New A2A City Plug quick and low cost solution

The ‘life company’ A2A committed to energy and the environment is revolutionizing the charging systems for electric cars by creating a large network of fast columns and a vast network of low-power points. The managing director and general manager of the A2A Group Renato Mazzoncini described it to ANSA on the sidelines of the inauguration of the first infrastructure of this type in Brescia.
Called City Plugs, the new A2A sockets have the potential – in terms of cost and ease of installation – of becoming “so widespread in cities as to trivialize even the stall reserved for electricity compared to normal ones – said Mazzoncini – given that a structure 100,000 euros per column needs a reserved stall” while for one “that costs just over 1,000 euros for each outlet it is also possible not to dedicate the stall”. Mazzoncini recalled that A2A is “the third Italian player for charging infrastructure” but that it had not yet designed its own hardware which we have now created using internal innovation”. The City Plugs were arrived at after “this simple reflection – explained the CEO of A2A – and that is that if in 2030 we have to have 3 million recharging points in Europe and more than 100 thousand in Italy, we cannot go on developing only columns that cost so much. And my team and I tried to reason around the concept of the power strip: in fact, nobody in the house has a socket for every appliance, to get one they would have to call a bricklayer and break everything to get an ugly and expensive result”. Mazzoncini reiterated that “the column is not just a socket but has its own electronics. So to innovate we imagined using a single cabinet with the electronics (the domestic socket in the case of the power strip, ed) and then connecting several small devices that only have one socket and obviously a digital interface for the card or the App” A2A asked Giugiaro Architettura to collaborate on the design, which also had to be robust “because the column must be in the city”. The result was a device in which “a battery of 7 City Plug poles which are 14 charging points has a total power of 33 kW distributed up to 7 kW for each socket, this depends on how many machines there are”.
Mazzoncini explained that this low-power solution is ideal for meeting the needs “of the classic commuter who travels 30-40 km, arrives home in the evening, parks the car and finds it charged in the morning. of 7 kW in one hour allows you to do 50 km, in two hours 100, in three hours 150 km a day”.
To spread the City Plugs more – said the CEO of A2A – “light poles could also be used to put the sockets since this type of technology allows you to place everything inside very normal poles. The goal is to make so that the citizen who travels with an electric car can arrive in the area where he usually parks, then look with the App and find a nearby outlet”. However, this radical innovation requires adequate investments. This is why Mazzoncini hopes that “the Government will also dedicate resources in the Pnrr for this. Today the resources are mainly or exclusively for fast top-ups on the motorway; there is a need in urban terms to fill”.