The Netherlands State Secretary for Infrastructure and Water Management, Stienje van Veldhoven, has announced the successful completion of testing for the first electric car charging station using IOTA payments. First opened on April 18th, the ElaadNL serves as a proof of concept for the public use cases for both IOTA and electric vehicle fast-charging stations.
The IOTA charging station is fully autonomous, capable of handling all necessary payment communication on transactions by using IOTA Tangle Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
“No back office and no communication protocol are required to operate the charging station; the transactions are exchanged directly without the use of a charge card or subscription,” IT Architect Smart Grids & Distributed Ledger Technology expert at ElaadNL, Harm van den Brink explained.
Eleventh-ranked cryptocurrency IOTA has been under development since 2015, and is specifically designed to operate in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. It features open-source protocol facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer and zero-fee real-time micropayments.
Suggested Reading : Learn more about IOTA in our beginner’s guide.
The charging station stores meter values every 15 minutes in the IOTA Tangle. Testing was carried out using a specially designed ‘mini-Tesla’ electric vehicle. The team behind ElaadNL will now begin to design the specific hardware necessary for regular cars to use the technology.
“The charge station has been tested multiple times with the special hardware (mini-Tesla) we built. We are currently busy implementing a QR-code display, so everybody can directly pay and charge,” said van den Brink.
In the coming months the charger will be integrated into a smart network that uses IOTA for distribution and information. Information such as the capacity load of the transformer and the device’s total energy usage will all be stored in the Tangle.
“The transformer can ask connected devices to do smart charging, and if they listen to that they will get incentivized directly by sending them IOTA tokens. This will also be a proof of concept, and we expect results by the end of this year,” van den Brink concluded.
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