The development of electronic vehicles is being fueled by growing fuel expenses, increasing pollution levels, and climate change concerns. But everyone is also worried about their exorbitant price, which is a major problem.
Battery-As-A-Service: The Next Revolution
Battery-as-a-service is an essential element that plays a key role in achieving the goal to stimulate more rapid electric vehicle adoption and speed up clean and sustainable mobility options.
Policies that speak of ‘battery swapping’ or ‘battery-as-a-service’ enable electric vehicles owners to replace the discharged batteries of their vehicles with a fully charged ones which can be done within a few minutes by paying an ordinary sum for a charge fee that is akin to refueling an IC engine vehicle.
In the long term, electric vehicle owners, manufacturers, and dealers will all benefit from this. By shifting from the battery as a product to the battery as a service, the entire idea will fundamentally alter the electric vehicle battery market.
What is Battery-as-a-service?
A battery would be leased from a provider of charging infrastructure under the BaaS model, and every time it would need to be recharged, it would be swapped out at a station.
The cost of a battery price amounts to almost 50% of the cost of an electric car. Customers can save money at the time of purchase thanks to the battery-as-a-service approach.
By using swap stations, electric vehicle owners may swap out their worn-out battery blocks with fully charged, ready-to-use ones. Electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, electric automobiles, and even e-buses are among the areas for which the technology is now being evaluated.
Stations for changing batteries might be manual or automated. Batteries are manually inserted into and taken out of the station’s individual slots when it has a manual station. The stations don’t take up a lot of room.
In countries like India, the major concern is that cities are not equipped with the infrastructure to accommodate the number of electric cars if and when they become mainstream. However, in the USA and China, there are companies that have already established automated swapping stations for electric vehicles. That being said, India too has some credible battery swapping solution providers like Charge up, Lithion Power, and Sun Mobility.
How is this Model a game changer?
In the first instance, a model like this would permit one to replace batteries for one’s electric vehicles efficiently and speedily unlike the time it takes in fixed charging stations which also is not cost-effective as the infrastructure it takes to build the same is a lot. Due to the BaaS model, the upfront costs of EVs may decrease dramatically; for example, the expenses for two-wheelers may easily decrease by up to 20%.
The beauty of this service is that the BaaS provider does not need to set up infrastructure on its own; instead, it can grow its network by working with organizations that have extensive collaborations of agents and equipment for charging.
What Does the BaaS Model Require?
For a country to be able to implement this service and infrastructure in order to encourage its citizens to adopt electric vehicles, there are a few things that need to be considered and sought before being able to establish a wide network of the same.
- The BaaS ecosystem is largely dependent on the production of batteries and electric vehicles (including research and development for advancements in battery technology). Next in the supply chain, EV producers rely on battery producers to power their vehicles, which are then offered for sale to consumers.
- The very infrastructure which includes charging stations and battery swapping providers for charging the said electric vehicle requires a network of operators. This is a crucial part of the entire BaaS concept. Hence, the government has to collaborate with the private sector and invest in establishing a reliable chain of network operators.
And as the last step towards this milestone, for the BaaS Model to operate successfully, its users must adopt it. These users can be institutional or retail clients like fleet operators or large logistics or delivery firms.
Additionally, mobile applications that help in providing information about the closest battery swapping station, the availability of fully charged batteries, and other crucial data points are important for the growth and evolution of this industry to facilitate the efficient onboarding and role of customers in this ecosystem.
Challenges Faced
BaaS is more practical for smaller electric vehicles, thus industry players and innovation teams will need to come up with ways to use it for heavier electric vehicles like trucks and other large vehicles.
One of the early problems with electric vehicles has been safety worries, especially in light of fire incidents and electric vehicles catching fire due to product problems. Thus, to make BaaS a reliable and secure choice, research and innovation in battery-related technology are needed.
Given the scarcity of fundamental resources and, in the event that they are not scarce, then the cost, readiness, and local availability, the availability of raw materials and components for battery manufacturing presents another problem. There is currently a significant reliance on imports.
All these factors have an effect on the cost of manufacturing and investing, which serves as a barrier to entry for battery manufacturers and serves as the foundation of the BaaS ecosystem.
Conclusion
We look forward to the standardization of vehicle components to adapt to such interoperability standards and the establishment of a greater network of battery swapping stations globally with less real estate, even though the mechanics of interoperable standards actually being achieved are still to be seen.
