The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation is a crucial piece of legislation to implement an ambitious rollout of publicly-accessible EV charging infrastructure required to enable EVs to support Europe’s energy and climate objectives in a cost-effective way.
Hence, the EU framework should allow the transformation of EVs into energy assets capable of supporting the integration of variable renewable electricity into an efficient energy system and the electrification of uses. This can be achieved by unlocking their flexibility potential thanks to smart and bidirectional charging. This would ensure EVs can increase, lower or shift their electricity consumption in a time-dependent way to adapt to the renewable electricity generation while shielding EV drivers from volatile energy prices, avoiding unnecessary grid reinforcements and reducing the EU energy dependency towards gas imports.
Our paper sets out recommendations for the negotiations of the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR).