He defines himself as a “recalcitrant optimist.” For this reason, despite the fact that the electric car assembly factory that it designed for Asturias has lost its “position”, it continues to believe in the region’s potential to become one of the national protagonists in electric mobility. The regional director of Phoenix Contact E-Mobility and president of the Business Association for the Development and Promotion of the Electric Vehicle (Aedive), Adriano Mones, will talk about it this Tuesday as a mentor of the Avante program of CEEI.
-Do we believe that electric mobility is the new paradigm?
-Electric vehicle sales are increasing on average 50% per month. The trend, once the covid bump has passed, is homogeneous, and it is expected to continue being that way. In relative terms, there is no industrial sector that is growing so much. But in absolute terms that number is still low. In Spain we have a total fleet of electric vehicles of 140,000 units and there are 24 million cars. Those of us inside think that it is a massive adoption by society, but it is still missing. The real opportunity is there, and although we are fewer than we would like at the moment, the potential for that mass adoption will be soon.
-What should improve?
-In 2025 it is estimated that the purchase price of the electric vehicle will be exactly the same as that of the thermal one and that the recharging infrastructure necessary to remove this anxiety of autonomy will be sufficient. Those two issues are important. They are conditioning factors that are determining evolution.
-Does the lack of charging infrastructures detract more than the price itself?
-In part it is so. One of the barriers is that people think that there are few public and private access charging infrastructures. I have recently been to Castellón in an electric car. I had to do almost a thousand kilometers of distance. Only from here to Madrid there are 28 fast charging points, so the reality is different from what people think. Throughout Spain there are 9,000 public access charging points.
-How should electric mobility be approached in order for it to be that transformation factor in society?
-There are things in the medium term that are going to change our lives completely and the electric car is going to be a motor of that change. The electric vehicle has to be integrated into the concept of smart cities as a regulatory element of electric energy. The car will supply the energy, either for its own autonomy, or to sell it in the pool to third parties, with which it is no longer a sole and exclusively transport element, but it will be able to power household appliances. In addition, we spend on average five years of our lives in a car and we are not aware of the amount of things we do when we are in it. As happened in its day with the mobile phone, which is already used for everything except talking, the same will happen with the electric vehicle. It will offer us endless offers with high added value thanks to the fact that it will be continuously connected to the cloud and will record all our behavior patterns. That will be a radical change.
-Are you talking about a distant future?
-From now. There are already pilot projects of all this: of the electric vehicle driven autonomously, and of those that supply energy to the grid and serve as regulatory elements. What must advance is the regulations, the legislation, the standardization of technological protocols.
-That is a complaint from companies that provide shared vehicle services.
-While the user experience is different in Gijón, Oviedo and Avilés, which are three realities, what can we aspire to? And then it will be necessary to achieve another type of functionality and benefits that would allow to adapt electric mobility more quickly.
-Could electric mobility be a driving force for the central area?
-It should be a pole of attraction because 80% of the population is concentrated in that metropolitan area, 80% of the wealth that is produced in the region and the provision of all kinds of services that have to do with the urban environment. It is logical that it should be so. But the metropolitan area has passed away. And the other side of the coin has to do with sustainability. We have a natural paradise at home and we are the envy of the rest of the country. And one of the ways to protect it and put it in value is by using electric mobility to move through places where we cannot enter with other cars because they pollute.
Not lose position
-Why hasn’t the project for the electric vehicle assembly factory in Asturias come to fruition?
-The valuation of the project, which was presented in 2018, was higher than the one to be carried out in Barcelona with Iberdrola and Seat. But if it has not found any public or private investor to promote it, it will be for something. What I know is that we have lost two years between some things and others and what we present then technically is no longer the most current that exists as a technological opportunity in the market. The positioning of what we could do can no longer be the same because technology and industry have already advanced.
-Should you rethink the project and continue betting on it so as not to waste more time?
-Asturias cannot waste any more time to promote electric mobility because it is strategic for the region. What should be done is to create a work table where both public and private interests were represented to carry this project forward. And to do so by integrating, on the one hand, all administrations: European, national, regional and city councils and, on the other, companies that have sufficient encouragement to assess the proposal.
-Is Asturias still well positioned?
-From a global perspective, of course. Electric mobility has three development vectors: technological, industrial and services. In Asturias all three can be covered and in some cases it is already done. Not all regions have two carpooling companies. We are pioneers. And in the industrial part and in the services related to mobility we do not have an electric vehicle factory, but we do have factories for charging points and companies that provide mobility services with high added value. And we lead the ranking of public access charging structure deployment. What should be tried is not to lose that position.
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