This is the last article in a three-part series examining the biggest problems with public electric vehicle charging and how to solve them (read Part 1 and Part 2). Canary thanks EnergyHub for supporting this series.
Erica Myers could talk all day about electric vehicle charging standards. After all, that is essentially her job as the head of one of the world’s leading organizations dedicated to promoting them.
However, she would like to spend less time debating the topic of electric vehicle charging standards that has been making headlines lately: the debate over which type of electric vehicle charging plug will ultimately dominate the U.S. fast-charging market. The fight is between Tesla’s proprietary North American Charging Standard (NACS) and the combined charging system plug used in nearly every other electric vehicle sold in the country—though that could soon change as major automakers plan to move to NACS-compatible connectors in their future. electric vehicle models.
This doesn’t mean that charging plug standards aren’t important. Far. But Myers, executive director of the Charging Interface Initiative of North America (CharIN), which has more than 330 members, has another million and one more pressing standards issue to solve.
“We exceed connector standards,” she said. â�<“无论是什么阻碍了充电方面良好的消费者体验，这都是我们集中时间和精力的地方。 â�<“无论是什么阻碍了充电方面良好的消费者体验，这都是我们集中时间和精力的地方。 “Whatever gets in the way of the consumer charging experience is where we focus our time and energy. Of course, ensuring interoperability and developing standards are also part of this. “
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we detailed the problem of unreliable public EV charging infrastructure in the country. We also describe how industry and government efforts to improve productivity, including calls for the largest federal investment in electric vehicle charging in U.S. history, may be hampered by a lack of data.
These reliability issues are largely due to a lack of standardization in the US EV charging industry. Electric vehicle drivers are often stymied by charging stations that don’t communicate effectively with the car’s charging management software, or by payment processing platforms that aren’t compatible with the smartphone app they download.
“When you open a gas station, you know it’s going to work for your car,” Myers said. â�<“但是您对充电器的体验却不同。” â�<“但是您对充电器的体验却不同。” “But your experience with the charger is different.”
Fundamentally, the industry faces a huge coordination problem: allowing EV chargers made by different manufacturers, operated by different charging network providers, and using software from dozens of different companies to work seamlessly with vehicles built around the world. WORLD – Meanwhile, new electric vehicle models and software versions are being released.
Myers said convincing automakers, electric vehicle charging operators and the many hardware and software providers that serve them to standardize how their technologies work together could be an important catalyst for the transition to electric vehicles, clearing the way for problematic compatibility barriers early on. believe.
Myers and CharIN aren’t the only companies looking to standardize to solve industry problems. It’s also at the heart of the federal government’s plan to put millions of electric vehicles on the road by the end of the century.
In February, the Biden administration released rules for government agencies and their private sector partners to seek funding under the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program established by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021. The plan imposes a series of requirements on federally funded projects to use standards-based technologies to ensure they can serve every electric vehicle driver today and in the future.
These rules could lead to significant changes to the fragmented EV charging system in the US, but only if companies in the EV charging industry can enforce them.
Signs of standardization problems are everywhere in the US EV market. As things stand, it’s not easy to get answers to the most basic questions: which technologies can work together?
John Smart, Director of the National Charging Experience (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Alliance (ChargeX) Director of the Alliance (ChargeX) said that “there is no mature structure between chargers and vehicles to create and share common diagnostic information.” The Alliance is a public-private partnership created by the federal Joint Energy and Transportation Administration to manage federal funding for electric vehicle charging.
“The current status quo is that every charger must be tested on every vehicle to prove compatibility – of course this is not scalable,” he added.
This diagram from a ChargeX publication shows the mix of standard and non-standard communication patterns between electric vehicles, electric vehicle chargers, and server software platforms currently used in the industry. This shows how difficult it is to get them to work together smoothly.
Part of ChargeX’s work is coordinating with automakers, charger manufacturers, public charging network operators and software developers and reaching consensus on what technologies to use to solve the problem. But these efforts must overcome a lag between the speed of deployment of modern charging hardware and software and efforts to open up technology standards.
Let’s take the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) as an example. It is a widely used open communication protocol supported by the Open Charging Alliance and has become the primary template for exchanging charger uptime, health and performance data between charging stations in Europe and North America and the back-end systems that manage them.
But until recently, OCPP 1.6—the most commonly used version of the standard, first released in 2015—still had a critical flaw, says Julian Offermann, CEO of S44, an open-source EV charging software provider based in New Jersey. OCPP 1.6 does not provide the system operator with a menu of error codes to indicate the specific problem that caused the charging session to fail or terminate prematurely, but instead only contains an error message.
“The lack of information about the components of the charging station really makes it difficult,” Offerman said. â�<“如果您对这些系统没有清晰的监控，您就不知道出了什么问题。” â�<“如果您对这些系统没有清晰的监控，您就不知道出了什么问题。” “If you don’t have clear monitoring of these systems, you don’t know what’s going wrong.”
ChargeX’s Smart agrees that the single error code provided by OCPP 1.6 is akin to a “get out of jail card” for toll system manufacturers and network operators who implement it. Each charger manufacturer has developed different methods for detecting internal component faults, and getting all manufacturers to agree on a common method for converting these proprietary error messages into a standard data reporting format is difficult.
Smart noted that the latest version of the standard, OCPP 2.0.1, was officially released in 2020 to correct this issue by including more error codes, and the NEVI standard requires all projects using its tools to adopt this latest standard. â�<“不过，充电站运营商在如何选择报告错误方面有很大的自由度，”他说。 â�<“不过，充电站运营商在如何选择报告错误方面有很大的自由度，”他说。 “However, charging station operators have wide discretion in how they report errors,” he said.
But OCPP 2.0.1 is not “backwards compatible” with older versions, creating a challenge for charging operators looking to upgrade existing charging networks to use it. This is an example of how technology adoption in the real world is rapidly outpacing the pace of consensus-based standards development.
The NEVI program provides an opportunity for federal requirements to try to address these issues with future chargers. In November, ChargeX published a list of 26 recommended minimum error codes.
“We encourage all EV charging companies to use this data, at a minimum, so that it can be easily understood and interpreted by everyone involved in identifying and solving the problem,” Smart said.
Payment authorization is a key point of failure and illustrates the difficulty of enforcing standards in the EV charging industry. In a review of public electric vehicle chargers in the Los Angeles area, Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern visited more than 120 chargers and nearly 10 percent of them were in working order, but her credit card was not accepted.
S44′s Offermann noted that at least these stations will be able to accept credit and debit cards. Many of the industry’s first EV charging station deployments required drivers to carry a vendor-specific RFID card or key fob to activate charging, and many charging station operators still offer these services. Starting around 2010, public charging stations began offering smartphone apps that EV drivers could use instead of cards or key fobs—an improvement in some ways, but the process remained fragmented and sometimes even frustrating.
“It’s cumbersome—you have to download an app to start charging,” Offerman said. While this may work for some EV drivers, “I don’t want to plan ahead, knowing where and how I’m going to charge,” he added.
Government regulations are increasingly forcing charging networks to abandon these proprietary methods and accept credit and debit cards instead. But converting gas stations to accept these payment methods comes with its own challenges.
信用卡和借记卡读卡器â�<“它们可能很笨重，可能会遭受大量磨损，并且可能需要频繁维护，”EVgo 市场开发和公共政策高级副总裁Sara Rafalson 说。 <“它们可能很笨重，可能会遭受大量磨损，并且可能需要频繁维护，”EVgo 市场开发和公共政策高级副总裁Sara Rafalson 说。 Credit and debit card readers “They can be bulky, wear out a lot, and require frequent maintenance,” said Sarah Rafalson, senior vice president of market development and public policy at EVgo. Rules for NEVI and other federally funded programs require stations to accept credit and debit cards, but only through a contactless payment system that is more tamper-resistant than swipe or insert technology.
The holy grail of payments is the so-called “plug and charge” function: payment for charging through automatic data exchange between the electric vehicle and the charging platform. This will allow drivers to simply plug in and start charging, eliminating the need for RFID key fobs, smartphone apps, credit cards or other existing payment methods.
Today, Tesla Supercharger supports this feature—an easier task for a company that has existing relationships with all EV owners and has vertically integrated its vehicle and charger technologies. But Jonathan Levy, managing director of US-based Kaluza, a UK provider of charging and energy management software for electric vehicles, and former chief commercial officer of EVgo, said there was still a long way to go to achieve plug-and-play standards.
Tesla’s electric vehicles already support connectivity and charging, but other companies in the industry are just starting to implement this feature through a standard called ISO 15118. NEVI-funded projects must have equipment that meets the ISO 15118 standard, “but they haven’t said it needs to be implemented immediately,” he said.
与此同时，美国主要的电动汽车公共充电网络已经建立â�<“漫游协议”，允许一个网络的用户通过智能手机应用程序在另一家公司拥有的充电站上付款。 <“漫游协议”，允许一个网络的用一家公司拥有的充电站上付款。 Meanwhile, the major government-owned electric vehicle charging networks in the US have entered into “roaming agreements” that allow users of one network to pay via smartphone apps at charging stations owned by another company. However, these roaming agreements do not apply to all premium providers. They also don’t address the problem of poor cell phone coverage in places like parking lots.
The requirements of NEVI and other federal programs correct this. By 2025, all federally funded chargers must comply with the latest version of the Open Charge Point Interface Roaming Agreement, which ensures that any driver can use any charger through a single app.
Bhaskar Deol, CEO of eDRV, said the situation in Europe is very different. eDRV is a software startup developing application programming interfaces (APIs) for charging stations in many countries. For years, the EU and UK have had rules “requiring a certain level of transparency around prices, settlement transactions and availability”, he said.
“I traveled from the Netherlands to southern Europe, through six countries, where I had several apps—not dozens, but one or two—that helped me along the way, without those horror stories,” he said. Car drivers often hear.
CharIN’s Myers also believes Europe has made more progress on interoperability.一个重要原因是â�<“由于更积极的激励措施和充电基础设施资金，欧盟的电气化发生得更早。”一个重要原因是â�<“由于更积极的激励措施和充电基础设施资金，欧盟的电气化发生得更早。” The main reason is that “electrification is happening earlier in the EU due to more aggressive incentives and funding for charging infrastructure.”
“The impact of this is huge. In Norway, almost 100% of new car sales are electric vehicles,” she said. â�<“这主要是由于政府政策。 â�<“这主要是由于政府政策。 “This is mainly due to government policies. This is where we take a more hands-off approach. NEVI is great, but if we had done it a few years earlier it would have made a big difference. “
Europe’s leadership also gives the electric vehicle charging industry more time to address diagnostic and repair issues that have plagued charger deployment in the U.S., where “data is very elusive” about the causes of fast charger failures and failures, she said.
In an effort to reshape the U.S. market along the lines of the more mature European industry, CharIN hosts several annual testing events involving dozens of automakers and EV charger manufacturers. The goal, she noted, is to quickly scale up the process of achieving true compatibility between newly released electric vehicles and charging equipment. Eventually, she hopes charging will become as standardized as Wi-Fi or cellular networks. â�<“这需要一段时间才能实现，而且我们是一个新行业。” â�<“这需要一段时间才能实现，而且我们是一个新行业。” “It will take some time and we are a new industry.”
Whether automakers and EV drivers are willing to wait is another question. The move by Ford, General Motors and other automakers to switch from compatible combined charging systems to NACS-compatible connectors in their future electric vehicle models represents an important step forward, said Andrew Krulewitz, CEO of the electric vehicle rental company, overcoming an inherent dilemma. development of standards-based and patented technologies. Startup Zevvy. In short, he said, automakers, tired of poor compatibility, are seeking security in Tesla’s patented technology.
“This experience is exactly what you need if you drive a Tesla,” he said. â�<“[车内]的大屏幕会准确地告诉您要去哪里、有多少个摊位、需要多长时间- 只要将其插入，一切就会正常。” â�<“[车内]的大屏幕会准确地告诉您要去哪里、有多少个摊位、需要多长时间-只要将其插入，一切就会正常。” “The big screen [in the car] shows you exactly where you’re going, how many stalls there are, how long it’s going to take—just plug it in and it works.”
This shows how a unified but proprietary (rather than standards-based) charging implementation can solve many problems. Industry experts recognize that the superior performance and satisfaction rates of Tesla’s Supercharger network compared to Supercharger networks operated by other companies is due to the company’s overall control over every aspect of its operation and a vested interest in ensuring that it operates properly. Make the experience as smooth and hassle-free as possible for EV buyers.
The time it takes to develop and implement standards in the real world may lead charger companies to think they are better off adopting Tesla’s playbook and maintaining as much control over the technology stack as possible, rather than waiting for slow development. Encouraging the development of global standards to ensure a seamless EV charging ecosystem.
As tempting as this path may be, any company planning to take advantage of the massive government funding pouring into electric vehicle charging will have a difficult time navigating it. NEVI rules require one supplier’s charging stations to be compatible with another supplier’s software platform – either to enable the transfer of payment system data between suppliers, or, in the worst case, to allow one supplier to take over what another already has in the business of charging stations during power outages.
“The challenge right now is network interoperability,” said Carter Lee, CEO of Swtch, an electric vehicle software provider in Toronto, Canada. If individual companies don’t make sure their efforts meet standards, “these workarounds won’t work.”
In other words, interoperability issues may be inevitable even if toll companies decide to implement their own vertically integrated technologies outside of the evolving technology standards ecosystem. S44′s Offermann says this is the main reason why mass-market technology standards such as cloud computing and telecommunications are beating homegrown solutions. However, the same dynamics have not yet been seen in the electric vehicle charging industry.
“For about 10 years now, we have had a ‘closed’ Tesla charging network that has not benefited other drivers,” he said.
Post time: May-14-2024