Power-bank hero

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Power-bank hero

When we launched Monta’s PowerBank feature – a preventative solution to help offload and stabilise the energy grid – we were as optimistic as true tech entrepreneurs can be. 

In other words, we dove head-first into this previously unknown area of electric charging. And while we weren’t immediately aware of all complexities (such as the importance of ancillary services), our calculations were promising: we estimated that savings of between 5-10 EUR per AC charger per month would be possible, making it a quite lucrative endeavour.

However, we also knew that this would be uncharted territory for us. No one had introduced grid services at this scale before, making it both a rewarding and challenging prospect for us.

PowerBank finally became available for our users in late 2022. Fast-forward to today, and Monta has access to 200K chargers, meaning that – if our original calculations were correct – we’d have managed to free up millions of euros in revenue by now.

But this story’s become much more complicated in the last two years. And while we haven’t been able to reach our original estimates (due to the volume of unforeseen roadblocks we’ve encountered), we’ve been steadily increasing our revenue rates and our grid services model is, by now, both stable and viable.

Here’s what that means in practice.

Chargers (and charging speeds) matter more than you think

One of our first major learnings in grid services was that participating in the most lucrative markets meant that our chargers have to be lightning fast, i.e. compatible with primary reserve (FCR) infrastructure. 

Stabilising grid services will only work with chargers that can pause and resume (or decrease and increase) charging in the space of only a few seconds. Fast meter readings at 1-second intervals are also essential. These parameters meant that we had to rethink all hardware requirements for our grid services. 

Because chargers with non-native OCPP setups (like proxies, or OCPP implemented via servers etc.) were incompatible from the start, we began developing a brand new infrastructure to accommodate PowerBank’s requirements – as well as working with each of our hardware manufacturing partners on potential firmware updates to ensure compatibility. 

Our primary goal was to engineer for increased reaction time, but without increased network traffic – and we’re happy to say that we were successful. In fact, we even published a whitepaper in March 2023 where we discussed the best ways to prepare charger firmware for grid services. (Sidenote: this whitepaper was later copied and announced as news by another player in the grid market.)

We now have an up-to-date list of supported charge points where you can check which chargers currently support our PowerBank feature – check it out here.

Different bidding zones and requirements for markets

Another challenge we discovered on our grid services journey: not all countries have a market for ancillary services. And not all markets can participate in grid service projects with only their chargers as assets – the variation in minimum capacity requirements, symmetry requirements, reaction time requirements is substantial. 

In Denmark, for example, half of the nation’s energy grid (DK1) has a symmetric capacity requirement: If the bid is 1MW, we need to be able to both decrease and increase power of chargers in the bidding area with 1 MW. But increasing the kW output on our chargers is impossible on a large scale, making this a significant challenge. 

Other countries have different infrastructures and specifications. In the UK, well-paid markets are typically smaller zones that require higher local capacity, whereas in Norway, the market is paid close to nothing since its high number of hydro assets already provides the flexibility necessary to balance its energy grid.

Updating our pricing strategy according to market changes

One of the most intriguing aspects of the energy market is its unpredictability. We experienced the more challenging effects of this unpredictability when the main energy market we decided to focus on with our grid services, the Upward Frequency Containment Reserve – Disturbance (or “upward FCR-D”) lost all momentum during the last 24 months.

average FCR-D price
Average price per month for FCR-D up

Like we said, there’s no way to accurately forecast the dips in service prices. However, such a dramatic (and durable) decrease meant that we had to rethink our original strategy: as it stands today, investing in grid services can still be a financially lucrative venture, but we need to stack multiple grid products to get back to our expected price level.

Expanding capacity, step by step

Eventually, we found the best way to combat these challenges: taking one step at a time in the certification and capacity processes.

So our first objective was to get certified for dealing with a bid size of 0.1 MW. (This can take several weeks, if not months, to achieve.) Once that was done, we restarted the process with a bit of extra capacity, and so on; by the time we hit 3.2 MW, we got capped as a single asset and had to update our system so it became possible to pool assets into parallel 3.2 MW asset groups.

Does this sound painful? Maybe (especially at the beginning). However, we’re confident that by the time a company reaches the stage of 100-200 MW, it will become much less tiresome.

Exploring the potential of aggregators

Already at the planning stage of our PowerBank function, we decided to work with aggregators and tap into their expertise to get quicker results. However, our mutual plans haven’t come to fruition so far – in a way, this is understandable, since EV chargers are still a relatively new technology (and it might not be an aggregator’s highest priority to optimise their ways of working for them just yet).

Today, we work with four different aggregators to cover our current markets, which in itself is a complex undertaking. Also, we’ve learned that with aggregators and ancillary markets, there’s no guarantee to participate, even with the available capacity – from what we can see, the majority of available capacity is often unused and so unable to generate revenue. Which means that we have to include this in all upcoming grid service strategies too.

What’s next for PowerBank?

With these two years behind us, the question is: what’s going to happen now? And we have good news: even though we’ve faced a previously unexpected number of roadblocks on our road towards balancing the energy grid with PowerBank, we are determined to continue on this journey. Here at Monta, we believe that achieving grid stability is essential for a healthy grid, and we’re confident that the revenue stream(s) we envision for our partners will be sustainable very soon.

In other words: great things are supposed to be hard. But that doesn’t take away their greatness!

On a practical level, we’re committed to building out our chargers’ capacity by solving the hundreds of smaller obstacles we’ve encountered, as well as exploring the OpenADR specification so we can streamline the communication between platforms and grid operators.

All in all, these two years have been instrumental to realising exactly how Monta’s PowerBank can help offload and stabilise the energy grid in a way that’s both financially viable and sustainable. All we have to do now is continue our journey towards a healthy grid – with whatever it takes.

Further reading:
Balance the grid through EV charge points
Monta PowerBank feature

Casper Rasmussen

Casper Rasmussen is CEO and Co-founder of Monta. Monta is founded by a small team of dedicated engineers and tech-minded professionals that have grown tired of the fragmented EV market. With technology at our core, we believe we are the best suited to combine state-of-the art technology with sustainable mobility solutions. Everything we do is fully automated and based on modern open-source technologies.
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