Dutch Drivers can now charge their electric cars without cash or card payments courtesy of a new digitalized charging station recently announced by ElaadNL.
The company, ElaadNL, is a “knowledge and innovation center” in the field of Smart Charging infrastructure in the Netherlands and is an initiative of Dutch grid operators. The new site will be located at Arnhem’s Buiten Business Park in northern Holland.
The technology behind the charging park is Tangle, the data structure at the heart of IOTA which uses a DAG instead of a blockchain to store its ledger, with the main motivation being scalability. IOTA’s Tangle is a distributed ledger protocol that is designed to facilitate machine-to-machine interactions including feeless payments in real time and the secure transfer of data through an internal protocol that does without blocks and miners and delivers “secure data transfers” as well as zero-fee micropayments.
ElaadNL claims that no admin office or communication protocol is required to operate the new system and transactions are paid for without the use of card or subscription. The meter values are stored every five minutes in the Tangle allowing for faultless and accurate payment.
The charger sets up a TCP/IP connection with the car through pre-installed hardware allowing machine-to-machine payment and data exchange. The charger is available to the public, and cars without the hardware will be given the option to send IOTA tokens using the normal IOTA wallet.
ElaadNL also has plans to develop a car wallet which will hold IOTA for use allowing clients to pre-fund their car for future charging periods.
The proposed themes will be familiar to electric car owners, including color indicators, such as: yellow/idle; green/connected; light blue/offering; dark blue/charging; and red/error
The company director, Onoph Caron, feels that DLT will increase in popularity and become more widespread with the announcement of more such schemes in the future.
