Super Smart Charging Hubs

Project Duration: June 2024 - November 2027

Programm EU Interreg North Sea Region 2021 – 2027 (European Regional Development Fund)

Project Budget: Total 4.08 million EUR, Funding (ERDF): 2.45 million EUR.

Project Focus Areas:

• Intelligent charging infrastructure (Super Smart Charging Hubs)
• Integration of renewable energies and battery storage systems
• Reducing strain on and increasing the flexibility of electricity grids
• 4 pilot projects in regional FFC collaborations, including:
  • The SSCH in Vlissingen (Netherlands) near the city center
  • A SSCH in Mechelen (Belgium) on the premises of a social housing company
  • A climate-smart mobility house SSCH in Helsingborg (Sweden)
  • A SSCH in Fælledby, a new 220.000 square meter Copenhagen neighborhood

The project consortium consists of 6 Living Lab partners, 1 research partner, 3 network and knowledge partners and 2 follower partners from 6 different nations.

Living lab partners

• Province of Zeeland and subpartner city of Vlissingen (NL)
• Agri Go Charge (NL)
• ASTER Flanders (BE)
• Hub Park (SWE)
• GreenFlux (NL)
• Gate21 together with the e-mobility partner Sustain (DK)

Research partner

• VUB MOBI Electromobility Research Centre (BE)

Network and knowledge partners

• Flux50 (BE)
• The Dutch EV drivers Association (NL)
• Way To Go (BE)

Replication partners

• Logistics Initiative Hamburg (DE).
• Partenord Habitat (FR)

Challenge

EU electricity demand for Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) is increasing from 9TWh in 2021 to 165TWh in 2030. At the same time, sustainable energy supply increases. This yearly requires € 69 billions of grid reinforcement investments. To limit these investments, experiments started with ‘smart charging hubs’ balancing the grid: a combination of sustainable (local) energy generation and storage (batteries, Vehicle to Grid). This provides an opportunity for businesses. However, innovations in this domain do not develop fast enough to market and integrating them in one system is challenging. Demand and technology for smart charging hub solutions are latent (public authorities do not tender for it) and the business case is unproven.

Support to develop solutions

The ’Super Smart Charging Hubs’ project will address this challenge by supporting at least 25 SMEs to develop innovative solutions for these hubs and taking away / align regulatory hurdles, leading to new products and services. This will result in more charging infrastructure and a reduced need for energy grid investments by operators and society. Four Super Smart Charging Hubs Living Labs will be created to support this.

Role of the LIH

LIH will be a replication partner within SSCH. Thus, LIH will mainly focus on transnational knowledge sharing with the pilots of SSCH in order to learn from them & transfer methods or learnings of piloted SSCH solutions to a specific Hamburg-based replication use case on shared truck-charging infrastructure near Hamburg Airport, aligning closely with the Hamburg-based KLIMready project. This will include communication initiatives, dissemination & active stakeholder-engagement on local & regional level. At the same time LIH will also contribute knowledge from own previous EU and regional projects to the SSCH partners to also enhance transnational learning from Hamburg to other North Sea regions. This includes project results from the projects SELECT (Interreg NS), e-Boost (COSME) & KLIMAready (ERDF). LIH will coordinate and lead the work on one of the output strategies in WP3, for which we will elaborate a feasibility for the uptake of SSCH results and learnings in Hamburg.

The project is not yet completed. Project work status and results will be published regularly on the official project website.