A company that has at its core the essential business of operating power plants and distributing electricity has launched an entirely new business unit and brand, Enel X, which is developing innovative services for customers in their homes, industries, cities and electric vehicles.
“Enel X represents the future for the non-commodity part of the energy business,” explains Enel’s director of communications, Ryan O’Keeffe. “With Enel X, we are taking charge of disruption and giving it our own direction. We are moving into new areas and competing not just with traditional utilities but with companies from the tech and digital spaces. In this way, we are real pioneers in the energy transition.”
Officially launched at the end of last year, Enel X marks the culmination of the utility’s journey towards what it calls Open Power and the New Power Economy ecosystem. As the renewable energy revolution turns domestic consumers into producers of their own power and slashes the price of energy, Enel is going beyond producing and distributing electricity and is developing new, value-added services for today’s generation of more empowered consumers.
“Every business in the utility sector is facing rapid changes,” explains Francesco Venturini, the CEO of Enel X. “Renewables are making energy cheaper, the generation of electricity is becoming more distributed, and traditional networks are being digitized. We have to do something.”
Working in a dynamic start up culture, miles away from the traditional environment of a utility, Enel X’s teams of young researchers have already released a series of innovations for the fast-growing electric vehicles market. All across Italy, the company is working to roll out 7,000 public charging stations by 2020, including cutting-edge designs for fast and ultra-fast recharging points.
Worldwide, it is supporting the popular Formula E and the recently-announced Moto E championships for electric race cars and motorbikes, providing advanced energy solutions for every event and showcasing the technology to an audience in the hundreds of millions.
“Our mission is to be on the cutting edge of this shift in paradigm.”
Francesco Venturini, CEO, Enel X
But Enel X is not content just to provide the infrastructure to power electric cars. Reflecting its Open Power vision, it is seizing the opportunity of electric vehicles to develop new value-added services for customers. Partnering with carmakers such as Nissan, Enel X has emerged as a world leader in so-called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology which allows owners of electric cars to sell electricity from their batteries back to the grid.
“For us, electric vehicles are not just about selling electricity,” Venturini explains. “We provide remotely controlled charging infrastructure and we deploy smart software which empower customers to provide services to the grid with their electric cars.”
Alongside e-mobility, Enel X develops energy management solutions that create cost saving and revenue generation opportunities for customers by optimizing and modulating their energy consumption to make power grids more stable and reliable.
“There are five mission pillars to Open Power,” O’Keeffe adds. “We want to open energy to more people, new uses, new technologies, new ways of managing energy, and more partnerships. Enel X covers every one of those. It is the clearest manifestation of Open Power coming to life that you could find within Enel.”
“Enel X is unleashing the potential of digitized energy systems.”
Ryan O’Keeffe, Director of Communications, Enel
And as it builds new relationships with its customer base, Enel X is rapidly diversifying into new lines of business. In Colombia, it is partnering with a major local bank to offer financial services to electricity customers who do not have access to traditional credit.
“When you have hundreds of millions of customers connected to your grid through meters, there are enormous possibilities,” Venturini says. “Our job is to get closer to our customers and help them benefit from this new paradigm with innovations that make a real difference to their daily lives. The potential is limitless”
As published in TIME magazine
