With the world’s decarbonisation efforts entering their most difficult phase, the slow adoption of electronic vehicles will become an increasing concern. Consulting firm Zühlke has produced a new application, which will help electric vehicle producers use data ecosystems to solve their most pressing challenges in the years ahead.
While the start of the decade saw clamour for electric vehicles (EVs) growing – with some studies even suggesting optimistically that they would become ‘the norm’ in the UK by 2030 – the reality has so far been underwhelming. With the government pushing back a long discussed ban on the sale of new combustion-powered cars, EV uptake is not anywhere near the levels imagined – while the charging infrastructure needed for wider adoption is still a distant target.
Even though the UK’s demand for EVs does present automotive brands with opportunities going forward, then, they are complicated – and firms must collaborate in order to avail themselves of them with minimised risk. Aiming to help the firms catering to EV demand avoid ‘putting the cart before the horse’, consultants from Zühlke applied for funding with Innovate UK’s ‘Prospering from the Energy Revolution’ programme. In partnership with both the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and OFGEM, Innovate UK’s programme sought new ways to better utilise and harness data between sectors.
When Zühlke won the funding, the firm found itself with a brief that “set us down an interesting path”, according to a release on the firm’s website. The firm explains that with the UK aiming to go carbon neutral by 2050, there are “a lot of infrastructural hurdles to overcome in the near future”. Most obviously, for example, that involves having to roll out at least 500,000 charge points in the next seven years – something which “requires strategy” to accomplish.
“What you can’t do is just upgrade everything at once,” adds Dan Klein, Zühlke’s head of data and AI. “That’s just not practical. So you’ve got to be much smarter about where the demand is.”
That’s where Zühlke realised the power of data ecosystems could play a transformative role in the UK’s decarbonisation efforts. So the firm’s experts set out to devise a tool that could link disparate datasets from the worlds of geography, transport, and energy – and help to plan where change needed to happen fastest, and where resources could be spared from for now to help deliver that.
Directional data
“Because we’re looking across sectors, we can see that – while there are pockets that are working well – it’s overall not very holistic,” explains Charlie Roadnight, a senior data engineer with Zühlke. “It’s not consistent. But when you join many datasets together, you can solve really big challenges that cut across sectors. That’s the potential power of data ecosystems’.
Zühlke spoke to hundreds of stakeholders from a range of sectors about the issues they face in rolling out EV infrastructure and found that things often take far too long in the planning phase – with lack of unilateral data being a key concern. And on the advice from Scottish and Southern Energy Networks (SSEN), the experts were then able to narrow in on a great testing ground for their concept: Ullapool, a small but densely packed village port in Northern Scotland.
So commenced a process of thoroughly auditing available datasets from the geography, transport, and energy sectors across a few key verticals. In the end, the team found 40 potential datasets before whittling down the ones that would suitably interoperate. Then, any calculations designed to provide meaningful insights would require aggregating lots of ‘apples and oranges’ data standards up or down towards comparable levels. No small task – and one which Roadnight says took several weeks.
Roadnight continues, “What we were looking for was granularity. You want to have granular data that takes you down to the population level of a single street or postcode, while also remaining accurate.”
The result of this auditing, scaling, and interoperating was a digital dashboard that users can use to cross-examine electric vehicle charging needs against things like weather, time of year, the direction of traffic, and even the Ullapool ferry timetable. By investigating all of those factors together, Zühlke’s resulting tool – named the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Investor App (EVIIA) – makes it easy to “spot pinch points and areas where new infrastructure makes commercial and municipal sense”.
Proof of concept
According to Zühlke, the powerful tool can connect data from bodies that otherwise don’t connect, and turn it into insight. The team now hopes to leverage this proof of concept to help with the roll out of EV fleets across the UK. Indeed, since launching the EVIIA tool, international ecommerce and logistics giants have indicated that the resulting information would be useful for helping to prioritise EV fleet roll outs around the UK.
Among the energy and transport sector bodies to have been surprised by the technology, Zühlke’s EVIIA has been called “quite a step forward” by HITRANS, while SSE Renewables added the platform was “really useful platform” as it “pinpoints issues very directly and quickly”. And Octopus Centre for Net Zero said of EVIIA that “the most valuable piece is bringing the data together and having a scalable way of accessing reliable data in a common format”.
Perhaps the most striking outcome from the whole project, though, came directly from our test base itself – Ullapool. According to Klein, one of the things that became very apparent from the prototype was that it immediately enabled players there to identify where their strengths and weaknesses lay for the coming period of decarbonisation.
Klein concludes, “When the local community looked at it, they immediately saw that there needed to be charge points in an existing car park to cope with summer ferry traffic. It was that sort of blinding “we’ve got to do something here” moment that only a connected data ecosystem can produce.”
