As electric vehicle adoption accelerates, grids face increasing pressure while electric vehicle (EV) owners look for simple ways to reduce charging costs and use the flexibility of their vehicles to support a stable energy system — without the need to invest in additional assets such as rooftop solar.
With Slim Laden (Smart Charging), essent helps its customers charge their electric vehicles intelligently at home. Customers who participate and keep their EV plugged in for at least six hours can benefit from our flexibility solution and earn up to €300 per year through bonuses or reduced electricity costs — all without changing their daily routine.
At the heart of the proposition is automated energy optimization. Charging processes are shifted to the most cost-efficient hours based on day-ahead electricity prices, ensuring that EVs are charged when electricity is cheapest and the energy system is under less strain.
To deliver this proposition at scale, essent relies on gridX’s advanced energy management system. The platform connects, monitors and controls electric vehicles via a cloud-to-cloud architecture, enabling seamless integration without additional hardware at the customer site.
In 2025, essent successfully migrated thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) to gridX’s cloud platform in less than one quarter. The rapid rollout was enabled by the cost-efficient cloud-only solution, as well as gridX’s APIs and the close collaboration between the essent and gridX development teams.
Today, all connected EVs are optimized using gridX’s time-of-use optimization logic, with charging schedules automatically aligned to day-ahead market prices. The cloud-based approach ensures low operational costs and a scalable setup that can grow with essent’s customer base.
The Slim Laden solution is designed not only for today’s charging use case, but also for future energy market requirements. XENON Flex enables the aggregation, forecasting and trading of EV flexibility in European energy markets.
In upcoming phases, essent plans to make electric vehicle flexibility available on energy markets via XENON Flex. This will allow EV flexibility to be aggregated and communicated to trading desks, where it can be marketed on energy and flexibility markets or used to support grid stability. Control signals can then be disaggregated and dispatched back to individual vehicles.
Slim Laden currently focuses on smart, price-optimized charging; the underlying setup enables essent to evolve towards flexibility use cases in future phases — depending on market and regulatory conditions. In this way, essent has established a scalable and future-proof foundation for its e-mobility offerings.
Klarsolar, a provider of comprehensive renewable energy solutions founded in 2018, was established to make photovoltaic (PV) systems, wallboxes and battery storage systems easy and affordable for German households. The company, which has been part of E.ON since the end of 2023, combines state-of-the-art technology with specialist expertise to provide efficient and sustainable energy solutions for private individuals.
By using XENON as a local energy management system, Fastned is able to avoid grid overloads, reduce both upfront and ongoing costs and serve even more electric drivers.
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