A Home & Roam charging solution is under development in a collaboration between GenGame, Paua Tech and Evergreen Energy.
The solution is being designed to meet the home and public charging needs of electric vehicle (EV) drivers, enabling them to smart charge their EV at home for the lowest prices and easily access public charging via a single app.
Costs of the charging are then settled via the customers’ home electricity bills, with the solution set to launch initially to customers of supplier Green Energy UK in late 2021.
Other solutions aimed at easing the payment process between home and public charging have been typically aimed at fleet drivers, including Octopus’ Electric Juice network and Centrica’s Fleet Charging Management System.
The Home & Roam solution is being funded by the Office for Zero Emissions Vehicles in partnership with Innovate UK. GenGame is leading the consortium, with Evergreen Energy being the virtual power plant (VPP) provider and Paua being the public roaming partner.
It follows Paua signing with Statkraft-owned EV charging network Mer in June, allowing business drivers using Paua’s fuel card to find, charge at and pay for electricity at the 160+ chargers on Mer’s network.
“This project and consortium will enable us to quickly design and roll out a solution to make charging as easy, cheap and green as possible for the rapidly growing number of EV drivers in the UK,” said GenGame’s CEO Stephane Lee-Favier.
GenGame has previously worked with Northern Powergrid, with the two trialing the effectiveness of mobile gaming to incentivise residential demand side response in 2018.
This found that customers cut their electricity consumption by an average of 11%, with the average turndown being around 305W although some customers cut as much as 4.9kW by turning off higher demand appliances such as EVs.
Following this, the two also announced the development of GenDrive, partnering with Newcastle University Ecotricity and EnAppSys for the £400,000 project exploring how mobile games could incentivise EV drivers to use their vehicles to support the UK energy grid.
