being charged by EVs with the same amount of transaction compared with current charging systems. With EuronPay, every charging provider participating in the blockchain network has equal rights to approach different EVs users and EVs users also can charge their vehicles with only needing a single accessible card with different charging providers in the network. Taking advantage of blockchain features, EuronPay enables charging providers in the network to receive EV users’ transactions without any intermediaries. EuronPay provides a universal, high security and transparent payment method to EVs users. If you are interested in our project EuronPay, don't hesitate to contact us here .