SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Siemens (NYSE: SI) announced an agreement to work together on initiatives for electric vehicles.
The two companies said they will develop an eCar proof of concept (POC) to demonstrate the cross-industry collaboration necessary to support widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
The companies intend to develop new and existing technologies–such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)–that can interconnect meter data across multiple charging stations and support anticipated transaction scenarios across various utilities providers.
Siemens Energy will supply a physical charging station as well as access to an e-mobility network operating center, which will enable communication between the charging station and various back-end systems. In addition to the Siemens hardware, the back-end system will initially include software from SAP and others as required. The initial design will leverage the Siemens technology at the device and network level and integrate respectively into SAP® for Utilities solutions.
As part of phase one of the POC, the working group intends to demonstrate the end-to-end process integration of measuring energy consumption and generating an invoice of an eCar charging at the "home" utility. It will also cater to the roaming use case where a "guest" utility is involved–for example, how a student living in one state could settle electricity costs incurred during cross-country commutes via their local residential bill. Additional charging and billing scenarios such as measurement and billing process for a "pro-sumer," where the customer is also a producer of electricity, are planned to be developed once the initial POC is complete and select utilities will be targeted for unique use cases.
"In areas such as smart grids, AMI and carbon measurement, SAP is helping companies across multiple industries by delivering business solutions that integrate and enable all areas of a smarter and more sustainable energy ecosystem," said Henry Bailey, vice president, Industry Business Solutions, Service Industries, North America, SAP.
A demonstration and results of this collaborative effort will be shared with the utility community early next year and initial participants are expected to be announced over the coming weeks.
Siemens already has a joint marketing agreement to offer EV charging stations that tie into the ChargePoint Network developed by Coulomb Technologies.