Everyone implements OCPP. What you don’t learn from reading the spec is what to do when the spec doesn’t cover the business case in front of you — and that happens more often than the industry admits.
The two sides
Needs infrastructure every station connects to, to report its state — free, occupied, how far the charge has got — and from which it receives the commands to start and stop. It’s the part that talks to hardware scattered across the territory, and has to work even when the hardware doesn’t cooperate.
Cards, apps, sessions that start and close, payments that need to add up. It’s the part the end user sees, and it depends entirely on information arriving from someone else — often a different company, often in real time.
In between sit the protocols that pass commands and information from one side to the other, and the hubs that save everyone from talking to everyone. Every hop is a point where something can fail to arrive.
Where it breaks
The territory
Unstable networks, communications that drop, devices that vanish and reappear. The system has to know what to do when information doesn’t arrive, and tell a broken charge point apart from one that just hasn’t checked in.
The protocols
They’re still immature relative to what the market asks for. Every time the commercial model needs something the standard doesn’t provide for, complex workarounds have to be built on top — and there’s no documentation explaining how.
The chain
Information leaving the user’s app crosses several systems, often belonging to different companies, before reaching the charge point. Every hop is a point of failure, and you need tracing, retries and monitoring to work out where it stopped.
The price
Pricing models are complicated, they have to be built while the session is under way, with information that arrives partial and then changes — so the bill has to be recalculated. It’s the part where a mistake shows up on the invoice immediately.
Before
A rapidly growing operator, with a network to connect and an energy- trading system alongside it.
After
The communication infrastructure between servers and charging stations, interoperability with other operators, and the trading side. Inside the domain for 6 years.
Why it matters
That’s the time it takes a new vendor, however good, just to understand how the pieces of this industry talk to each other. Four weeks paid for by you, before a single line gets written that’s good for anything.
We’ve already put in those four weeks —
five years ago.
Dry Run
In this industry references matter less than usual, because the hard work doesn’t show from outside. We take one thing off your list — an integration, a piece of roaming, a pricing logic — and do it. At the end you have it, and you know how we work.
If instead what you have is a system that’s already causing problems, the door is a different one: Rescue