In this episode Claudio Geyken speaks with Jaap Burger, who has
worked on electric vehicle grid integration for over fifteen
years, about why flexibility is the thing that decides whether
electrification is affordable, and why the industry keeps arguing
for it instead of demonstrating it.
Jaap started at the city of Amsterdam on its first public
on-street charge points, at a time when the roles of charge point
operator and mobility service provider were not yet clearly
separated and roaming meant operators emailing each other
spreadsheets of identifiers and charge data records. He has been
freelance for eleven years, and since 2015, when he helped build
smart charging on a connected car API linked to a utility's
trading desk, his work has moved steadily towards grid
integration and European policy. He describes his role as
translating for policymakers what innovators can already do, and
translating back to the market what regulation could actually do
for them. He arrived for this conversation from Utrecht by
electric coach, with a single charging stop at a truck charging
hub near Hanover.
The conversation gets specific. Jaap argues that expensive public
charging is a cost problem before it is a pricing problem:
permitting, planning, grid connections, hardware and software set
the price an operator must ask, which shapes utilisation, revenue
and bankability, and therefore how fast that operator can scale
at all. He makes the case that not every peak is equally bad,
that a charging peak coinciding with local solar production can
help the grid, and that some early demand charges inside network
tariffs flatten one peak only to create a bigger one later. On
the Netherlands, he explains how a grid map that is almost
entirely red for new connections coexists with distributed
flexibility from single vehicles reaching the flexibility market,
with a new mechanism opening this autumn at low voltage level,
and what it took to get there: operators, an MSP platform and
grid operators demonstrating it at scale. He is measured on
vehicle to grid, which works today in captive fleets with one
carmaker, one operator and one source of data, and warns that the
excitement around it obscures the larger near term value of
unidirectional smart charging. He also covers the German pass
through model, real time price endpoints from operators to
mobility service providers, the non discriminatory pricing
requirement in the European alternative fuels infrastructure
regulation, and the fragmentation of roughly 800 distribution
grid operators in Germany.
An episode about the gap between what flexibility can already do
and what the rules currently reward, and about what fleets and
operators need from each other to close it.
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