Airport operator Fraport is gradually converting its fleet of vehicles to electric drives. Parallel to this, the charging infrastructure at Germany’s largest air traffic hub is also expanding and evolving.It now still works conventionally, with current flowing from a charging point into vehicles’ storage batteries.

In the future, however, power will also be supplied in the opposite direction. This approach will turn e-vehicles into mobile storage units that are able to feed unused power back into the grid on an as-needed basis. The technology isn’t yet ready for large-scale use, however, and the interfaces also still need to be standardized. This applies in particular to many of the special-purpose vehicles used for aircraft ground handling.Fraport is receiving support from the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action for broadly implementing this ambitious idea at the airport.

Over the next four years, a total of over five million euros will flow to Frankfurt Airport within the scope of Germany’s program to promote electromobility. Fraport itself, together with other partners, will invest another 4.1 million euros in the project.

“Frankfurt Airport is providing an ideal, self-contained field test system for implementing a bidirectional charging infrastructure,” explains Michael Kuschel, the Fraport vice president responsible for power and networks. “Fraport is playing all of the main roles in it: we are both the network operator and its primary consumer. The charging points are part of our own infrastructure, and we are also providing the required software.

This unique constellation enables us to model the required test environment despite the fact that not all of the technical and regulatory definitions have been fully formulated yet.”

Also involved in the project are Stromnetz Hamburg GmbH (the owner and operator of Hamburg’s power distribution network), which will support Fraport for developing the required software, and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, which will be monitoring the economic and technical aspects. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action has put the DLR German Aerospace Center in charge of the project.