Buy a sofa, charge the car
Pop into Skeidar for a sofa and, before long, you will be able to charge the car while you are inside choosing cushions. Norway's largest furniture and interior chain is adding commercial EV charging across its stores, and the whole setup is Norwegian end to end: amina builds the chargers, CURRENT runs the software, and Grønn Strøm fits them.
Facts
Customer: Skeidar, Norway
Focus: Customer and staff charging across stores
Challenge: One dependable setup, no technical middlemen
Solution: amina 22 kW AC chargers on OCPP, run on CURRENT
Result: One operating partner, easy-to-use chargers, nothing to manage
One car park, three Norwegian companies
Skeidar has been helping Norwegians furnish their homes since 1912, and today runs around fifty stores from Tromsø in the north to Kristiansand in the south. Putting EV charging into that many sites could easily have become a tangle of suppliers, apps and finger-pointing whenever something stopped working. It did not.
Instead, Skeidar chose a single, tidy chain of Norwegian companies to handle its commercial EV charging. amina supplies the chargers. CURRENT provides the software that runs them. Grønn Strøm handles the physical installation at each store. One country, three jobs, and no gaps in between.
For Skeidar, it has been important to have a simple, dependable solution that works for both staff and customers.Tom Orvei, Managing Director, CURRENT
The charger’s job is to be boring
Each installation is built around amina’s 22 kW AC chargers. They talk to CURRENT’s systems over local OCPP, the open industry standard, and that is the part that matters. Because the hardware speaks a common language, CURRENT can run everything that happens after the cable goes in: monitoring, billing, user administration, support, technical follow-up and automatic fault correction.
That division of labour is the whole point. The charger delivers power and stays predictable. The software does the thinking. There is no extra cloud layer bolted on by the hardware maker, and no propietary lock-in quietly deciding who Skeidar can work with next year. It is a deliberately unglamorous approach, and it is exactly why it holds up.
The new system has given us chargers that are easy to use. For us, a good partner means we do not have to think about EV charging and can leave it to someone else.Skeidar representative
One number to call
For Skeidar’s stores, the real win is having one partner to deal with day to day. CURRENT looks after the charging sites and the people using them, from payment through to support, while Grønn Strøm takes care of installation. When a driver hits a problem, they ring a dedicted line, not a store manager who would rather be selling sofas.
The chargers also do double duty. Customers can charge while they shop, which is a quietly useful reason to linger a little longer. Staff get somewhere to charge at work. Neither group has to download an app or think very hard about any of it, which is rather the idea.
amina M: the charger built for commercial charging
How amina sees commercial EV charging
amina is based in Stavanger and builds 22 kW AC chargers for homes, housing companies and commercial sites like these. They are designed and made in Norway, and built to be run by whichever software platform a customer prefers, which for Skeidar is CURRENT. CURRENT, in turn, is Norway’s largest independent charging operator, with somewhere around 300,000 users.
The Skeidar rollout is a fair example of how we think this should work. Good hardware that gets on with the job, an open protocal so nobody is locked in, and partners who each do the thing they do best. If you run sites that need charging and would rather hand it off, get in touch with the amina team. Buy the sofa. Charge the car. Nobody has to think about the box on the wall, which is rather the point.
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