WM Motor, State Grid team up on EV charging service, V2G tech

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- State Grid Electric Vehicle Service Co., Ltd. (State Grid EV), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned electric utility monopoly State Grid, forged strategic partnerships on October 25 with WM Motor, BAIC Group, GAC NE and BYD Auto Industry Company Limited to provide consumers with more affordable and convenient EV charging services.

To encourage the application of EVs, four participants will offer preferential policies to lower users' charging cost. For instance, BYD is to provide a personal user and a mobility service firm with 5,000-kilowatt-hour and 30,000-kilowatt-hour electricity quota for free charging respectively. Besides, BAIC Group plans to pump RMB1 billion into this project.

(Photo source: WM Motor)

The startup WM Motor, perhaps the most generous one, allows a personal user of the EX5 520 special edition to use the State Grid’s charging piles without payment and frequency limit for three years.

Under the latest cooperation, the users of WM Motor's GETnGO application will be given access to State Grid’s self-developed charging piles. In some urban areas of Bejing, charging piles standing every 0.7 square kilometers will enable a driver to reach the nearest pile within only three minutes.

(Photo source: State Grid)

State Grid aims to have the plug-and-play function become available to its entire charging pile system by June, 2020, and the newly-built facilities will support the non-inductive payment as well, according to local media reports.

The aforesaid plan will benefit WM Motor who also intends to supply users with plug-and-play and non-inductive payment services based on the vehicle-infrastructure data connectivity with the state-owned partner.

In the meantime, the EV startup said it would make joint efforts with State Grid to research and develop V2G (vehicle-to-grid) technology that uses batteries of EVs as intermediate storage and buffers for the entire power grid. If necessary, energy from EV fleets will be fed back into the grid to alleviate the grid’s power supply pressure, notably during the peak demand hours. The collaboration will help WM Motor to expand its mobility service ecosystem along with other applications like V2H (vehicle-to-home).