Owning Your EV Charging Data

After the asset is built, this is a software business

The hardware is a one-off. The business that runs on it is not.

A charging site earns from repeat traffic, and repeat traffic is won with software: knowing which drivers came back and which did not, being able to make one of them an offer, being able to show a host what their site actually earned, being able to put something in a driver's hands that the network down the road cannot. A report on their battery, worked out from sessions they were having anyway, is an example of exactly that. It costs nothing per session and no competitor without the data can copy it.

1. 1

   Pulling drivers in

   Visibility, pricing, reliability, and a reason to choose your bay. All decided in software.

2. 2

   Keeping them

   First session to second session is the number that compounds, and it moves on follow-ups and offers rather than on hardware.

3. 3

   Winning hosts

   A host signs with whoever can show them what their site will earn, and renews with whoever can show them what it did.

4. 4

   Building something others cannot

   Added services, personalisation, insight for the driver. Every one of them is built on accumulated data about your own network.

None of that is possible on data you can see but cannot use, and none of it is possible on data you would lose by changing supplier.

What your data has to include

Operators usually think of this as session records. Session records are the smallest part of it, and on their own they are close to useless for anything except invoicing.

1. 1

   Drivers

   Who they are, what they charge, where, how often, what they spend, and what happened when a session failed. The basis of every retention decision you will make.

2. 2

   Site hosts

   Which sites, which units, what each earned, what was invoiced, what settled and the terms behind it.

3. 3

   Installers and field work

   What was commissioned and how, what has been maintained, what was replaced and when.

4. 4

   The chargers

   Asset records, firmware, configuration, fault history and the full session and diagnostic record per unit.

5. 5

   Tariffs, offers and transactions

   What you charged, what you discounted, and what that did to behaviour. An offer with no record of its effect is a cost rather than a campaign.

All five, in a form you can query and export, or you do not have your network's data. You have its invoices.

Three ways operators lose control without noticing

• Export exists but is partial. Sessions come out; telemetry, configuration and fault history do not. You can bill from what you got and you cannot run a network with it.
• Export exists but is a report rather than data. A PDF or a summary CSV is a picture of the data, not the data. It cannot be loaded into anything.
• The chargers themselves are the lock. Even with a full export, if the fleet cannot be pointed at another platform remotely, the data is portable and the network is not.

The third is the one we know from the wrong side. We used to resell a shared third-party platform, and when a change finally became unavoidable the only way to deploy it was to send people to every charger in the field. The data was never the problem. The fleet was.

What ownership means in practice

Ownership is a legal word and it does very little work on its own. These four are what determine whether it means anything.

When white labelling is the right answer

Owning your data is not always the correct call, and it is worth saying so.

1. 1

   A small network, run locally

   A handful of sites in one city, a known set of drivers, no plan to expand. White labelling a third-party platform is faster, cheaper and entirely reasonable. The data you are giving up is data you were not going to act on.

2. 2

   Scaling, or operating across markets

   The moment you are planning to grow, operate in more than one country, or build services on top of charging, the position reverses. Every month of accumulated behaviour becomes an asset, and an asset held by your supplier is not one you can build on.

3. 3

   Somewhere in between

   The question to settle early is not what you need now but what leaving would cost in two years. That number only goes up.

We supply both, which is a conflict rather than a coincidence. We say white label where white label is right because an operator sold the wrong thing is an operator who leaves.

Customer data is different

Session and telemetry data are commercial questions. Customer data is a legal one, and the contract cannot override it.

• Establish who is the controller and who is the processor, because that determines who carries the obligations
• Purpose limitation: what the platform may do with your customers' data beyond serving them
• Whether it may be aggregated into anything the platform sells or uses across its other customers
• Deletion on request, and what happens to data already in backups and derived aggregates
• Where it is stored, which increasingly matters for Indian deployments

Private tenancy and self-hosting

For some operators the answer is not a better export clause, it is not being a tenant.

A private tenancy or a self-hosted deployment puts the data in infrastructure you control. It costs more to run and it removes the whole class of questions above. It is worth it where the network is large enough that switching cost dominates, where a customer contract or a regulator requires data residency, or where charging data is genuinely strategic rather than operational. For a small network it is usually over-engineering.

Moving off the platform you are on

Most operators reading this are already on something, and the reason they stay is usually not the platform. It is the belief that moving means downtime, lost history, and a fleet of chargers that have to be visited.

1. 1

   The history comes with you

   Sessions, drivers, hosts, assets and the fault record migrated rather than abandoned, so the network does not restart at zero and the reporting does not have a hole in it.

2. 2

   The chargers repoint without being visited

   Where they can be reconfigured remotely, they are. The failure mode no operator wants is the one we lived through ourselves, which was sending people to every unit in the field to deploy a change.

3. 3

   The two run in parallel

   Chargers move in groups with both platforms live, so the network keeps charging throughout and a group that misbehaves goes back rather than taking the site with it.

4. 4

   Settlement is reconciled across the cut

   Sessions that start on one and finish on the other are the part that generates disputes, and they are handled deliberately rather than discovered at month end.

We do this work as a service, including off platforms that are not ours. It is the most common reason an operator talks to us for the first time.

What we commit to, and why

We were the supplier in an arrangement that served the supplier better than the customer, so these are the terms we wish we had offered then.

• Your data is yours and exportable in full, including telemetry, fault history and configuration, not only sessions
• Machine-readable, via API, on demand rather than by request
• Your fleet can be pointed at another platform remotely, without anyone visiting a charger
• Changes you need are not negotiated against other customers on the same system

If any of that is missing from what you are being offered by anyone, including us, ask why. A vendor with no answer has told you something.