As COP25 takes place in Madrid, key initiatives agreed upon at COP24 is also bearing fruits. On 21 November, Naotaka Shibata, on behalf of CHAdeMO Association, participated as a keynote speaker in the Global e-Mobility Forum hosted by the COP24 president country, Poland, and spoke about the importance of collaboration and interoperability all the while guaranteeing a healthy market competition and a level playing field.
Partnership For E-Mobility, one of the three key initiatives of the Polish COP24 Presidency defined in the declaration “Driving Change Together – Katowice Partnership for e-Mobility” led to the Global e-Mobility Forum held at the National Stadium in Warsaw on 21 November 2019 with the aim of transforming the declaration into action.
Naotaka Shibata, Director of CHAdeMO Association Europe from Tokyo Electric Power Company, was invited as a key note speaker at one of the Roundtable Workgroups named “Standardization in e-Mobility” at the Forum. Mr. Shibata gave a presentation on the CHAdeMO DC fast charging standard, explaining the long years of efforts by the Association to accelerate the EV adoption in the world and to contribute to the fight against climate change, to the participants representing key actors of e-Mobility as well as the public sector.
The discussion of the Roundtable Workgroup began with a question “Is one global standard necessary instead of co-existing four international DC standards?” raised by the moderator Filip Opoka, PSPA (Polish Alternative Fuels Association). Mr. Shibata asserted that “Standardisation is required only in the aspects of safety, security and interoperability, but it should not impede fair competitions in the market.” He also said that Project ChaoJi, the next-generation ultra-fast charging protocol being co-developed by CHAdeMO Association and the China Electricity Council (CEC), “has a great potential to be a global standard since we reached out to countries such as Germany, South Korea and India and told them that we would welcome them to join this harmonisation. Some European OEMs and key industry players are actively participating already through JVs in China.”
As Mr. Opoka describes, participants “had an inspiring and mostly optimistic discussion that led to a conclusion that even though various standards of charging both for passenger and heavy duty/e-bus vehicles had been developed, there is no need to choose only one of them to keep the rEVolution on track.” The group aligned on the fact that there are “solutions allowing various standards to coexist” and that it is “the ‘interoperability’ that is necessary for the end users not to pay too much attention to the actual standard used by their EVs” and agreed that “no standard should be excluded from the market as long as it is capable of retaining interoperability.”
At the end of the Global e-Mobility Forum, after the reports of conclusions from each moderator of the Roundtable Workgroups, Mr. Michał Kurtyka, COP24 President and the Minister of Climate of Poland wrapped up by pressing on the importance of public- and private-sector cooperation to promote e-Mobility at this early stage.
CHAdeMO Association is an official Observer Organisation of the UNFCCC (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
Outside of the venue, EkoEnergetyka, a CHAdeMO member company, displayed a multi-standard fast charger. Photos taken inside the venue courtesy of the Global e-Mobility Forum website (K. Rainka).
