Electric mobility is the future, but in some places like Portugal it already has a past. The first steps began almost a decade ago. And that is one of the main factors that explains why the country leads Europe in the percentage of electric vehicles sold (including plug-in hybrids), only surpassed by Norway and Sweden. Of the total number of cars registered in 2023 in the country, 31.8% were electric or plug-in hybrids, while in Spain only 11.9% were, according to data from Electromaps, a European recharge app.
Something that Spain has not been able to offer has contributed to the Portuguese expansion: the universalization of the payment method in any of the 7,970 charging points in the public network, spread across the 308 municipalities of the country, to which are added another 900 installed in buildings or companies that adhere to the MOBI.E system.
Users only need a contract with an electric mobility energy marketer and a card or an app to fill the battery of their electric car. There are 94 charging operators and multiple applications, but the administration has managed to create a single market by providing a public network, managed by private operators, and has prevented it from being a sum of watertight compartments. “From the beginning we thought about devising the model to provide the best system to the user,” highlights Luís Barroso, president of MOBI.E, the public company that designed this universe, dependent on the Ministry of the Environment.
Barroso recalls that the initial steps were taken in 2011, when the electric fleet did not reach 1,400 vehicles throughout the country, with the development of the first projects, abandoned shortly after during Portugal’s intervention by international institutions after the request for a financial rescue of 78,000 million euros. One of those organizations, the European Commission, is now trying to accelerate the energy transition across the continent, but then the ruthless cut in public spending took away Portugal’s intentions to move towards the decarbonization of mobility.
In 2015, now free from the troika, the public company MOBI.E was created to be the Managing Entity of the Portuguese Electric Mobility Network (EGME), responsible for the entire network of public charging stations. After a pilot project in 25 municipalities, the Government then commissioned it to extend the network to all towns to guarantee at least one position in each one. Currently, 37% of the 4,500 positions are fast charging (between 60 and 90 minutes) or ultra-fast charging (less than an hour). The rapid takeoff of the system was initially doped with public money: electric charging was free for five years.
Starting in 2020, when 850 charging stations had been reached, MOBI.E privatized the network with concessions to operators. Recharging was no longer free. “What we did was create an electric mobility market and then pass it on to the private sector,” explains Luís Barroso. The designed structure, he adds, is “more complex” than in other countries and differentiates the function of the energy seller from that of the charging station manager.
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SubscribeA user pays to recharge his electric car, at a supply network point in Lisbon, Portugal.MOBI.E
MOBI.E devised a unique platform that reads energy consumption at each point and communicates it to the electricity market, so that consumption can be differentiated from electric mobility. These data, according to Barroso, made the market attractive for private companies, which supported the expansion of the network. Right now there are 23 energy retailers, 94 charging operators and a park with 228,140 electric vehicles (almost 92% of them are cars). The network has also managed to enter private spaces by facilitating the measurement of private consumption when recharging at points installed in companies or buildings. “This allows, for example, a hotel to offer charging points to its clients but they are the ones who pay for their supply,” explains Luís Barroso.
In addition to encouraging the purchase of electric cars with free recharging between 2016 and 2020, the public company designed a common system that avoids fragmentation. Barroso recalls that they were inspired by another successful model promoted in the country: the Multibanco network, a universal ATM where you can withdraw money or pay bills regardless of the financial institution of each user. A simplification of life that has been transferred to electric mobility. “There are multiple apps but they are all interconnected and allow their use throughout the network,” says Pedro Faria, president of the Association of Electric Vehicle Users, founded in 2015.
Not everything is perfect. Faria considers that the disadvantage of the Portuguese model is the information on the cost of recharging, which includes energy, use of the supply point, taxes and other services, although he trusts that this will be corrected with the impulse that comes from Brussels . On April 13, the Regulation on Infrastructure for Alternative Fuels, approved by the European Parliament and Council, comes into force, imposing a policy of transparency. “Users of vehicles that use alternative fuels must receive accurate information about prices before the start of the recharging or refueling session. “Prices must be communicated in a clearly structured manner, so that the end user can identify the different components of the price charged by the operator when calculating the price of a recharging or refueling session and predict the total cost,” the regulation states. .
The implementation of the public charging network for light electric vehicles has been uneven in the European Union. One of the objectives of this regulation is to try to redirect heterogeneity to facilitate connectivity between countries. “Right now there is no articulation between markets,” laments the president of MOBI.E, Luís Barroso.
As Miguel Ángel Medina reports, the Spanish network, which is made up of about 80 companies including charging operators and charging service providers, works quite differently. “What happens in Portugal is that operators are forced to integrate their public charging points into MOBI.E and when you access one of the apps of any CPO, you have all the public charging points available, regardless of of the operator,” says Arturo Pérez de Lucia, general director of the Business Association for the Development and Promotion of Electric Mobility (AEDIVE). “In Spain there is no such figure that at the state level requires such interoperability, because, although electricity generation is regulated by the State, it is a liberalized activity in which any person or company can generate electricity, pour it into the grid and sell it. ”.
According to Pérez de Lucia, “in Spain and the rest of Europe, what exists are interoperability platforms that, through agreements with charging operators, offer a very extensive network of charging points manageable from the same app and, on the other hand, Charging point operators close direct agreements between themselves for the same purpose,” he adds.
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2024-01-26 06:38:58
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