The energy transition is bringing new business diversification opportunities to many traditional companies and at Forjas de Castilla they know it well. The Soriana company, founded in 1980 and with 40 years behind it in the industrial manufacture of forging, stamping and machining parts, has jumped on the bandwagon of electric mobility and renewable energy.
The Forjas de Castilla facilities are in Almazán, a strategic location for the entire Aragón, Soria, Navarra and La Rioja axis, and two chargers for electric cars open to the public will be installed there: an ultra-fast 300 kW one, which allows to recover 80% of the battery in just a few minutes, and another 60 kW. The idea was hatched when the Endesa X Way team, the Endesa brand dedicated exclusively to electric mobility, knocked on the door of Carmelo Gómez, director of the company.
“In the use of chargers for publicly accessible electric vehicles, the ground is gold,” they stress from Endesa. In this sense, part of the Endesa X Way sales and marketing team, led by Manuel Muñoz, is in charge of looking for weddings with which to form a charging infrastructure network that breaks down one of the main barriers presented by zero-emission cars. . In this sense, with a length of 165 kilometres, the A-15 motorway as it passes through the town of Almazán (the second most populated municipality in Soria), is a strategic intersection point and a fundamental piece to revitalize the confluence between Aragón, Soria, Navarre and La Rioja.
“We accompany the client throughout the process, adapting the business model to the partner”
“From Endesa X Way we accompany the client throughout the process, adapting the business model to the partner. It is a turnkey project, from the work prior to installation to commissioning. But precisely because this is indeed our business , in which we have more than ten years of experience, we operate and maintain the chargers; we offer you all the commercial support and our platform so that your chargers enter our infrastructure network”, highlights Muñoz.
Open 24 hours
These chargers will be open to the public 24 hours a day and can be found in the Endesa X Way mobile recharging application. In addition, they will have the same pricing policy as the rest of those that operate. The mobility firm already has more than 4,600 chargers installed in Spain, of which more than 300 are ultra-fast charging.
As indicated by Endesa itself, the keys for a company like Forjas de Castilla to decide to install chargers open to the public are, among others: having a location with vehicle traffic; having contracted power in your business available to cover the needs of the chargers, they obtained income when they started operating, they also help to amortize that fixed expense (power term); and that the ownership or management of the land has a life long enough to make the project profitable.
“We have thought for a long time that electric mobility is the way. As, in addition, due to the nature of our industrial processes, we have hours in which energy is not consumed and therefore we have electrical power, we saw the opportunity to convert a fixed cost a source of income”, comments Carmelo Gómez. Forjas de Castilla will be able to make these chargers profitable as soon as they start working, foreseeably at the end of the year. But it is also that the company has a large installation of solar panels with which it will provide a large part of the energy used in recharging.
At the end of 2022, of the 18,128 public access charging points that Spain had, only 3.8% had a power greater than 150 kW. In this way, the employers’ association of vehicle manufacturers Anfac warned that Spain should multiply its high-power charging network by five with the aim of reducing recharging times to less than 30 minutes on average. According to the public access recharging infrastructure map drawn up by the association, there are currently 698 points of this type and 3,513 must be reached this year to achieve the annual emission reduction targets of the ‘Fit for 55’.
On the other hand, from the sector they warn of the bad image that “ghost charging points” give users. “Either they are in the absence of connection permits or they are not active,” says the general director of Anfac, José López-Tafall. Bureaucracy is thus once again a limit to the drive for decarbonization. Operators can wait up to a year and a half just to obtain authorization to start the installation of the charging point.
