Battery swapping and charging stations: Future of mobility

The government’s focus in Budget 2022 on key sectors: infrastructural development, energy transition and climate action, shows a strong connection with the present, addressing today’s immediate challenges and driving recovery while keeping the long-term vision of India at 2047 at the centre of its planning. With regard to the energy transition, the mobility sector is switching from fossil fuels to electricity-powered mobility.

The Indian transport sector currently accounts for the country’s 18% of total energy consumption, according to the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, an agency created under the Ministry of Power. As the complete ecosystem is shifting from carbon fuels to clean electricity, the future of e-mobility would depend upon EV charging models. With current technologies, the charging of electric vehicles (EV) appears to be a major challenge.

To address the challenge adequately, India needs to build an extensive charging ecosystem across various real estate, including parking spaces, commercial and residential complexes.

The Government also realises the constraint of space in urban areas for setting up charging stations at scale. Therefore, the proposal for a battery swapping policy is a progressive initiative by the Government which will at large encourage the adoption of electric mobility.

However, currently, a lot of innovation and evolution is happening in the battery management system segment. Today, batteries are designed in various shapes, sizes, and capacities and no two electric vehicle manufacturers use the same type of batteries for their EV brands.

The battery is considered to be among the most expensive EV components and its quality is of paramount importance for the efficiency and viability of electric mobility. Furthermore, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) in the EV space need to cooperate and support common styles and designs of battery packs. EV manufacturers have already been collaborating on the idea for some time
now.

The public electric vehicle charging infrastructure will also witness a shift. Currently, the government and the industry looked at installing vehicle charging stations. However, the battery swapping policy will lead to the creation of “battery charging stations” for EVs, which could be based on various innovative operative models.

The stations will have high-end, up-scaled battery charging infrastructure that would have batteries on charge mode. Customers will swap batteries, depositing the discharged battery for charging and paying for charged batteries. This will give rise to the battery-as-a-service (BaaS) or energy-as-a-service (EaaS) ecosystem, which is the future of electric mobility.

If one compares the EV segment with mobile technologies, there was once a time when smartphones and mobile phones came with various types of chargers, batteries and charging points.

As the industry evolved, batteries, chargers and connecting points became standardised, so much so that most mobile phone brands can be charged using the charger of other mobile brands. Today, we have largely the iOS and the android mobile phone charging systems dominating the industry.

Similarly, as we transition to evolved technologies in electric mobility, the BaaS or EaaS models will be the future of charging EVs. However, for this to happen, all EV batteries and battery management systems would need to be by and large standardised as per guidelines and design framework accepted across the industry to facilitate in inter-operability of batteries.

The industry stands in support of the government’s vision of rolling inter-operability standards for EV batteries in 2022. We look forward to deliberations across the board in designing the right EaaS/BaaS model and are very keen to see the final print of the formulated standards and guidelines.

(The writer is the co-founder of EVRE, an EV charging infrastructure startup)

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