EU has made a commitment to ensure full coverage of EV infrastructure across its members. However, EV infrastructure in public areas is still considered too expensive to be deployed by the private sector, mostly due to an uncertain –in the best case- ROI. Current business models and the revenues that are generated from EVSE are not sufficient to ensure a sustained, healthy market growth. This results in a lack of confidence in the EV sector as a whole and leads to uncertain users hesitating to buy EVs, triggering a vicious circle of a frozen demand because of an unsatisfactory offer and vice versa.
MEISTER delivered a set of tools to foster e-mobility large scale adoption by (1) demonstrating innovative, sustainable business models to lower installation and operation costs of charging infrastructure, (2) optimizing usage of infrastructure by the smart combination of charging and parking services, (3) integrating EV within urban SUMPs, including the establishment of EV sharing and the inclusion of EV within MaaS schemas to reduce CO2 emissions and optimize urban space usage, (4) providing interoperable platforms and services to users for an easy, convenient and barrier-free access to charging, billing and smart grid services.
Thus, MEISTER has helped to create the conditions for smart e-mobility market take up in cities, by means of developing integrated approaches, smart solutions and innovative, sustainable business models, which were tested and validated in three urban areas in Southern, Central and Northern Europe: Malaga (Spain), Berlin (Germany), and Stockholm (Sweden). These three sites are EU leaders in the field of e-mobility, have complementary contexts and share a common vision on EV deployment.
In spite of that MEISTER has had to face the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility patterns, the project has been able to demostrate the potential to reduce CO2 emissions, to induce citizenship to change from private transport towards shared mobility systems, to reduce parking demand, to optimize the use of charging infrastructure, to make more cost-efficient the EV fleet in municipalities, to solve the capacity issues in the distribution grid and contribute to a decrease in system costs and operational costs for the CPO's, to introduce environmental criteria in the procurements of city councils in order to increase the use of EVs in the private providers’ fleet, to make greener the last mile distribution and much more.
All these aspects have helped to increase the demand for EVs as well to reduce the installation costs of EVSE infrastructure. Business models and public-private partnership frameworks developed and demonstrated by the project has been well documented to facilitate trans-European transferability and impact.
