Equipment manufacturers, energy suppliers and technology companies must collaborate in order to realise the full benefits flexibility can offer, Kaluza has said.
Speaking to Current±, the tech firm’s director of electric vehicles Tom Pakenham said that more significant collaboration was happening in the sector, starting with partnerships like the one it struck with battery storage manufacturer sonnen earlier this summer.
“I think you’ll find a lot of this [collaboration] starting to happen where the integration is important, and it actually works for the different use cases. Commercialising this technology for sonnen or whoever in the UK probably makes sense to do that through partnerships,” he said.
That arrangement will see sonnen’s technologies integrated into Kaluza’s flexibility platform, allowing both parties to benefit from flexibility provision services. Further arrangements with other equipment manufacturers are being negotiated, and Pakenham stressed that scale was pivotal in this area.
“Scale helps you to learn. The more load one has on a platform, the more you can do with it, the more you can learn and the more services you can offer,” he said.
But Pakenham also put forward the need for partners to share the same vision or “philosophical connection”, and to be aligned commercially for them to be successful.
He went on to put forward Kaluza’s work with EV charging manufacturer Indra as a particularly good example, one which was triggered by the government’s trouble in finding smart charging technologies for a now completed trial of the technology – Electric Nation.
Having witnessed the government’s difficulty in finding the right kind of chargers for the project, OVO invested in Indra Technologies and helped the company increase its scale, bring new, smart charging technologies to the market.
