Xeal Claims All Uptime All the Time for EV Chargers

Battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) deliver a powerful pitch – plenty of pep and style, power to drive trucks and cars aplenty hundreds of miles (and growing) on a single battery charge, and the real possibility to affect climate change for the better through zero-emissions mobility.

Yet there is a very real market slowdown at present in EV sales projections and plant construction for both batteries and the vehicles themselves; a main reason for which is consumer distrust of the EV charging infrastructure.

“EV charging uptime today is, in a word, dismal,” Nikhil Bharadwaj, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of New York City-based Xeal Energy, recently told Battery Technology. Major business and car-centric publications report that at any given time, one out of every three car-charging sites are non-functioning; the vast majority (95%) being due to central network issues including connectivity, failure to process payments, and numerous other firmware and software issues. Word gets around. Says Bharadwaj, “Such unreliability is killing the industry.”

Xeal Energy CTO and co-founder Nikhil Bharadwaj. XEAL ENERGY

Self-reliant and hyper-local

As with many things, such pain is driving the search for a solution. Bharadwaj’s background includes time spent at Schneider Electric, where he led a transportation innovation team, investigating, among other things, EVs and related battery-charging issues. In the nascent days of the EV industry, he describes, virtually all vehicles charged overnight at single-family homes, leaving millions in apartments, condos, and other multi-family housing complexes without an option. “Add the connectivity issues and the real need for reliability that continues today, we launched our mission to boost a better charging infrastructure for the entire population,” he says.

Related:Fundamentals of Electric Vehicle Charging

With the vast majority of EV chargers at present relying on a physical server located hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the charger site, the problem of cloud computing protocols to start the charger and process data makes such network connections a life-threatening point of failure. According to Xeal, all charging companies claim 99.9% equipment uptime, but conveniently do not identify such real downtime causes as remote server outages; hardware issues related to antennae, routers, and wiring; telecom connectivity between user phone apps and related bugs, and many more.

By contrast, Xeal provides a patented proprietary approach it calls a “self-reliant, hyper-local computing layer ensuring 100% of critical uptime smart functions in any IoT device.” Bharadwaj describes Xeal as a “technology-first company building a smart, sustainable infrastructure stressing 100% reliability. EV charging is a critical application, but it’s the first of many opportunities.”

Related:How Is Europe’s EV Charging Infrastructure?

Ledgers and tokens

In Xeal’s view, for a better IT solution, eliminate relying on the internet. No need to connect to the cloud eliminates any downtime constraints plaguing cloud-based architectures. Instead, Xeal provides what it calls distributed ledger technology that turns EV chargers (and other smart devices including smartphones) into “supercomputing” mobile servers that create a hyper-local, self-reliant network that enables all the smart functionality with no external network dependency.

Time-based tokens are constantly refreshed in smartphones. With no cloud-based roundtrip necessary, the smart device, in this case the EV charger, simply accepts and validates the token and starts the session. Tokens and the distributed ledgers are encrypted, keeping user and transaction data more secure from the IoT’s most common attack vector, the internet itself.

Xeal EV charging station. XEAL ENERGY

An article earlier this year in Motor Trend describes the process this way: “A Xeal user downloads an app while connected to the internet, entering identification and payment information. The app delivers a cryptographic token that then resides on the smart phone. When visiting a charger, the user touches the phone to the charger, and the token on the phone authorizes the charging session (each token is good for one session). To end the session, the driver simply unplugs the charger and gets the summary of the session on their phone.

“This time the charger imparts a "distributed ledger" to the phone, with details of how much electricity was used, the fees, etc. The next time the user's phone connects to the internet, it transmits the ledger information to Xeal, which bills the credit card in exchange for a charging token good for another session.”

Market reactions

Bharadwaj admits there is a significant learning curve explaining and educating customers, but he reports sales are up 10 times since the company launched and Xeal is in more than 40 markets and growing. A 100% uptime guarantee can make a country more comfortable adopting the EV experience.