Electric vehicle charging in India presents a huge opportunity as the nation progresses towards accomplishing its ambitious green electricity and green mobility goals. And Siemens, with its gamut of products in this sector, is looking at making most of it.
Speaking at an investors’ meet lately, Sunil Mathur, managing director and chief executive officer, stated, “[Siemens] sees much of the initial growth in the Indian electric vehicle (EV) market coming from commercial vehicles. Passenger vehicles are unlikely to be the first ones to get into e-vehicles.”
“In the next one year or two or three, [the market going to see] a lot of commercial vehicles. There are already tenders out there. The FAME program is gaining a lot more interest in the area of e-vehicles and e-charging,” added Mathur.
In e-charging itself, Siemens considers an opportunity to bring in the entire grid connection, operation and maintenance, and charging infrastructure as well as the software to manage the whole charging station infrastructure.
“As you electrify your fleet, this fleet is going to start moving around the country, and you will need charging stations everywhere. You will need to bring electricity from the grid to the charging stations, and you will need to manage that entire fleet of e-vehicles as well as charging stations. We already have [the software to manage this] and use it in other parts of the world. [We] can implement here in the country as well,” stated Mathur.
Siemens has already inked a memorandum of Understanding with Switch Mobility, the electric vehicle branch of commercial vehicle major Ashok Leyland, to deliver cost-effective e-mobility solutions. These solutions would be available to Switch Mobility’s commercial electric vehicle customers in India.
Under the partnership, Siemens would offer the charging infrastructure technology and the charging infrastructure management software solutions to boost the performance of the charging stations. The infrastructure would be supplemented with a management software solution to develop the energy-efficient operation.
Switch Mobility and Siemens would also collaborate on introducing novel business models, such as E-Mobility as a service, integrated depot energy management, vehicle-to-grid, and onsite/offsite renewable energy sources by leveraging batteries from commercial vehicles.
