KT wins out in electric car charging business
A motorist charges his electric car at a discount chain in Seoul. / Korea Times file
By Jun Ji-hye
KT appears to have taken the top position in the electric vehicle (EV) charging business, beating out four other competitors licensed by the government to provide charging stations.
According to the Ministry of Environment, Tuesday, KT has installed 3,656 chargers for electric cars. The government has established 8,457 such chargers in parking lots for apartments and public facilities nationwide. KT’s contribution accounts for 43 percent of the total.
Posco ICT has installed 1,621 charging facilities and GNTEL has 1,273 while Korea Electric Vehicle Charge Service has set up 1,240 and EVERON 667.
The ministry said the figures were tallied based on government subsidies offered to the five firms at the end of December.
The ministry has provided the five charger providers with 300 million won to 400 million won in subsidies per charger. KT received about 13 billion won.
The ministry said it will reflect such performances as well as the results of its ongoing on-the-spot surveys of the chargers in its evaluation to select EV charger providers for this year.
In field surveys, ministry officials look into the quality of charging facilities as well as their accessibility and operation state.
“We will reflect the results in the evaluation scheduled for next month,” a ministry official said.
KT, the nation’s biggest fixed-line internet operator and its second-largest mobile carrier, said Monday it has begun to a demonstrate new business model, called electric vehicle-demand response (EV-DR), which will enable EVs to be utilized as supplementary power supplies in case of emergency such as blackout.
The firm said it has built a vehicle-to-grid test bed for demonstration at its building in Bundang, Gyeonggi Province. This refers to a technology in which plug-in EVs communicate with the power grid to offer demand response services by, for example, returning electricity to the grid.
The company cited an example that some factories and large buildings here were forced to halt operations to reduce power consumption due to the extreme cold wave hitting the nation this winter. In this case, electric cars can play a role as supplementary batteries for factories or buildings to minimize their losses that would have been caused by suspension of their operation.
The new business model can also contribute to stability in the nation’s electric power demand management, the firm added.
Kim Young-myoung, head of KT’s smart energy business unit, said if 100,000 EVs participate in the EV-DR market at once for an hour with 5 kilowatts, it will amount to the electricity produced by a thermoelectric power plant.
“Based on KT’s EVs and their charging infrastructure, we will lead the EV-DR business and vitalize the market,” Kim said.
The firm replaced its 1,500 office cars with EVs last year and plans to replace an additional 10,000 cars soon.