An electric vehicle charging station in the Netherlands is now using IOTA’s Tangle technology for feeless machine-to-machine communication. ElaadNL, a solar- and wind power- fueled smart-charging initiative by the Dutch grid operators, has teamed up with IOTA for the maiden DLT-fueled charging station for electric vehicles. The charging station is located in the Arnhems Buiten campus, which is a business park test site open to the public where customers can access machine-to-machine charging and smart-meter like payments for parking and the energy they consume to power up their electric cars. A developer offers a glimpse into what the code looks like –Source: Medium”We see the potential of DLTs, and we thought: ‘Could we integrate this into a charge station? Can we use this technology to create a better-integrated system, as with smart grids, and get as much renewables into the system as possible?’”, said Harm van den Brink, an ElaadNL developer in a blog post. The charging station boasts the following features –”kWh-based charging”A proprietary IOTA charging app”kWh measurement storage” akin to a car’s odometerThe IOTA charger is built on IOTA’s open-source Tangle technology, an internal protocol that does without blocks and miners and delivers “secure data transfers” as well as zero-fee micropayments. IOTA’s charging station joins several of ElaadNL’s other innovations and smart technologies for electric cars that also are located on the site, such as a “fast charger, charging island, a battery” and a pair of charging lanterns. Here’s a picture of the IOTA charging station powering up a mini-Tesla that is fit for a child to drive in the Netherlands. Developers kept some of the themes that are uniform throughout electric vehicle charging stations, including the following color scheme: yellow/idle; green/connected; light blue/offering; dark blue/charging; and red/error. IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener is quoted in the blog as saying:”Electric vehicle charging is one of the many applications where IOTA as the base-protocol for the transactional settlement between machines is the obvious choice. The work done by the team at Enexis in creating the first ever IOTA-based EV charging station has been tremendous, and will pave the way for more adoption of IOTA in the mobility space.”IOTA InroadsIOTA’s DLT has fueled millions of micropayment transactions and previously identified “feeless micropayment-based electric vehicle charging [and] parking” among its use cases. As CCN previously reported, IOTA’s Tangle technology is also powering Taipei’s smart-city initiative. The IOTA digital currency, which is currently ranked No. 9 among the leading digital coins based on market cap, is trading higher alongside its peers after gaining 12 percent on the day. Featured image from IOTA