A new generation of entrepreneurs are dedicating their work to one major goal: finding solutions in the fight against climate change. It gives hope that all the ideas that come up there.
At the end of the noughties, when the market for e-cars was still tiny and in a niche, two young men walked through the streets of Charlottenburg in Berlin and wondered: where is the electricity here? Electricity that can be used without digging again? The two men saw parking machines – but there were too few of them. They saw neon signs and even spoke to the operator, Ströer. But these spaces were often in the wrong places and there weren’t really many of them. Then they saw: street lamps. And so began an idea that years later would be a building block in solving a major problem: How do we get enough charging stations on the streets for all the e-cars?
The two men were Frank Pawlitschek and Knut Hechtfischer, in 2008 they founded Ubitricity, which was bought by the energy company Shell in 2021. Their idea sounded simple: Why not convert every street lamp into a charging station – cheaper, faster and with an “intelligent charging cable” that immediately knows who is charging?
Pawlitschek and Hechtfischer found out how and where the lanterns are connected and whether the power would be sufficient, because the network is different in every city. “As a test, we had the prototype of our charging socket built into an inspection hatch for the street lamps in front of our office on Helmholtzstrasse,” recalls Pawlitschek. The flap with socket fitted perfectly into the mast. They plugged in an Audi in which they had removed the combustion engine and installed an electric motor. The whole thing was mainly a small staging, which was possible. A journalist took a picture and wrote an article about the “lantern’s second career.” “Something completely new began with this photo,” says Pawlitschek. Ubitricity was born as a lantern loading startup.
Frank Pawlitschek is just one of many heads of a new generation of founders who, often for years under the radar and in niches, are looking for solutions to the fight against climate change. Pioneers brooding over ideas, building prototypes, raising money and starting businesses.
The Green Founding Era
Despite the setbacks in climate protection, we are experiencing a green start-up period. Young companies are springing up all over the world and we will need them. Just as Biontech found a corona vaccine with the “Lightspeed” project, we need thousands of small Biontechs. It won’t always go at the speed of light – but similar to Biontech, there is one major goal: finding solutions in the fight against climate change. Of course, these companies also want to make money. But they have a mission. They are researching new types of energy storage, systems to filter CO₂ from the air, they breed meat in the laboratory, are experimenting with new building materials – or innovative charging stations.
This is also necessary: in 2050, half of the CO₂ reduction must come from technologies that are not yet ready for the market but will have to be by 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has calculated that 90 billion dollars would have to be invested in research and development every year up to 2030. It’s currently $25 billion. So we still need a lot of “Lightspeed” projects.
The phase up to 2030 is crucial: many plans and strategies of states and companies run until 2030, it is a time when something has to happen – after that it would be too late. That is why we are facing a “green decade”: These are years in which our economy will be given a new operating system. Years in which we convert factories and industrial plants, in which we build blast furnaces for green steel, in which we set up solar and wind parks in completely new dimensions, in which we have to produce hydrogen in completely new quantities.
The car will become the new smartphone
Frank Pawlitschek, who now works at the Hasso Plattner Institute, is just one of many of the new generation of founders. And using the street lamp is only the visible part of the vision. In future, Pawlitschek explained to me, the car will have to be thought of like a mobile phone with a contract. It doesn’t matter whether you charge at home, at work or at a third place, you actually have to leave all the data and the contract on and in the car, with an intelligent electricity meter that is included in the car or charging cable – and if you have this data around around the clock, you could even commercialize the large battery in the car as a power storage. The idea is that the car will come as hardware with a “bundle service”. “That was actually the highlight of Ubitricity,” explained Pawlitschek.
The Ubitricity example is textbook for a number of reasons: First, the core of the innovation is not a magic potion, but a new way of thinking. Many only think of the number of charging points. The founders of Ubitricity have rethought the charging process as such. The second lesson is bitter, especially for Germany: regulation has been so cumbersome here that it took a decade before Ubitricity could offer a standard model – beautifully named “Heinz” – available since autumn 2021 but much more expensive. After thousands of masts have already been converted in London, for example.
The $4.6 trillion market
Countless young companies have emerged around the topic of charging, promising to charge better or faster, building platforms, offering charging management or individual products: Wallbox from Spain, for example, whose product has almost become a generic term like Nutella and Tempo handkerchiefs. Founded by former Tesla executives in 2015, the company was valued at $1.5 billion in 2021.
Which also shows how much money is now flowing into the sector. According to a study by data provider Dealroom, climate tech startups were able to collect 32 billion dollars worldwide in the first nine months of 2021. The fastest growing region was Europe, where $8 billion was invested, a good seven times as much as in 2016. The money in Europe is used from Lithuania to Spain, with the technology centers London, Stockholm and Paris being the major drivers, the report said Report. Europe is a “super connected technology ecosystem”.
There is ChargeX, for example. The company wants to turn every parking space into a charging station with multiple sockets. Wirelane has also made a name for itself in Germany. The Munich company, founded in 2016, has discovered an interesting segment: parking spaces for companies and hotels. However, power companies such as Eon and EnBW with their own charging networks are powerful players on the market in Germany. There is also Ionity, a provider backed by car manufacturers with deep pockets. Ionity focuses on the charging network, especially on motorways, now in 24 European countries.
There are also plenty of fast charging startups, they are called Enevate, Freewire or EvGO and have developed systems that promise to charge cars within 5 to 15 minutes. Freewire even speaks of “boost chargers”. In Switzerland, the startup Evtec offers “Special Fast Charging” within a few minutes. The French startup Electra wants to make charging as easy and fast by 2030 “as filling up at the gas station”.
It’s all about speed
You can see that there is no lack of ideas and founders. The charging problem can be solved, it’s more about the pace of expansion and suitable areas for charging stations and parks. The question will be which systems and platforms will prevail, because as a driver you can’t have dozens of customer cards.
Of course, in the market for charging infrastructure, as in other climate tech markets, many providers will disappear, many ideas will die as prototypes, and technologies will not catch on. The market is still young, it will consolidate, but it will no longer disappear, it will grow.