EV Charging Infrastructure
by Akiro
With the fast increasing demand of EVs, there is an imminent transition to cleaner energy. For the growth in EV segment to sustain, it is very important to build the appropriate infrastructure in terms of Charging and Swapping stations. There are several solution providers that are taking advantage of this paradigm shift and accordingly developing solutions for the EV infrastructure.
A lot of companies are coming up in the market with the proposition of Fast charging of vehicles and some of them promise a charging time to the tune of 15 minutes. These kinds of technologies are further expected to increase the adoption of EVs rapidly.
As of now, both battery charging and swapping technologies are gathering pace which might have different use cases for different users. While some of the customers might prefer taking some time out for charging the vehicles, some of them might opt for an Asset light model and a battery swap service would be an answer for that.
Akiro has developed a platform for EV charging infra use cases that would be helpful to both EV charging as well as swapping stations. It allows users to easily onboard various EV charging/swapping units on the platform, monitor and control them remotely and also get analytics on the data collected.
Ingestion
As there would be numerous battery charging/ swapping stations spread across multiple geographical locations, it becomes necessary to onboard these stations in a hierarchical fashion so that the performance and output of these stations can be monitored region-wise. Akiro uses Asset hierarchy feature to allow users to list their stations in a particular manner that is useful not only for onboarding of new units but also to get insights for better decision making.
Akiro provides seamless integration with various communication protocols such as OCPP being used by the EV charging infra. It is capable of ingesting data both from multiple primary sources as well as secondary sources. A dashboard of the charging units on the Akiro platform gives a bird’s eye view of all the charging units that are active, idle and under maintenance.
Preprocessing, Alerting and Monitoring
As Akiro allows multiple parameters to be ingested to the platform, it allows users to create rules on the data to generate Alert/ trigger in case of an anomaly such as sudden power outage, voltage fluctuation, unexpected rise in temperature or any machine malfunction. An alert can accordingly be sent to the ground operations team to take necessary action and raise a red flag at the necessary levels.
As the EV charging stations are coming up for the first time at such a large scale, it needs consistent monitoring of various other parameters as well to reduce the chances of anomalies. A lot of challenges in terms of safety might occur in the future that are unknown as of now but should be monitored on a regular basis. A low-code offering from Akiro is helpful in such a case that makes the creation and modification of rules much easier with its schemaless design.
Insights
As the EV charging infra is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years, it becomes much more necessary to take data driven decisions. These decisions can be with respect to the new charging/ swapping stations that need to be opened based on the response that an existing area/ region is receiving. For eg, if a station in Whitefield, Bangalore is receiving high demand (say an Asset utilization of more than 80%), it makes a good case to open up a new station in the nearby region.
Moreover, a data driven team is more likely to analyze different kinds of data by experimenting with various trend lines and graphs. Akiro provides a facility to create customizable Analytics and Reporting dashboards to the user that takes just a few minutes to be created. A user can also arrange the various charts on the screen to keep those metrics on the top that need regular monitoring.
