World’s first IOTA charging station by ElaadNL

World’s first IOTA charging station by ElaadNL

On Wednesday the 18th of April 2018 ElaadNL released the first charging station in the world where charging and paying can be done with IOTA. The charger is part of the new ElaadNL test site. The test site is located in business park Arnhems Buiten (former KEMA site) and contains all types of charging stations that are used in the public area in the Netherlands. This includes a fast charger, a charging island, a battery, two charging lanterns and the IOTA charger. The IOTA Tangle is an innovative type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) specifically designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. It is an open-source protocol facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer, fee-less real-time micropayments.

No back office and no communication protocol is required to operate the charging station: the transactions are exchanged directly without the use of a charge card or subscription.

The IOTA charging station operates completely autonomously and takes care of communication and payment with the end ‘user’. The meter values are stored every 15 minutes in the Tangle, which ensures reliable and irrefutable administration.

This technology might be a perfect fit in the future connected and fully digitalized world. The exploration of this technology in the e-mobility domain could also provide insight for other (connected) sectors like the energy sector.

The charger is equipped with hardware to setup a TCP/IP connection with a car, after which the payments and data exchange can happen fully autonomously and machine 2 machine. It uses the charging cable and special hardware, which is also used for the newly developed communication in e-Mobility ISO 15118, between car and charger to setup this connection.

The IOTA charger will be available to the public for charging. If cars that want to charge are not equipped with the required hard- and software, they can still simply charge their car by sending IOTA tokens directly to the charger using the normal IOTA wallet.

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