All roads do not lead to ROAM-ing

With 35+ charging station operators & 15+ battery swapping operators in India, there is always a debate about how will Indians consume energy from such a fragmented set of operators. Here is our take

2023 is the year where interoperability will be put in the spotlight. India is nearing its inflection point when it comes to EV sales and EV users are going start demanding interoperability. Here is a eye opening quote from an EV user

“When I can fill fuel from any fuel station irrespective of brand, why do I need to download 40 different apps to charge my EV. Why do I need to download an app in the first place?”

At Pulse Energy, we have witnessed charger interoperability across both US and India over the past 6 years. We have been operational in India since 2020 and spoken to almost 30 CPOs about their interoperability plans. Below we take a stab at summarising their feedback and their concerns with interoperability.

1. What is OCPI?

OCPI (Open Charge Point Interface) is merely an API contract between two parties on how to search, start, stop and bill for chargers / charging sessions. It one of the most popular interoperability protocols in the world. There is a nice image from Greenflux that shows where OCPI plays it’s role.

The genesis of OCPI was to help conduct cross border billing reconciliation and authentication amongst CPOs in Europe. Mainly since tax rules were different across borders. It was meant for CPOs who already wish to partner with each other to figure out how they can authenticate users between their networks and perform billing reconciliation.

2. What are the flaws of OCPI?

OCPI has its roots in solving billing reconciliation issues that happen at the end of the month amongst European charge point operators. European CPOs allow “out of network” users to charge at their chargers and it’s expected that this user will be billed at the end of the month by the network that the user is tied to. This works when you are in a country with one or two large charging networks, and service providers are able to collect money as expected from users (via Credit Cards with no 2FA). In India however, there are 42+ charging networks, varying from really large charge point operators like Jio BP, Tata Power to small-medium charge point operators  like GOEC, K-Charge, etc. There are several disadvantages with adopting OCPI as is for India.

OCPI has the three major flaws today based on our interviews with CPOs

Multiple Contractual Agreements:

A contractual agreement is necessary between two parties wishing to exchange information about their chargers with each other. This means large players can choose to not get into any contractual agreements with a smaller player, wishing to either acquire them or starve them out of the market. This is applicable even in a roaming hub scenario. Hubject (Europe’s largest roaming hub succeeded because it’s a joint venture setup by EV Auto OEMs like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, etc.).

Risk of cannibalization:

OCPI integration via a roaming hub or P2P agreement means the participating CPO has to willingly be ok sharing their charger utilization (how popular is a charger location) with other CPOs. A large CPO could look at the utilization of a particular location and decide to cannibalize the location for their own interest. Leaving the participating CPO at a loss. One such case has already been reported in India.

Walled garden:

Today all 42+ charging operators have their own charging apps and force EV users to use their own apps to access their chargers. If a MapMyIndia or Google Maps or a PayTm or Park+ wishes to offer a seamless charging experience across any charger anywhere in India, they need to approach each CPO individually and set up OCPI agreements. This is a considerable investment that prevents them from entering this space for the foreseeable future till the time private EV ownership picks up in India.

3. So, what’s the solution?

In order to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, we wish to encourage a decentralized (No, not on blockchain) network where a small local entrepreneur with land can set up their own hyper-local EV charging network and earn. We want to take out the difficulty they have with having their chargers being discovered and additional investment that comes with setting up a mobile app and doing marketing around it to all EV users.

At Pulse Energy, we have solved this problem and offer a solution that helps CPOs avoid cannibalization, increase their utilization and enter into a single contractual relationship (No, I am not referring to a roaming hub).

Our interoperability platform does roughly ~10MWh of energy transactions every 30 day across 554 DC chargers, and 13,246 AC chargers

4. Are you a CPO that’s looking to increase your charger utilization?

Then drop us a note at hello@pulseenergy.io, our team will help onboard your chargers to the Pulse Energy platform and help you device a strategy on how to increase your utilization.