This is the first time in human history that the automotive industry has become interlinked with the electricity industry
go largely ‘off grid’. Imagine a street where half the households have solar panels and energy storage and the other half has not. You could think of a system where for every kWh that is fed back into the grid, a household gets a virtual energy token, let’s call it an ‘electricoin’. Neighbouring houses might use their ‘electricoins’ to pay for the energy that someone else in the street has produced, without intervention from a central third party. Sonnen, a German-based battery manu- facturing company is pioneer- ing with this with their Sonnen Community. All EV charging networks
across the country would be completely interoper- able because they all accept ‘electricoins’ as a payment method. Everyone carries his ‘electricoins’ in his virtual wal- let. That means that the ‘elec- tricoins’ that you earned by
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producing solar kWhs at home with your solar panels can now be used to charge your electric vehicle at any public charge point.
WIRELESS CHARGING Many people today have never plugged in a car and are definitely not used to seeing cars hooked up to charge points via a cable. However,
the next generation charging mecha- nisms, wireless charging, are already underway and will be adopted on a large scale in smart cities. In the smart city all parking bays will be equipped with induction plates on the floor. By simply parking your car in the bay, your car will be charged wirelessly via the induction plate. If that sounds far-fetched, think of how your electric toothbrush charges. To take it a step further, all roads in the city will consist of induc- tion plates ensuring your car is charging while driving. Today, most cars are
standing still for 80 per cent of the time – this is not a very efficient use of that capital to say the least. In a smart city the reverse situation would occur, in which cars are in use 80 per cent of the
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