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Recharge your batteries while shopping
Mobility service provider Amic Energy and its partners Immofinanz and Smatrics rely on the stop charge shop concept.
Recharge your batteries while shopping
VEHICLE ECONOMY:Amic Energy claims to be the largest private investor in e-charging stations in Austria. How many stations are currently in operation and how many are still to be built?
GÜNTER MAIER, ANDREAS SERNETZ: Amic Energy currently operates nine locations, each with two to three fast charging stations in Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland and Styria. In the next few years the number is to be increased to 20 locations. This includes, among others, all 13 locations of the Immofinanz Retail Parks Stop Shop in Austria.
The market for charging current is currently hotly contested. How do you want to position yourself here?
Our charging stations are located in retail and commercial parks because customers can ideally combine charging with various errands. At gas stations it is comparatively unattractive to bridge the half-hour waiting time, so in our opinion charging while shopping will become more common.
Are the Amic Energy fast charging stations able to charge a car while shopping?
Depending on the charging capacity of the electric car, our fast charging stations can charge the battery up to 80% within 30 minutes. With the future-proof output voltage range of 150 to 1000V, future generations of electric vehicles will also be able to use our charging stations.
Currently, charging for electricity is primarily billed based on time – when will there be billing based on kilowatt hours?
Our Hyperchargers are already compliant with calibration law and can bill both by kilowatt hours and by minutes - that just depends on which charging card the customer uses. With our partner Smatrics, we provide a wide range of payment options from charging cards to apps to QR codes via credit cards. In our opinion, billing based on kilowatt hours is the fairest option and will therefore soon become established.
Amic Energy operates a large network of fossil fuel filling stations in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. Is the charging current business already just as lucrative today?
No, at the moment it's still a zero-sum game. It will only become good business in the future with the further spread of electromobility. It will probably take a few years before we reach the profit zone.
Opponents of electromobility argue that electricity often comes from dirty sources...
Our CO2-free charging power is supplied from 100% renewable energy from Austria's leading electricity provider Verbund. Our partner Immofinanz also follows a zero-emissions strategy and attaches great importance to climate-friendly mobility.
If electric cars become more widespread, will there actually be enough electricity from green sources?
A study from Germany has shown that if all cars were to run on electricity overnight, the electricity requirement would be around 100 terawatt hours per year - that corresponds to around 16 percent of Germany's total electricity consumption. Already in 2019, 244 terawatt hours of green electricity were generated annually. So the problem is not the amount of electricity, but rather the distribution. The networks are currently unable to deliver the required power to all locations at the right time. However, the development is extremely dynamic, and it will undoubtedly bring enormous advantages for a country's entire electricity supply if electric cars can be used as decentralized swarm storage.