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Supporting the energy and mobility transition

With many parking facilities at strategic urban locations, Q-Park plays an important role in facilitating EV charging for customers with electric vehicles. Our EV charging infrastructure supports the mobility transition, encouraging sustainable transport. 

Parking and charging are a great match. With increasing numbers of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) in car fleets, demand for charging infrastructure continues to grow.

EV vehicle types and charging options

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As sustainable mobility partner, it’s only logical to include expanding numbers of EV charging points in our parking facilities in our business plan. But the energy transition is causing grid lock in many major European cities, which makes upgrading our electricity supply to meet EV charging needs a considerable challenge.

Multifaceted programme

Energy portfolio management building blocks

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Our multifaceted Energy Portfolio consists of six building blocks:

• Energy savings

• Measuring and dashboards

• Procurement and grid upgrades

• EV charging

• Solar power generation

• Battery storage

We have developed an energy roadmap to provide a framework for adding sustainable value to our core parking business. This covers the demand and supply sides of our energy management needs.

Supply and demand

On the demand side, we sell energy to our customers as they charge their EV while parking. On the supply side, we manage the energy we need more effectively.

The energy grid requires continuous balancing to manage variations in demand and supply. Electricity production, especially from renewable resources such as wind turbines and PV installations fluctuates constantly.

In our parking facilities where we have our own mini-grid and energy storage system, we have specialised dashboards which measure consumption and forecast our energy needs. This enables us to determine our capacity requirements and procure electricity accordingly. Energy storage plays a vital role in this eco-system of supply vs demand.

Demand

The demand side mainly consists of EV charging and topping up battery storage during off-peak hours.

Supply

On the supply side, we continue to take measures to reduce energy consumption. These measures include installing LED lighting with motion-detection and photocell systems to control lighting levels and save even more energy. We also take measures to reduce our carbon footprint by procuring renewable energy, and generating renewable energy ourselves with solar panels and/or wind turbines at selected above ground parking facilities.

We are enhancing our dashboards to help us to better balance supply and demand, and forecast our energy needs. We are working with suppliers to secure a flexible supply of renewable energy and where required, we apply for grid upgrades to meet EV charging needs.

EV charging

We see strong performance of the EV charging points we provide in our parking facilities. We have made good progress in the past three years:

• more of our parking facilities provide EV charging points;

• more charging points installed and more charging points operated by us;

• EV charging is a complimentary service to parking with increasing charging transactions, thus supporting the transition to zero-emission mobility via Park+Charge and increasing emission-free kilometres.

Offering EV charging in our parking facilities is a service our customers appreciate. At present, the most common EV charging points in our portfolio are AC charging points providing 11 kW. National EV fleets include increasing numbers of battery only vehicles (BEVs) and AC charging can only top up (not fully charge) the battery when customers park for just one or two hours. As part of our Energy Portfolio Management, we are therefore looking into adding DC charging points, which offer faster charging, at selected locations if economically viable. This will further enhance the customer experience.

Performance over three years regarding numbers of EV charging points at selected parking facilities

Main types and modes for EV charging (Source: ARENA, adapted)

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Proof of concepts

LED lighting

From 2013 to 2019 we carried out a far-reaching LED transformation project. The primary objective was to reduce energy consumption, reduce energy costs, and decrease our carbon footprint.

At the time, we upgraded the lighting systems in more than 300 parking facilities, selected based on the business case per location. As part of our maintenance responsibilities and our obligations under the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), we continue to replace inefficient lighting systems with LED lighting with smart management throughout our portfolio.

Solar power and battery storage

Across our portfolio, we have identified over a hundred parking facilities with exposed rooftops which are potentially suitable for solar and/or wind power generation. In the medium-term, we will develop several pilots to expand our knowledge and gain further experience.

Energy procurement

We are defining an energy procurement strategy with a focus on:

• developing guidelines for pricing and energy supply contracts;

• embedding central energy marking monitoring.

Grip-on-Grid

To provide even more EV charging points in our parking facilities we need to upgrade our electricity supply. This can be very complex and time-consuming, so we are developing a standard approach with action plans per geographical area under the name ‘Grip-on-Grid’.