What is an EV Charging Optimization Platform?

In this article, our new CMO wonders what’s in a name, following research by Flashpoint Venture Capital and a look around this new, emerging software category. 

In a previous blog post, my colleague Lucy reviewed some research that one of our investors, Flashpoint Venture Capital, conducted into the business opportunities in the EV space, specifically the software market for EV charging. 

The conclusion from that research was a resounding “yes” to the opportunity. Despite much reporting on the slowing of EV car sales, we are still chronically underserved when it comes to public charging infrastructure, especially in North America, and the business case for becoming a charge point operator (CPO) remains strong. 

Our friends at Flashpoint also looked to define the software categories that serve this market and named some of the vendors in each of those categories.  

Image from Flashpoint Venture Capital, showing Dodona Analytics classified as a "Charging Point Analytics" vendor.  (Source)

Broadly, as a charge point operator, in addition to all the usual business software to manage finance, projects, and all of that, you need specialist tools to help find sites, deploy, and optimize profitable network growth, tools to manage that network once installed, and tools that provide the customer experience, like apps and payment platforms.

I have simplified that a great deal, but clearly, Dodona Analytics falls into the first of those categories—a category that some call “EV Charging Optimization Platform,” although Flashpoint called it “Charging Point Analytics,” and one of our competitors calls it “EV charging station intelligence software.” As a newbie in this category, I’ve discovered many others (I’ll list them at the end).

How does the software help?

But, despite having a slight identity crisis, what does this software category do, and how does it help Charge Point Operators?

In a nutshell, the purpose of these platforms is to help business users easily find and assess viable and feasible EV charging sites from a collection of aggregated data sources without needing to do this manually with spreadsheets, multiple systems, and, to be honest, gut feel and guesswork. 

The core features and  functionality of these platforms are:

• Geospatial analysis: Utilizing geographic data to analyze potential sites based on data such as traffic patterns, proximity to amenities, EV ownership density, and grid capacity.
• Predictive modeling: Forecasting future demand for charging based on trends in EV adoption, enabling the selection of locations that will maximize usage and revenue.
• Cost-benefit analysis: Assessing the economic viability of different locations by evaluating factors such as land costs, potential revenue, funding available and installation expenses.

These core features help the commercial team make profitable decisions about charging sites and which contracts to go after, but once the contract is won, this same data helps to inform the project to install the chargers, so, in addition, these platforms need:

• Site visualization: the ability to take a virtual look at the site and plan the installation
• Reporting:  Shared insight into the  potential charging network that is used both in the process of winning the contract and also in keeping partners, clients, and all the stakeholders informed
• Collaboration tools: Ability to plan the project and share important information between the teams, specifically between the commercial, operations team and the client.

All of this of course, needs to be served up in an interface that is business user-friendly and easy to use and, on the back end, have the ability to:

• Import data: A CPO will want to differentiate its offering with its own secret sauce of data and build its own models around what it offers to the market. Maybe the specific charger they install has specific space or technical requirements, or they have a mandate to install chargers in underserved communities regardless of profit. 
• Export data: In addition to the ability of creating reports, these platforms need to play nice with other systems and export the reporting data in a form that can be imported by other systems. 

• Scale: At the acquisition stage, CPOs need to be able to evaluate a lot of potential sites, possibly hundreds or thousands as part of an opportunity or potential contract and then keep track of a growing network. So the platform needs the ability to zoom in to the detail of the street view of a single site that might be needed in the installation planning to an overview of an entire network, across hundreds of miles to check-in and optimize a whole network.  

Why does this matter?

That’s a very high-level overview of these tools and this newly forming category, but this software makes a huge difference to CPOs, who are looking to grow their network efficiently and profitably and attract investment in a capital-intensive industry. 

These platforms enable CPOs to:

• Reduce risk -Makes the business more predictable and therefore investible 

• Stay competitive - Offers the insight to identify profitable sites ahead of the competition and then offer a better service, respond faster, and provide more accurate data throughout the contract process

• Be operationally agile and efficient - As these platforms remove a lot of the manual work and specialized data analysis skills needed, a business user can operate more efficiently, evaluate more sites and share insight, create reports much faster.

What's in a name?

Ah yes, that identity crisis. Well, I have collected a few terms I have come across that you may hear describe a similar platform to solve these problems:

• EV Charging Network Planning Software
• EV Charger Location Optimization Tool
• Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Planning Software
• Site Selection Software for EV Chargers
• EV Charging Station Installation Planning Tool
• EV Charger Placement Analysis Software
• GIS Software for EV Charging Network Planning
• EV Charging Site Analysis and Planning Tool
• Electric Vehicle Charger Network Design Software
• EV Charger Installation Site Survey Software
• EV charging station intelligence software

We can help

While this article provides an overview of the category, my colleagues would love to discuss our experience with our clients, the problems they’ve solved, and, of course, our take on EV Charging Optimization, the Dodona eMobility platform (DeM). So please come say hello.