The forklift charges when electricity is cheap

A forklift has something most appliances don't: it doesn't care when it charges. As long as the battery is full the moment work begins.

With a dynamic electricity contract the price differs per hour, and those hourly prices are known a day in advance. The difference between the most expensive and the cheapest hours of a day is regularly a factor of two or more; with plenty of wind or sun the price sometimes drops to around zero. Whoever charges on autopilot — plug in after work, so right in the evening peak — structurally pays for the wrong hours.

At Fruittuin van West the forklift and the golf carts therefore don't charge when they are plugged in, but when electricity is cheap. The Homer EMS knows tomorrow's hourly prices and knows when each vehicle needs to be ready. Within that boundary the system picks the cheapest hours and charges then.

Practice demands more than the arithmetic. There is a button for the exception: sometimes a vehicle simply has to be full now, schedule or no schedule — one press and the system charges immediately. The exception belongs in the design, not in a phone call to the builder. And the next step is ready: a weekly schedule the people at the farm adjust themselves, without calling me — because a working day on a fruit farm looks different on Tuesday than on Sunday.

This has been running daily since May 2026. In the morning the vehicle stands there just as full as before; only the hours in which that happened have shifted to the moments electricity was cheap — and those are, increasingly, the moments when there is plenty of sun and wind on the grid. Charging cheaply and charging cleanly turn out, in practice, to be largely the same moment.