The BMW Group and E.ON have agreed on the first pan-European cooperation for intelligent charging at home. The strategic collaboration aims to create ‘Connected Home Charging’, “a holistic charging ecosystem that will allow customers to connect their electrified BMW or MINI vehicle with the energy system, as part of a climate-neutral, sustainable household.”

“With this unique cross-sector cooperation, the BMW Group and E.ON are laying the groundwork for harnessing the tremendous potential of electric vehicles for the transformation toward the exclusive use of green energy,” adds the press release.

Frank Weber, R&D responsible at BMW, said: “For us, e-mobility is much more than electric driving: green energy, sustainably-sourced raw materials, charging, recycling — we are driving all these key factors forward at the same time.”

“Together with E.ON, we will make the car an intelligent element of the smart home. He added that this would bring more balance to the private energy ecosystem, with lower costs and an improved carbon footprint, and will enable smart future integration into the energy market.

Patrick Lammers, a board member at E.ON SE, added: “E.ON and the BMW Group are already leaders in their industries. We are now leveraging and combining our strengths to create a unique ecosystem for charging at home. In this way, we will jointly set the standard for electrified vehicles to become part of the energy market in the future and support the energy transition.”

At-home charging

The cooperation will focus on at-home charging, which is already, and will continue to be, the most important use case for charging electrified vehicles. Longer downtimes also mean that at-home charging processes are well-suited for intelligent control.

“The comprehensive ecosystem that E.ON and the BMW Group are building is being tailored to take at-home charging to a new level. The core element of the ecosystem is creating a common interface that combines three complex and previously separate systems: BMW Group electric vehicles, customers’ smart homes, and the energy market,” explained the press release.

The BMW Group will be responsible for the vehicles and charging hardware as part of the cooperation. In addition, it will manage the interface with the customer, focusing on their mobility needs.

In addition to providing installation, electrical, and connectivity services at customers’ homes, E.ON will also be responsible for ensuring sustainable energy tariffs and access to the energy market, which plays a vital role in the intelligent control of charging processes.

Fall of 2023

The first customer offering of ‘Connected Home Charging’ will be available in several European countries in the fall of 2023. In the coming years, the ecosystem will be consistently expanded to include additional customer benefits: in a second step, this will include cost-optimized charging and extending the connectivity of fully-electric vehicles and smart homes to the energy system.

Customers can then take advantage of price developments on the power exchange market with a special electricity contract that allows them to charge at low prices whenever possible.

At the same time, the customer’s mobility needs always come first – optimal time slots are also determined based on the customer’s planned departure time and required range. Therefore, this option will be available to customers over the next year.

Bidirectional charging in the future

The cooperation will also create the conditions for enabling future bidirectional charging. This technology makes it possible to use the fully-electric vehicle’s high-voltage battery as an energy storage device and feed the stored electricity back into the customer’s own household or the power grid later.

The results of the joint research project ‘Bidirectional Charging Management — BDL’, completed at the end of 2022, are being incorporated into the development of the future customer offering.

The focus was on using a holistic approach for the first time to connect vehicles, charging infrastructure, and power grids to promote renewable energy and increase supply security. For this purpose, 50 regenerative BMW i3s were provided to customers.

“In this way, electromobility is increasingly becoming an integral part of the energy transition. Its ramp-up reduces CO2 emissions both from mobility and electricity generation. Scaled for electric vehicle fleets from 2030, bidirectional charging could even have positive economic effects since using the batteries of millions of electric vehicles could reduce the need to build up large-scale battery storage systems and gas power plants,” says BMW.

Against this background, both partners will focus their efforts on the opportunities offered by bidirectional charging and its two central use cases: ‘vehicle to home’ (V2H or feeding electricity from the high-voltage battery into the household) and ‘vehicle to grid’  ( V2G or feeding electricity from the high-voltage battery into the power grid) — with the explicit aim of creating appropriate customer offerings in the medium term.

Successful cooperation extended

The BMW Group operates one of Germany’s largest company charging networks, which E.ON has built up since 2019. It now comprises more than 5 500 charging points at eight German locations. More than 1 600 of these are eRoaming-capable and publicly accessible.

The expansion will continue in 2023 and 2024: BMW branches in Germany will also be connected to the company charging network, which will include more than 6 000 charging points. All charging points are powered entirely by renewable energies.