Thanks to the ever-sharpening focus on sustainability and automotive innovation, electric vehicles—rarely seen on the road just a few years ago—now comprise a significant and fast-growing share of the overall car market. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects a 35 percent annual increase in EV sales in 2023, and electric cars will secure 18 percent of the global car market this year, double the share of two years ago.
Yet barriers to EV adoption remain. To meet the demand of projected new EV sales, the number of EV chargers nationwide must quadruple by 2025 and grow more than eightfold by 2030, according to S&P Global Mobility forecasts. Consumers are clearly worried about the current shortfall of reliable chargers. Nearly 80 percent of Americans cite charging infrastructure issues as a primary reason for not buying an EV, according to a 2023 poll by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Widespread public adoption of EVs can only happen if charging rapidly becomes more available, reliable, and fast. Building the infrastructure to support the required scale and pace of growth could be prohibitively expensive and too slow to meet the market’s needs. But innovative companies are using the cloud to expand the number of chargers and create reliable solutions for drivers, whether at home or on the road.
Getting More Chargers to More People
Take Wallbox, for example. This global manufacturer of charging and energy management systems doubled in size during 2022 alone and has more than 500,000 chargers operating in 115 countries. To meet these global needs, Wallbox chose AWS as its cloud provider to take advantage of the world's most extensive cloud infrastructure, covering 32 regions, while using AWS IoT (Internet of Things) services to connect Wallbox’s EV charging stations worldwide to the cloud securely and cost-effectively at scale. This enabled the company to grow quickly while providing reliable, rapid charging services to its customers around the globe.
To ensure reliability, Wallbox depends on the insights and predictive capabilities of machine learning (ML) services to detect service problems remotely, often resolving them before drivers become aware of them. The company gathers information and can identify issues in near-real time from more than 300 sensors in each of its connected chargers. With the scale of AWS global infrastructure and the power of immediate analysis through AWS compute services, Wallbox is able to see potential failures immediately.
This same technology helps Wallbox avoid downtime at its global smart manufacturing facilities. It also provides insights from sudden changes in sales or customer usage to inform production forecasts, improve capacity planning, and make key business decisions.
Running on AWS, Wallbox has been able to expand its year-over-year US sales in the second quarter of 2023 by 67 percent with the help of its new Texas-based factory, opened in 2022. This site alone can currently produce 250,000 chargers a year and will produce 1 million chargers annually by 2030.
In addition, Wallbox is one of the few companies to reach compliance with the US National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula program, an important part of the federal government’s efforts to establish 500,000 EV chargers along 75,000 miles of highways designated as Alternative Fuel Corridors. At this scale, Wallbox has become a key player in the race to build America’s public EV charging network.
Making Cars Part of the Green Grid
Wallbox is also innovating to improve EV owners’ home charging experience of by helping them better manage the relationship between their home chargers and the electrical grid, maximizing the use of renewable energy and even feeding power from EVs back into the grid. For perspective, the energy stored in 10 Nissan Leaf EVs could power 1,000 homes for an hour.
The company’s Power Boost service adjusts charging automatically to stay within the grid’s capacity. This is especially important when grid use surges, such as during extreme weather. Power Boost keeps EVs communicating with the AWS cloud-based charging management system and the grid, constantly monitoring and adjusting energy consumption while optimizing pricing, maximizing the use of renewables, managing locally stored energy, and meeting customer preferences.
And Wallbox’s new Quasar2 chargers will be bidirectional, using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology to determine automatically when a plugged-in car should be charging, such as during peak use of renewable energy, and when EVs should feed energy back into the grid.
For consumers, these smart charging solutions mean efficient EV charging, lower electricity bills, and improved electricity management. For Wallbox itself, the software behind this system can accommodate rapid growth by using AWS compute services that help the company to take advantage of unused capacity in the cloud, achieving dramatic cost savings.
Wallbox also uses compute instances powered by AWS Graviton2, an AWS-produced chip that delivers 40 percent better price performance than prior-generation instances and consumes 60 percent less energy than comparable instances. Working with AWS, Wallbox has reduced its IT costs by 70 percent.
Reimagining the role of home EV charging is a catalyst for thinking differently about how we use the grid. According to Enric Asunción, CEO and co-founder of Wallbox, “EV adoption plays a key role in helping us transition toward a world powered by renewable energy. AWS provides the underlying infrastructure we need to develop and globally deliver intelligent charging infrastructure and energy-management solutions, as well as the ability to open new pathways that harness the flow of energy through the grid. Like AWS, we believe in putting our customers at the center of everything we do, so we can change the way the world accesses, uses, and shares energy.”
From Barrier to Benefit
For EVs to be fully accepted by the majority of car buyers, EV charging will have to become as easy for drivers as their experience at the gasoline pump. Bill Foy, AWS general manager of automotive solutions, says this makes the cloud a critical player in removing the remaining obstacles to EV adoption: “Getting more EVs on the road will do more to help our zero emission goals than nearly anything else we can do,” he adds. “This can only happen with ubiquitous, fast, efficient, and easy-to-use EV charging. Achieving this at scale requires sophisticated energy management, compute resources, enormous data and analytic resources, including AI and ML, and vast storage requirements.”
The speed, scalability, and flexibility of the AWS cloud enable companies such as Wallbox to bring these capabilities together, removing the last barriers to EV adoption and helping advance a climate-safe future.
Learn more about how AWS cloud infrastructure can help you innovate to build and run secure and performant applications that create new customer experiences, improve efficiencies, and scale your business faster.
This story was produced by AWS and edited by WIRED Brand Lab.
