Charge Smarter: EV Connect’s C-NOC Powers Up the Future of EV Charging Management
The fuel of the future is here, and EV Connect’s mission is to build a better planet by enabling the distribution of electricity as a fuel. Encouraging the adoption of EV charging technology and building the infrastructure to support it will help speed the electric vehicle industry’s growth in the near term, but installing more chargers is just the first step. The key to a fully electric future will be streamlining the EV charging process for both drivers and station owners.
While many drivers are switching to electric, battery range anxiety and public charging reliability remain two of the most significant barriers to entry. At present, around 80% of EVs are charged at home, so while increased charging infrastructure will help get more EVs on the roads, more stations alone won’t help if they are constantly mired in downtime due to repairs. Moreover, these stations — and by extension, the software that manages and controls them — will be unable to evolve and adapt to new technologies and faster-charging speeds. They will become outdated relics if they are not managed properly. At EV Connect, we want to empower our customers to have complete visibility of station performance both operationally and financially, and the ability to triage and enable action to ensure stations are online.
Our newest product, the Charging Network Operations Center (C-NOC), is the next step toward a fully electric future. Charging Station Network Operators now have unprecedented visibility and informed data of their entire network. EV Connect is empowering station owners with the ability to dynamically recognize potential problems with automated alerts and notifications based on programmatic data from station equipment. It’s just the latest way EV Connect is making the EV charging experience easier and better for charge point operators, manufacturers and EV drivers.
The C-NOC isn’t just revolutionary technology — it’s part of our commitment to ensuring the best driver experience and continued growth of the industry. Here’s how EV Connect built the C-NOC for the present and future of EV charging and how we can help make your business more efficient and your investment even smarter.
Improving the EV Experience
Like most New York to Los Angeles transplants, Raj Jhaveri was slightly shocked at the importance of car culture in California. Jhaveri, now Senior Director of Product and Technology for EV Connect, decided he wanted to reduce his personal carbon footprint during his lengthy commute from his home in Orange County to the EV Connect’s headquarters in El Segundo, part of the tech hub known as Silicon Beach. Though his background is in healthcare, Jhaveri began researching EVs at a time when the industry was in its early stages compared to the dominance of internal combustion vehicles.
“This is a very rapidly evolving industry.” says Jhaveri. “Everyone wants to find a way to make EV charging like being at a gas pump where you can just fill up a full tank — or a full battery from our perspective. So, we’re really thinking ahead on emerging tech and how it is going to shape the future of the industry, and now is the time to set up our architecture for future innovation and exploitation of the data we keep.”
When Jhaveri began his first search for an EV, the available models were expensive, the battery range was short, and the options for charging were both slow and hard to find. He joined EV Connect soon thereafter, just as automakers began to release more affordable vehicles with longer ranges, and charging stations started to spread across California and the world at large. With such rapid expansion of infrastructure, Jhaveri knew that station health and diagnostics would become more critical.
“People want to go to a charging station that works, that's the basic common foundation of a driver experience,” says Jhaveri. “However, there are all these different nuances and interpretations of protocol configurations and how hardware communicates with the network. There's a lot of human error, from setting up the station and configuring it to all the way to installation and usage. And there's not a single way to do early detection of where these errors could occur.”
That’s when Jhaveri tapped into his background in medicine:
“I looked at it as, how do we diagnose a human?” he says. “Physicians use an electronic medical record (EMR) system where they have collaboration components and full visibility and all these different tools to diagnose and triage a patient. So, why not use something similar for EV charging networks — which are not nearly as complex as a human body?”
Jhaveri built his own version of an EMR system to offer the same robust functionality to EV Connect customers — the Charging Network Operations Center.
The C-NOC grants customers full visibility on station performance and the ability to diagnose potential problems, quickly acting to prevent issues and outages. EV Connect’s support team has always been able to quickly troubleshoot issues while collecting data and measuring metrics that will lead to faster recognition. Now, using the C-NOC, other networks can leverage our technology to troubleshoot their hardware and support their drivers. For major hardware issues, EV Connect technicians will even interface with suppliers to find solutions and share data to help manufacturers improve their stations for future deployment.
Supercharged Service
The technology behind the C-NOC is cutting-edge and built to evolve and integrate even more advanced innovations like machine learning and artificial intelligence. But the platform itself is designed to give EV Connect customers more in-depth data about their networks without compromising ease of use. As Daniel Bryant explains, investing in emerging technology without considering the user experience can discourage people from adopting a new platform.
“Businesses are investing in new EV infrastructure and want to see EV drivers using it. Drivers are potentially investing a lot of money in a new electric vehicle, and want to replicate the same easy experience as going to a gas station. And if an EV driver has to get from point A to point B and arrives at a charging station, that station has to work. The best way to prevent a negative experience is early identification, and that’s the whole point of the C-NOC. We want to get the alert, identify the issue as soon as possible, and correct it before the driver even arrives on site.”
Bryant has spent most of his career at the intersection of business and sustainability and was early to the EV space, where he had first-hand experience with some of the first major breakthroughs in EV technology. As the Director of Customer Experience at EV Connect, Bryant is in constant communication with customers to learn how they interact with our products and what new features will improve their overall satisfaction. His team continuously generates client feedback, which leads directly to product innovation and the development of new features in response to customer needs.
“One of the key things our customers pointed out was, ‘We want our stations to be operational, we don't want to have to worry about them.” Bryant says.
EV Connect leverages our strong relationships with manufacturers to help coordinate with station owners and provide our customers with the highest level of service possible. In fact, as the C-NOC collects more data and learns to predict issues before they occur, EV Connect will be able to help stations managers preemptively repair or replace station parts for truly seamless solutions.
Fueling Your Future
As the EV industry continues its exponential growth, the technology will improve at quantum levels — literally. EV Connect software is purpose-built to evolve alongside the industry to ensure our customers maximize the return on their investment in EVs and EV infrastructure — and it is designed to be as adaptive and flexible as possible, enabling us to create customized solutions for our client’s needs.
The C-NOC represents those dual purposes perfectly — and is only the latest innovation from an EV Connect team that is dedicated to supporting a sustainable future.