Hitachi Energy has signed a memorandum of understanding with Eve Air Mobility to jointly develop the power infrastructure that will support scaled urban air mobility (UAM) operations. Announced on July 22, 2026, the collaboration lines up Zurich-based Hitachi Energy's grid, transformer and HVDC expertise with Eve's certification-track eVTOL program — a partnership aimed squarely at the vertiport power gap that has stalled every commercial UAM plan to date.
What the MoU Covers
Under the MoU, the two companies will collaborate on charging infrastructure architectures, substation and transformer designs, grid-interconnection studies, and energy-management systems tailored to high-frequency eVTOL turnarounds. Eve — a 2020 spin-off from Brazilian aerospace major Embraer, listed on the NYSE and B3 — currently reports approximately 2,700 eVTOL letters of intent and targets 2028 certification and commercial service, with recent binding agreements from Revo (Brazil) and AirX (Japan) for up to 50 aircraft each.
Why the Grid Question Matters Now
Urban air mobility scaling is fundamentally an electricity-delivery problem. A commercial vertiport running frequent turnarounds needs medium-voltage substation capacity, fast chargers, thermal management and grid signals coordinated to the network operator — infrastructure that lives closer to Hitachi Energy's HVDC and transformer businesses than to any aviation supplier's core. Hitachi Energy generated about $16 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue with 58,000 employees, and has been aggressively expanding its transportation-electrification portfolio, including a separate Samsung C&T grid collaboration announced this spring.
Eve's Certification Push
Eve arrived at Farnborough 2026 with real flight-test progress. Its engineering prototype completed dozens of successful test flights since December 2025, is preparing to enter transition flight evaluation this quarter, and will begin building six conforming prototypes later this year. Alongside the Hitachi Energy MoU, Eve confirmed ANAC has opened a sectoral consultation on updated airworthiness criteria for the Eve 100 and that Eve has applied to EASA to initiate Type Certificate validation. The certification stack matters: without ratepayer-scale power infrastructure at destination sites, even a certified aircraft cannot fly a commercial schedule.
How It Slots into a Broader eVTOL Push
The MoU is the second major infrastructure signal for the sector this week, following Archer's ACES consortium plan for 250 eVTOL charging sites. Combined with Eve's 16-aircraft Shearwater LOI earlier at Farnborough and Vertical's first public demo flight, the vertiport-power layer is finally moving in parallel with the aircraft layer.
Reporting based on coverage from Urban Air Mobility News, Embraer, IBTimes JP, PR Newswire and Eve Air Mobility.