Phoenix Contact is one of the pioneers of electromobility, said the company’s Managing Director, Răzvan Encică, during the „Smart Cities – What we can do today” conference, organized by Energynomics.
“The first project was completed in 2009. There were our connectors to help charge the bus batteries for public transport in Nianjing, China. There were huge depots with huge walls with rectifiers and batteries that the buses changed when discharged – this was our first contact with electromobility. The Phoenix Contact Group’s strategy for the next 10 years is based on the phrase ‘All-electric society’, a future society in which renewable energy is the main resource, produced at permissive costs for everyone. The three pillars we believe in are electrification, automation and the interconnection of all sectors of industry and the economy. It is very important to produce energy from renewable sources and to be able to transport it to the place of consumption. For this, all sectors – production, distribution, transport and supply must be automated and interconnected,” he said.
The Phoenix Contact e-mobility division was established in 2013 to conduct research, development and production in this sector.
“We have factories in three countries, Germany, China and, since 2018, Poland. Related to the production area, I would like to address the first challenge we have, namely supply chain disruptions. We all know about the crisis of raw materials, metal or semiconductors, which today are making the investments more difficult and the vision in the short and medium-term on the development of the business”, he added.
Phoenix Contact addresses all companies that want to develop their own charging stations.
“We have the full range of services, from control to vehicle-to-grid, which has already been implemented in many European countries. This means that you can use storage [in the car battery] to inject energy into the grid when consumption increases. Vehicle-to-grid can be an alternative [to the power supply challenges], but this requires communication between public institutions, the distribution area and transport. Roaming can be done internationally, it is a very big and very complicated concept, but it can solve many of the current problems. It’s all about standardization”, he said.
The conference “Smart Cities – what we can do today” was organized by Energynomics, with the support of our partners ABB, Automobile Bavaria Group, Consolight, Eaton Electric, Enel X, Flash Lighting Services, LAPP Romania, Phoenix Contact, REI Group, Sixt, Signify.
