Daniele Farrace
Chief Innovation Officer
Azienda Elettrica di Massagno (AEM)
It’s only half past ten in the morning and the sun’s already burning mercilessly from the sky. The thermometer’s reading over 30 Celsius when we meet Daniele Farrace at a Mobility station in Tesserete near Lugano. Not ideal conditions for a video interview – but the 36-year-old from Ticino is smiling despite his shirt and long trousers. “The heat suits the topic.” The temperatures that prevailed throughout Switzerland at the end of August were “above-average” even by Ticino standards, according to the doctor of engineering (ETH). This is the ideal time to talk about the energy transition.
Farrace is the Chief Innovation Officer of distribution grid operator Azienda Elettrica di Massagno (AEM) SA. The company employs some 25 people and serves around 9’000 customers. “We’re small, which is why we need to be innovative and agile,” Farrace emphasises. AEM is the local network operator: at the beginning of the year, the company was awarded the Watt d’Or energy prize. It was singled out for a project in the little village of Lugaggia, where AEM was able to significantly increase the municipality’s consumption of its self-produced electricity thanks to an intelligent networking of electricity consumers and solar producers. For Farrace, awards like this aren’t a reason to sit back – quite the contrary. “The faster we can push ahead with the energy transition, the better.”
Optimising self-produced electricity
Like in Lugaggia, AEM has also linked houses in the municipalities of Massagno and Tesserete to form what’s known in Switzerland as a ‘Zusammenschluss zum Eigenverbrauch’ (ZEV) – an association of electricity producers and consumers. These are groups of households and commercial and recreational facilities that generate and band together to use their renewable energy. This is where the “V2X Suisse” project comes in: the idea behind V2X or bidirectional charging is that electric cars not only consume electricity, but also feed it back into the grid when they’re not being driven. “The technology allows us to store the overproduction from our photovoltaic systems in the cars’ batteries during the day. Then at night, when the PV systems are no longer producing electricity, we feed the energy from the car back into the local grid.” The public electricity grid is only tapped when the available energy has been used up. AEM uses an algorithm to control this process. It estimates the load profiles of the aggregated households based on past consumption data and current weather forecasts.
E-cars harbour “huge potential”
Daniele Farrace believes strongly in the future of V2X, which is why he’s fully committed to his “V2X Suisse” side-project. Not least because, according to estimates, Switzerland will be home to some two million electric vehicles by 2035. “This trend has huge potential.” For comparison purposes: the Leibstadt nuclear power plant today achieves a nominal output of some 1.22 gigawatts of electrical energy, while two million e-cars have the potential of delivering around 15 gigawatts of electricity.
As a next step, local grid operator AEM is looking to develop business models together with its partners in the V2X side-project – namely Mobility, Primeo Energie (Zurich city’s electricity utility), the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, and the OST University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland – to ensure the economic viability of the V2X model going forward. Farrace stresses that the challenges here are not primarily in the technical area. “The technology exists, and it works. What’s needed is the right framework,” he says. Legislation and regulations in Switzerland are still too conservative. He’s not deterred by this. “We want our input to make an active contribution to the energy transition.” To achieve this goal, the V2X pioneer is happy to accept interviews at temperatures over 30 Celsius.
This article was created at the half-way point of the project in autumn 2023.
What is “V2X Suisse”?
The research project ran from autumn 2022 to spring 2024. It involved the integration of 50 fully electric bidirectional Honda model ‘e’ cars into Mobility’s regular car-sharing scheme. It was the first large-scale trial featuring bidirectional charging e-cars to be held in Switzerland. The idea was to explore how this technology can be used to reduce load peaks in the power grid and how households with solar installations can optimise their own consumption. In addition, the aim was to investigate the economic potential of bidirectional vehicles in Switzerland and test the competition between potential flexibility consumers on three grid levels (Swissgrid, distribution grid operator and ZEV – association of electricity producers and consumers).
The final report is due to be published on ARAMIS (the Federal Administration’s research database) in summer 2024. ARAMIS – the Federal Administration’s research database – homepage (admin.ch)
Conclusion: the project has demonstrated the technical feasibility of bidirectional charging and given the technology a boost. It has confirmed that V2H (vehicle-to-home – a proven methodology), and V2G (vehicle-to-grid) work technically, at both the grid level and in terms of benefiting the system as a whole. Such a scheme cannot yet be operated economically by a car sharing company, however.
The following companies were involved in the project in addition to Mobility: Car manufacturer Honda, software developer sun2wheel, charge point developer EVTEC, aggregators tiko, scientific support by novatlantis, in collaboration with ETH. The project is supported under the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s pilot and demonstration programme.
Images Copyright: Patrick Besch
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