The Urban Mobile Charging project is set to re-invent the EV charging experience.

On the 3rd of May, the first public demonstration of "UMC" (Urban Mobile Charging) will take place in Zilina. UMC as a project is supported by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union. The whole charging demonstration will include a public event and a two-month pilot program.
A Public Opening Event will take place from 10 am to 12 in the rectorate of the University of Zilina, Univerzitná 8215/1, 010 26 Žilina. It is a free event to learn more about electric mobility, and EV drivers will also be able to test the UMC solution for free. The ultimate goal of the Urban Mobile Charging project is to make EV charging more accessible throughout Europe. The project will revamp the approach to charging and mobility in urban areas focusing mainly on demand-side flexibility, logistics, and autonomy. The fully autonomous battery charging unit will be introduced as a part of the project in 2023.
About UMC: using the unique NimBee service to remove the biggest obstacle to electromobility
The UMC project aims at proposing commercial enablers for new innovative Electric Vehicles (EV) charging solutions that will fit with the surrounding urban environment. UMC, as a project, is creating a service for Fast Mobile Renewable On-demand Electric Vehicle Charging in three EU cities (Zilina, Helmond, and Braunschweig) to ensure drivers have access to charging when needed and suitable without excessive use of cities´ space and infrastructure. This will be done via a charging-as-a-service approach that is easier for drivers. The service is based on a Nimbee solution developed by Nimble Energy. It brings the battery-backed charger to where the car is parked while at the same time providing demand-side flexibility for the grid.
The project will solve necessary tasks for successful and wide citizen-centric use of this service focused on easy city deployment and infrastructure planning. The aim is to develop an autonomous charging robot in 2023. A pilot operation has been launched in Prague, Czech Republic. Users of electric cars were able to order recharging at any time, anywhere, using a mobile application.
Available charging infrastructure is a significant concern both for cities and for EV users. It is expected that 33 million EV owners in Europe will need efficient charging by 2030. In contrast to slow charging stations, fast-charging stations significantly load local electricity networks and cannot be installed everywhere. For example, it is difficult to install them in urban areas such as historical city centers, large parking houses, or apartment blocks where the electricity network capacity extensions could be very costly. A solution to improve the availability of fast charging is to bring a fast-charging station to an electric vehicle.

"I want to rid the owners of electric cars of their dependence on charging stations. Why should you drive to a charger when a charger can come to you? Nimbee is electromobility minus the hassle."
- Jan Šamal, CEO and author of the NimBee idea

About the demonstration: come and learn more about electric mobility.
The Public Event on the 3rd of May will be the launch date of a 2-months "Free on-demand testing" of the UMC service using the mobile app.
The service will be tested in three cities across Europe. The overall goal of demo tests is to confirm the technological and commercial viability of mobile fast charging. Each demo will be conducted at different stages of the project and will have a different purpose. The first test will take place in Zilina, Slovakia, in May and June 2022. The objective is to test mobile fast charging as an on-demand service.
The charging station will be human-operated. A crew will bring the Mobile Battery DC Charger loaded on a car trailer to the EV driver's location. The service will be free of charge, and EV drivers may order it using the mobile phone app. The second demo is planned to take place in the city of Helmond in early 2023. It will be focused on testing UMC charging unit as a static self-service to charge EV. Such a use case corresponds to a situation where the mobile charging station is a temporal solution, e.g., replacing another fast-charging station that cannot be temporarily operated or used in areas where the need for fast charging is only temporary. The third demo will be located in Braunschweig in Germany in late 2023. As a final demonstration of the project, the goal is to provide a fully autonomous charging unit in a parking garage.

About EIT Urban Mobility
UMC is a project under the support of EIT Urban Mobility.

EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, aims to accelerate solutions and the transition towards a user-centric, integrated, and truly multimodal transport system. As the leading European innovation community for urban mobility, EIT Urban Mobility works to avoid fragmentation by facilitating collaboration between cities, industry, academia, research, and innovation to solve the most pressing mobility challenges of cities. Using cities as living labs, its industry, research, and university partners will demonstrate how new technologies can work to solve real problems in real cities by transporting people, goods, and waste in more innovative ways.

About UMC Consortium
The international consortium is coordinated by Nimble Energy, the Czech innovation company in energy distribution and EV charging technologies. The partners of the project include Altran Technologies (France), Siemens Industry Software and Service B.V. (Germany), Capgemini Engineering (Italy), Czech Technical university in Prague (Czechia), Technische Universität Braunschweig -Niedersächsisches Forschungszentrum Fahrzeugtechnik (Germany), Brainport Smart District (the Netherlands), City of Helmond (the Netherland) University of Zilina (Slovakia), City of Zilina (Slovakia).

Nimble Energy, Jungmannova 15/26, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic
EIT is a body of European Union, The Project is co-funded by the European Union

Nimbee is a startup that aims to revolutionize the EV charging experience. We provide a mobile DC charging service for EVs in urban areas. The combination of a fast 50kW DC charger and hardware unit small enough to fit the narrow EU streets with our open platform gives us an opportunity to remove that hassle from EV charging and to provide EV users with the charging infrastructure they need.

This release was published on openPR.