A new project with 30 participants from eight European countries will pave the way for an emerging new European business and technology ecosystem aimed at tackling various energy related challenges for the future of mobility. The project accelerates Europe’s decarbonization goals for 2050.
The advancement of e-mobility is a key part of the green energy transition. Together with its direct role in reducing emissions, the adoption of e-mobility also has a crucial indirect role as a grid stability element. E-mobility accelerates the transition to wind and solar energy production, and thus reduces the use of fossil fuels in the energy mix.
The Energy ECS (Electronics, Components and Systems) project, launched in June 2021, responds to these needs by developing a set of ECS technologies to improve the digitalisation of e-mobility systems. The aim is to enable European know-how and business based on manufacturing capabilities combining hardware, software services and data. This combination enables interaction with other vehicles and smart mobility infrastructure: connection to the grid, intermodal transport, autonomous driving, data generation, and vehicles as service providers. This project is also working to mitigate the challenges that electric vehicles pose on the energy system.
“We are proud to drive European innovation and technology ecosystems as a part of the Energy ECS project. Addressing problems in the now helps our society to transition towards a low-carbon economy. E-mobility is an excellent area to drive the transition in practice. Collaborating in ecosystems is the way towards innovation and joint benefits for all the partners involved,” says Ari Järvelä, Head of Operations at TietoEVRY, the overall project coordinator for Energy ECS.
The Energy ECS project will build on six use cases that represent different angles on future mobility and energy: enablers of new logistics modes, energy independent intermodal transport, charging technologies and opportunities, grid stability responding to bi-directional charging, and enablers of safe autonomous driving. By 2030, the new technologies developed in Energy ECS are expected to generate turnover for the participating companies. In addition, the project is aimed at enabling increased market share and market leadership for the 24 partners. The other expected impacts include dozens of new collaborations, hundreds of new jobs, and additional investments.
“The partners in the consortium complement each other very well in their skills and are well aligned along the value chain for all use cases. The new creative combination and cross pollination of technologies for the partners, who are often SMEs, allows faster innovation and knowledge generation that can be used to capture markets. This project has the potential to strengthen Europe’s position in the areas of smart grid and mobility, thereby contributing to the European Green Deal objectives,” says Anton Chichkov, Programme Officer at ECSEL JU.
Unikie to lead secure autonomous driving development
The autonomous mobility and process control software developer Unikie participates in the Energy ECS project by leading one of the six use cases. The use case aims to develop safe autonomous driving technology for closed areas with software development and LiDAR based sensing. The solution utilizes Automated Factory Parking technology to remotely plan and control the movement of multiple buses in real time using a centralized and automated vehicle mission control platform.
The buses themselves do not need to have capabilities for autonomous driving. The AFP solution can control vehicles and buses utilizing HD Mapping and Sensor Fusion from multiple infrastructure sensors for highly accurate localization and positioning, and Edge Computing to relay the maneuvering commands to a bus through a secure network connection. As a result, electric buses can be driven safely and autonomously by the infrastructure to charging stations at a bus depot area, including safe approaching and charging. Furthermore, the use case includes testing of the components on Unikie’s own test cars in Finland and demonstration of the system in real environment in Strætó’s bus depot in Reykjavik, Iceland.
More information:
Energy ECS consortium Press Release 29th June
Ksenia Avetisova, TietoEVRY Finland
Email: ksenia.avetisova@tietoevry.com
Phone: +358 468 114 913
Harri Nyrhinen, Unikie
Email: harri.nyrhinen@unikie.com
About Energy ECS
Energy ECS project is an extensive 3-year project that develops smart and secure energy solutions for future mobility and green energy transition. The project has a total of 30 partners from eight European countries and an overall budget of 33 M€. It is co-financed via the ECSEL Joint Undertaking of the EU Horizon 2020, national funding agencies of the participating countries, and the consortium partners. The project is coordinated by TietoEVRY and consists of 16 small and mid-sized enterprises, eight large enterprises, and six research and technology organisations from Finland, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. The project consortium and proposal were built with the help of Spinverse.
About Unikie
Unikie is a Finnish software technology company that develops technologies for protected real-time processes. Our services concentrate on the crossroads of three global macrotrends – IoE, 5G, and AI, where our technology solutions enable a constant awareness of surroundings, as well as decision-making and control based on it. Our clients include pioneers of real-time data utilization in the automotive industry as well as other industries and telecommunication companies worldwide.
Founded in 2015, Unikie is one of Finland’s fastest growing technology companies. In 2020 our sales were 33 million euros. Our goal for the near future is to keep up our rapid international growth, because the demand for our AI, deep technology and security solutions is increasing rapidly everywhere. At the end of 2020 we received growth capital from Capman Growth and Tesi. We employ nearly 400 software developers in Sweden, Germany, Poland and the United States. Our clients include Sandvik, Nokia, Valmet and Ponsse.
