There’s no good way for a company to abandon its customers. But Enel X Way, the EV-charging subsidiary of Italian utility and energy conglomerate Enel Group, may have picked the worst way to go about it — and critics say it’s running out of time to choose a better path.
On October 2, Enel X Way abruptly announced it was shutting down its North American charging business. Effective October 11, it stated, all of its customers in the U.S. and Canada would lose access to the software that keeps its JuiceBox chargers running.
Without that software, all of the roughly 25,000 JuiceBox commercial chargers at shopping malls, multifamily parking garages, and other such sites would be essentially “bricked,” unable to process payments or initiate and manage charging sessions.
And while the roughly 100,000 residential JuiceBox chargers in North America could still function, they would be transformed from “smart” to “dumb” chargers, without any smartphone connectivity, customer control capabilities, or options to pre-program charging times to avoid costly electricity rates or help relieve stress on the power grid.
EV owners, commercial charging providers, and the dozens of utilities now connecting to the company’s JuiceBox chargers for demand-response and smart-charging programs are displeased, to say the least.
The utility Xcel Energy, for example, has promoted JuiceBox chargers for managed charging programs for its customers in Colorado and Minnesota. “We need the reliability of the ecosystem and data standardization” for those programs to succeed, Emmett Romine, vice president of customer energy and transportation solutions at Xcel, said during a panel discussion at an EV charging conference in Berkeley, California, earlier this month.
The utility is exploring the possibility of transitioning customers “to another vendor’s charging equipment,” Josiah Mayo, spokesperson for Xcel Energy, told Canary Media in an email. In the worst case, customers and utilities like Xcel may have no option but to replace their JuiceBox chargers, which cost anywhere from $600 for a residential charger to $1,600 for a commercial charger.
Consumers are demanding that the federal government investigate. In a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, nonprofit groups Consumer Reports and U.S. PIRG, along with 60 JuiceBox owners, complained that Enel’s decision “represents an egregious example of how companies are controlling the functionality of a product even after the consumer has purchased the device.”
Enel X Way’s assets will be auctioned off at the end of the month, which could allow a buyer to come in and restore service to customers. In the meantime, the uncertainty caused by the upcoming asset sale is making life more difficult for the two companies that are already doing the hard work of migrating JuiceBox customers to other charging softwares.
EV-charging experts say the whole affair could have been avoided if only Enel X Way had planned ahead — not just by taking a wiser approach to shutting down its North American operations, but by embedding open standards–based technology in its chargers, so that converting them to an alternative software platform would not be as painful and as costly as it is now shaping up to be.
The timing of the bad publicity is unfortunate for the EV-charging industry, experts say. Electric-vehicle adoption needs to rise quickly in order to get planet-warming gas cars off the road, and one of the biggest barriers facing EV adoption is that consumers — rightfully, in plenty of cases — think chargers are unreliable. Enel X Way is far from the largest provider of EV-charging equipment in North America, but at roughly 125,000 chargers, it’s not inconsequential either.
“That’s all we need is news stories like this to come out that make people say, ‘Ah, I don’t know if I’m going to go get that electric car,’” Tom Moloughney, contributing editor at industry publication InsideEVs, said in an October 10 YouTube video.
Representatives of Enel X declined to respond to questions from Canary Media regarding the status of its chargers or its plans to support customers of its now-defunct North American EV-charging business.
EV-charging software companies to the rescue?
After fuming over Enel’s decision, which he called “inexcusable,” Moloughney also identified a potential silver lining — the prospect that independent EV-charging-software developers could rescue the JuiceNet software system that keeps those chargers running.
Those potential rescuers include U.S.-based companies ChargeLab and Epic Charging. The CEOs of both companies appeared in the video to tell Moloughney how they’d been working behind the scenes for months to reconfigure Enel X Way’s chargers to keep them running on their companies’ back-end systems.
Soon after that video went live, Enel X North America updated its web page with a slightly less dire message for its customers. No longer was it planning to cut off its software. Instead, it intends to work with B. Riley Advisory Services, the third-party firm it has contracted to manage the closure of its North American charging business, to ensure that “Enel X Way USA software will continue to operate for an extended period, with the ultimate goal of maintaining operational continuity for customers.”
Based on these recent developments, it may be possible that the worst-case scenario for Enel X Way customers — being saddled with inoperable chargers — doesn’t come to pass. But it can’t be ruled out yet, either.
Enabling that “operational continuity” won’t be easy, Zak Lefevre, ChargeLab’s CEO and co-founder, told Moloughney. That’s because Enel X Way failed to use industry-standard technologies that would allow other companies to easily “migrate” them to their own back-end control platforms.
Specifically, a majority of Enel X Way’s JuiceBox chargers don’t use Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP), Lefevre said — or at least, they haven’t implemented a version that ChargeLab can easily integrate with.
OCPP is a widely adopted open protocol that defines how EV chargers should communicate with back-end management systems. “With an ideal OCPP implementation, any technician or site host can easily reconfigure their chargers and choose from over a dozen different software providers,” Lefevre said.
Many companies claim their charging stations are OCPP-compliant. But some implementations of the protocol are more or less consistent than others — and Enel X Way’s approach has turned out to be less than ideal.
In an interview with Canary Media, Lefevre explained that ChargeLab has devised a workaround to this lack of standardization that uses a “brute-force” method to reconfigure commercial JuiceBox chargers to run OCPP. “In the past week, we have migrated a couple hundred Enel X chargers, made them speak OCPP, and connected them to our back end,” he said.
But to do this, ChargeLab not only must send technicians to each charger to update its firmware, he said — it also needs to be able to complete complex back-end steps. That’s gotten more complicated since Enel closed down its North American charger business and laid off all its employees as of October 11.
Source link by Canary Media
Author Jeff St. John
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