Tom Orvei
20. Dec 2022 | 8 min read
The entire world needs to make greener choices for the sake of ourselves and future generations. Whatever your view on climate change, it’s undeniable that we’ve damaged the planet and the environment due to pollution and over-use of both natural and unnatural resources. This is why the concept of sustainable development has risen and become a focus for people and businesses across the globe, with 85% of people changing their behavior to make greener choices in the last five years.
Goal 7 of the UN’s official Sustainable Development Goals centers around cheaper, cleaner energy to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.” It states that accelerated action on modern renewable energy is needed – especially in the heating and transport sectors. The share of renewables for the electricity sector, globally, exceeded 25% as of 2018 – but the modern renewable share of total final energy consumption was only 3.4% for transport.
EV adoption can play a major part here, and CURRENT is supporting its clients to help them achieve their sustainability goals and make the planet a better, cleaner place. We’re able to step in, as the experts, and provide the knowledge of electrification, charging, and energy that they might not have internally. The question is, how exactly is CURRENT accelerating the action that’s so sorely needed?
The barriers to sustainability
With so many options available to us, the main barriers stopping businesses from achieving their Sustainable Development Goals – regarding transport in particular – tend to be competence and organizational structure, which is fairly surprising. Somebody in a business might suggest they transition their fleet to fully electric, but then there has to also be someone on the team who is able to understand how to do that. That might require hiring a person who has the capability or competence to get the initiative rolling internally, and it takes time to get everybody on board.
For bigger organizations, it’s even more difficult because making decisions is such a lengthy process. However, it’s by no means impossible; even a huge business like BP is making strides towards its strategy of becoming a renewable energy company, which is pretty mind-blowing for an oil business. BP is shifting quickly because it has worked hard to build competence, develop the skill set, and start to tune the organization to see results.
How CURRENT supports fleet owners
For CURRENT, it’s about proper enablement for our clients. We have quite a few in the transport sector that are transforming their fleet cars and vans to EVs, which we have all the tools and knowledge to enable. We are assisting them in choosing the right charging hardware to install, for example, because there’s such a large variety in brands as well as smart functionality. We support them with the open standards that we are able to control remotely and in choosing the charge point technology that will future-proof their charging infrastructure.
As new standards on how to charge and exploit charge points emerge, we are continuously upgrading the firmware and exploring every possibility. There’s also the chance to implement bi-directional charging from the hardware, enabling even more effective use of energy and opening up Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) functionality.
As a player in the EV space, we’re working towards multiple Sustainable Development Goals indirectly, simply by making sure that increasing numbers of vehicles on the road are charged with electricity.
Global reporting initiative
To help our clients work towards their own chosen Sustainable Development Goals, we provide something called GRI – global reporting initiative. GRI is a system of standards that allows organizations to report the impact their business has in a visible, structured way. Specifically, the European Union wants businesses to use GRI standards to report how they reduce their emissions, and CURRENT is the entity that can extract that information. This means our fleet clients can actually prove how they are contributing less to emissions, which will keep improving as time goes on.
EV taxation rules
Additionally, we’re working with our clients on taxation rules regarding company cars, to make sure it’s all done seamlessly through our platform. Again, it’s about underpinning the ability of organizations to choose EVs instead of fossil fuel cars. For example, if you have a company car that’s an EV and you charge it at home, how do you get reimbursed for the use of your own energy? We’re able to facilitate that through the CURRENT platform as well. There’s already a robust structure in place for filling up fossil fuel cars effortlessly, so we’re making sure the same is true for EVs.
Sustainability at the core of business
Barriers aside, sustainability is so much more embedded in business than it used to be, and organizations will approach Sustainable Development Goals far differently in the future. Sustainability as a topic is already being pushed quite hard, and as governments get increasingly involved and become the driving force behind that, it will continue to improve. Businesses everywhere and in all industries will have to meet certain goals and the pressure to do so will increase, until being sustainable is a primary focus for everybody.
Electric vehicles are a key player when it comes to making an organization more sustainable. EVs slash tailpipe emissions to nothing – that’s a hard fact. Plus, increasingly, EV manufacturers are thinking about how these vehicles are produced and where they can reuse materials, how to recycle batteries, whether batteries can simply be replaced if an EV customer wants to keep their car, and so on.
There are all sorts of initiatives that make EVs the greener, more planet-friendly option beyond simply emissions (or lack thereof) they produce, and allow Sustainable Development Goals to become a reality. CURRENT is incredibly proud to play its part in the betterment of our planet.
