-Hello. You are the head of the program Batteries and Infrastructure for Renault. Electric cars imply plugs and charging standards. Could you tell us about the various charging standards and how they are determined in various areas of the world? -First, standards are important to us as they stabilize our technical solutions. So having as many standards as possible prevents us from having different issues in different areas. There are three main standards on the planet. The first one is Japanese and called CHAdeMO. The second one is European and called Combo. The third one is Chinese and called GB/T. For the past few years, we have been trying to standardize everything to reach one standard for each main geographical area so cars can be charged on any station and to makes things easier for the customers. In the past, some stations were installed which follow outdated standards. -The standards are still current as we still back-pedal somewhat on all products. We make sure people who bought a car 3 years ago, can still charge their car and that the old stations can charge new vehicles. However, we are aiming for more effective standards. At the moment, there are two standards for stations and we are aiming for one which will be effective for all electric vehicles. -An electric car, as other cars, will be parked for stretches of time and connected to a network, either a home network or a wider network in a street. How are the "vehicle-to-home" or "vehicle-to-grid" systems relevant and important to you? -They are relevant because they open up new fields to create value, especially with energeticists and those who manage the network. A car drives on average for about 50 kilometers a day but is capable of driving 300. The batteries have a large reserve and it should benefit the community. You can charge your car at the proper time, not charge it during consumption peaks when people come home. We still manage to use the network efficiently and to share part of the profits with the final users which makes cars more affordable and thus promotes their diffusion. -Isn't there a risk, if we use up the battery to respond to a local demand peak, that when we use the car, its autonomy is lower than expected? -Absolutely. This is why we have been working with start-ups to understand customer usage and make things easier. We need to know a couple of facts. First, when, in the morning, do they need their charged vehicle and what was the charge level when it was plugged in? The other important data is the minimal autonomy they want when the car is plugged in to go to the hospital or to somebody's house. Between the minimal and maximal values we need at any given time, the car will be charged whenever it is best for the network. We are trying, thanks to an easy-to-use Smartphone app, to work on customer usage, and network usage to make the integration of the vehicle to the network easier and to create value. -Does the customer get some of this value? What is the incentive to leave their car plugged to the network so it can adjust to peak periods? -This is pretty easy, if they did not get anything, they would not do it. It is logical. Of course, we give some of the value back. All the value chain must be remunerated. Everybody must earn something, the network as well as the aggregation platform, with all its IT intelligence, or the final user. By working together, we create a bigger cake so we can all have a large slice instead of having several small cakes. We are working on ecosystems to create as much value as possible so everybody wins. -The batteries in electric cars, after a while, lose some autonomy capacity. Then, it can have other uses. Could you tell us more about the battery's other uses and the technical interest of the second-life uses? -They are called second-life batteries. The first life lasts 8 to 10 years in the car. When it is under 25% of its nameplate capacity, it no longer fulfills our promise to the customer so we take it out. When we take it out, it is still good for other uses, especially stationary energy storage. We make a plug-and-play product. We take it out, plug it again on a stationary system and we use it to charge or discharge via the network. The first application we use it for is inside buildings. Inside a tertiary building, in the morning, when the elevators or the kitchen start, they need a lot of energy and less so afterwards. To avoid peaks, we use second-life batteries. We also use them in houses or on rapid-charging stations. To charge a car very quickly, it needs a high power peak. Second-life batteries store the energy and redistribute it to the car. This is a nice use of circular economy. The batteries help the cars charge faster. It adds 5 to 10 years to the battery's life span. So that makes 10 years in the car, 10 years as stationary storage so we only need to recycle them after 20 years and not 10. -We know that the environmental relevance of electric cars will depend on the decarbonization of electric systems. This will require the implementation of renewable sources. And electric car batteries can facilitate their development. Could you tell us more about this use of second-life batteries? -It will probably start with second-life batteries and then on-board batteries in the car. But it will start with second-life batteries. Using more and more renewable energies on the networks, which is notably happening in Germany, in the Netherlands, which have high renewable energy rates, will disturb the network and we can stabilize it thanks to batteries. Second-life batteries become interesting because of their cost. Second-life batteries are half as expensive as new batteries. So we have a synergy between two worlds. The more second-life batteries we use on the network, the more renewable energy we can use to decarbonate our energy. Cars will then be charged with green energy, which creates a virtuous cycle. Electric cars will be charged with more green energy, it will be cheaper, and thanks to what they bring to the network, we will have more wind turbines and solar panels. -Another way of storing renewable energies is by producing hydrogen which can be used in fuel cell cars. Do you see these as being in opposition or in synergy with the current electric vehicle batteries? -Not many things are in opposition. Everything is mostly complementary. Hydrogen will come later, probably thanks mostly to buses and trucks, which need more autonomy. Hydrogen has upsides when it comes to autonomy and downsides with its expensive infrastructure. It will probably come through fleets of vehicles with perfectly managed infrastructure between point A and point B and with larger vehicles, buses or trucks. -Thank you very much. -You're welcome.
