Charging networks in UK & Ireland opt for Fortum SaaS
Fortum of Finland is progressing beyond the Nordics as the company announces seven new partnerships with charge point operators in Great Britain and Ireland. The partners utilise Fortum’s cloud management solution as the company now offers software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Fortum calls its solution its Charge & Drive Management Cloud (CDMC) that has been developed based on the company’s network in Scandinavia. There, over 3,000 public chargers run on the platform and manage about 250,000 charging transactions every month, mostly in Norway.
In the UK and Ireland, the new partner networks include Alfa Power (Leeds), Franklin Energy (Liverpool), EV Driver (East Anglia), Plug-N-Go (UK), Go Charge (Dublin), ePower (Cork) and one partner that has yet to be named.
Michael Warner, SaaS Business Manager at Fortum Charge & Drive, considers the market on the Isles growing with EV sales potentially reaching a tipping point from 2022. The manager intends to “pass on any relevant learnings from our own experience as an operator” and to provide the technological solution to foster and accommodate for a growing number of charging transactions.
Fortum’s purpose-built cloud solution was re-platformed in 2018 to ensure the scalability which the uptake of electric vehicle ownership will demand in the coming years.
Apart from software, the Finnish company is building its own charging network and is increasingly looking into high power chargers (HPC) as Fortum is opening charge parks to form a Nordic ultra-fast charging corridor. Besides, a wireless charging system for electric taxis is under construction in Oslo in cooperation with US-based Momentum Dynamics. In a recent video interview with electrive, Mike Warner, who heads Fortum’s SaaS unit considered inductive charging a technology with “huge potential”.
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