Some EV charging infrastructure control functions are best handled on-site, some in the cloud. Driivz and Sparkion offer a combination of both.
- Some EV charging control functions require connection to the cloud (e.g. driver authentication, payment processing), and some are best handled by an on-site processor (load management).
- Load management serves critical functions such as preventing circuit overloads and minimizing utility demand charges. It can also act as a power multiplier—Driivz software can enable a given power connection to serve six times as many EVs as it could with no load management.
- V2G is still mostly a pilot-stage tech (at least in the US), but it presents intriguing income opportunities. Battery storage is a great plus for EV charging installations, and battery-to-grid applications such as demand response could provide the revenue needed to justify an investment in batteries.
Every EV charging system consists of various components, including hardware (chargers, switchgear), software (charging management, user apps) and services (installation, payment processing, maintenance). As regular Charged readers know, companies that want to provide charging can purchase the various components of this stack in just about any combination. Organizations with smaller EV fleets often choose to go with a turnkey package (Charging as a Service), so they can focus on their core activities.
Companies that are actually in the business of EV charging, however—CPOs and fleet operators—are going to build their own ecosystem of hardware, software and service providers. These are the companies that Driivz targets with its software solution, which it describes as “an operating system for EV charging networks.” The Driivz platform is an end-to-end solution, incorporating EV charging operations, energy management, billing and payment processing, and user apps.
Driivz was founded in 2013. In 2022, Vontier acquired software provider Driivz, along with energy storage and charging management specialist Sparkion, combining the two complementary companies under the EVolve brand.
Charged spoke with Driivz Chief Product Officer Oren Halevi.
Charged: Perhaps you could start by explaining how the Driivz and Sparkion products fit together.
Oren Halevi: We acquired Sparkion about two and a half years ago, and we’re in the process of merging their on-site energy management capabilities completely into the platform. For now, we’ve decided to keep the Sparkion brand separate. We are in the process of offering a single solution that will have multiple capabilities or modules based on the requirements of our customers.
Some of the customers can continue to use the existing Driivz software for cloud-only energy management. That works for, I would say, 90% of the use cases. But as the industry grows and sites become more and more complex, some sites require local energy controllers—it could be because they have unmanaged loads, it could be for managing local battery storage or PVs or other assets on-site. This is where we bring in the Sparkion component.
Charged: So your Driivz EV charging and energy management platform runs in the cloud, but Sparkion’s system runs locally at a charging site.
Oren Halevi: Right. It’s a combination of having a local asset, basically a small computer that connects directly into the local energy consumers, that is also connected to the cloud to enable the additional capabilities that we provide.
Charged: Tell me more about the advantages of having more intelligence at the local site level.
Oren Halevi: The energy demand on-site is not always predictable, which means that you may see spikes in consumption. During the day, it could be that another consumer is using the same energy source, for example, a car wash machine or other devices that are not managed by our platform, but may be very heavy energy consumers. In this case, it’s harder for a cloud-only solution to work efficiently because a spike can happen in under a second. For those cases, we have a local controller that can act very quickly, receive information from smart meters that are connected to those unmanaged loads, and reduce charging, stop charging or draw additional energy from the on-site battery storage to compensate for that additional load. So, when you have batteries on-site, when you have solar panels, and when you have unmanaged loads—those would be the three main use cases to install a local controller.
When you have batteries on-site, when you have solar panels, and when you have unmanaged loads—those would be the three main use cases to install a local controller.
Charged: So, this has to do with the time lag of a cloud-based energy management solution. When you need response in less than a second, you need the computing power on-site.
Oren Halevi: That’s correct. There are lags in multiple areas. The actual communication with the network could take time. Also, the charger responding to an OCPP request may take time. The same charger could be connected via a mod bus directly into the local controller, and in this case it responds very, very quickly.
Charged: A mod bus?
Oren Halevi: A mod bus is a wired direct communication between the charger, the local controller, the battery, the PV, etc. You don’t go to the cloud and back. Everything is done within the EV charging site. This is the brain behind a microgrid. All the information is coming from all the components into this, and it controls the different types of energy generation and consumption.
Charged: We recently did an article about a company called Pando that provides charging for multi-unit properties. With their system, all the smarts are local, for reasons of reliability. If the WiFi is down or the cell network is down, everything can still function.
Oren Halevi: It’s true, but the reliability of the network is important too. The authentication of a driver, for example, must rely on network communication—if the network is down, drivers will not be able to start a charge. Long periods of time offline are not valid in any of those cases. But you’re right, if you have 30 seconds or a minute that a network is down, the local controller will compensate for that.
Charged: Also, I recently spoke with an exec from ABB who said that the smarts (for want of a better term) are increasingly moving to local processors for several reasons.
Oren Halevi: I partially agree with what she’s saying, but I would say both sides need to be smarter. The network is not aware of who’s charging, the vehicle’s capabilities, the state of charge and other additional information that we know. I think there needs to be an improvement in that logic on both sides. And I see companies that are looking after the network, the peripherals other than chargers, coming more and more into this market. I think there is room for both.
Charged: Tell me more about bidirectional charging and demand response.
Oren Halevi: Another interesting use case, especially in Europe—less in the US, at least for now—is the ability to take this microgrid and join the flexibility market or demand respond market. You can offer the ability to reduce power drawn from the grid and generate additional revenue for your local site.
Charged: Is that something that’s happening today on a commercial basis, or is that still in the pilot stage?
Oren Halevi: It’s funny, because Driivz demonstrated V2G capabilities in 2019, and back then we kept hearing, “It’s going to be happening in the next two years or three years or five years.” I don’t know how fast this will go, for two reasons. One: the business model behind V2G is not very clear. People need to be motivated to offer their vehicle as an asset to the grid. Two: there is still a big concern about frequent discharge of the battery. If every day you charge and discharge, it may reduce the battery life, or at least people think it will, and that discourages them from joining.
There was a demonstration last month in Brussels by Renault where they showed a proof of concept for V2G. In their case, the vehicle, the charger, the back end and the utility were all part of this pilot, so it’s easy alignment. But there’s currently not enough vehicles that support it and…anyway, we’re waiting for it to happen. Our back end is ready for it but we haven’t seen it yet in any commercial use.
Charged: Does your implementation of Sparkion’s technology have some specific applications to V2G and bidirectional charging?
Oren Halevi: Yeah, actually in that case it’s easier. Assuming I have a battery on-site, I don’t need to use the vehicle to discharge. I can discharge the battery first, so I can easily buy cheap energy and sell it back to the grid when it’s more expensive. I can put enough room in my battery to do that. And actually, in order to make a reasonable return on investment for the battery, it is not enough only to connect it to chargers. It must be part of additional revenue streams, such as battery-to-grid, demand response, the flexibility market, etc. Each one of these is a small additional revenue stream that contributes to the ROI. Only if you combine all three or four use cases together can you justify the installation of the battery.
Charged: So, being able to do V2G is an additional selling point for EV charging operators to deploy on-site battery storage. And they might use those batteries for some revenue-generating applications, like arbitraging energy, that don’t have anything to do with EVs.
Oren Halevi: Exactly. And by doing that they justify the installation of a battery, and help the EV sites to have additional capacity. Once you pay the bills and generate additional revenue, then it actually makes sense. We’re doing exactly that with multiple customers in Europe. I can mention Circle K and Recharge—both of them are participating in these markets using Driivz and Sparkion. There are additional ones that I cannot mention, but we just did a survey of our customers a month ago, and it was amazing. Almost all of them said they’re probably going to install batteries in the next year at one or more of their sites. So, it’s really a fast-moving market. [Read the results of the survey in Driivz’s new report, 2025 State of EV Charging Network Operators.]
In order to make a reasonable ROI on batteries, it’s not enough only to connect it to chargers. It must be part of additional revenue streams, such as demand response, the flexibility market, etc. Combining these use cases you justify the installation of the battery, and help the EV site to have additional capacity.
Charged: On your web site, it says, “You can accommodate up to six times EV charging on-site without increasing the site electrical capacity.” So you’re saying that, just by using your software, a customer can support six times as much charging power as they could without it?
Oren Halevi: In general, yes. If we break it down into different use cases, it depends. With public charging it’s a bit harder, because people want to come, charge and get out. They don’t want to stay connected for hours. When you look at a fleet depot, on the other hand, they charge overnight, which means you don’t have to charge all the vehicles together. You can start lining them up and reducing the overall load of the site. So, different use cases have different calculations, but yes.
Charged: In a fleet charging situation, you know what vehicles are going to be charging and when. So just by using software, no batteries or upgrade to the power connection, instead of charging one electric bus or truck, you might be able to charge as many as six.
Oren Halevi: Exactly. We’re doing a really interesting pilot, which we’re pushing to become an open-source project, available to everyone. Say you have a fleet of vehicles—let’s say Volvo as an example, one of our customers—and you have charging depots that welcome those fleets to come and charge.
The fleet driver would probably know when he’s arriving at the depot, so he says, “I’m arriving at two o’clock, but I want to make sure I have enough energy to charge.” And that’s becoming more complicated because you need to calculate in advance how many vehicles are coming and say, “I cannot have any more vehicles coming in at this hour because I’m at full capacity, not necessarily because of the number of chargers, but because of the grid.” We are building this integration together with a charging depot on one side, a fleet on the other side, and we’re in the middle. This will all go through a roaming protocol because they are different companies, and they need to communicate somehow.
Charged: How do CPO apps interface with your system?
Oren Halevi: We’re also on the app side. Driivz provides a white-label app to our customers, which means that the app that you use may actually be a Driivz app even though it looks like an app from Shell or someone else. Some of our customers have decided to build their own apps on top of the API that we provide—that’s another option. It requires some more technical capabilities from our customer’s side, but we are good both ways. Driivz is also responsible for the full billing cycle—getting the credit card information from the driver, calculating how much the driver needs to pay, showing it to the driver accurately based on regulations such as CTEP, then generating an invoice.
Charged: CTEP?
Oren Halevi: CTEP [California Type Evaluation Program] started as a California regulation, focusing on providing accurate information about the energy delivered and the cost to the driver. It has become standard in many of the states in the US [as the National Type Evaluation Program]. We are required to show accurate pricing information to the driver while they charge—basically like a gas station.
Driivz provides a white-label EV driver app to our customers, and we’re also responsible for the full billing cycle—getting credit card information, showing payment info to the driver accurately based on regulations such as CTEP, then generating an invoice.
Charged: In my experience, that part of it works pretty well—charging apps seem to give me pretty good information about what I’m buying. The thing that bothers me is that there’s so many apps, and they’re all different. On some apps, starting a charge is a complex process, and on others it’s very simple. Why can’t they all be like that?
Oren Halevi: I think it’s a young market and it will evolve. I don’t know if one provider will win, maybe Google or Apple Maps will show all the chargers, maybe some kind of regulation would force all the CPOs to show other chargers as well. Different countries are doing different things. I agree. It’s still a pain for the driver to download five or ten different apps.
Charged: If these CPOs all participated in roaming, then you could just use one app.
Oren Halevi: Yes. Roaming capability is another service that we provide. For example, if one of our customers partners with ChargePoint, then you as an EV driver can charge at any ChargePoint locations and vice versa. It’s a start. CPOs need to add maybe two or three more big networks into their roaming agreements, then you’re going to be fairly well covered.
Charged: Tell me about the geographical breakdown of your customers.
Oren Halevi: We’re in 36 countries. In most of those countries, we work with the number-one and/or number-two players in the market. For example, if you take all the public charging in the Nordic countries, our customers cover about 80% of this market. Same thing in Ireland and the UK, getting there in Germany, Australia, Japan, the US—those are the biggest markets that we currently play in.
Charged: And what different kinds of customers do you have? Charge point operators? Fleets?
Oren Halevi: It’s a nice combination. In Europe, we see more electric utilities that are our customers. It happens less in the US because of regulations. Most electric utilities in the US cannot operate chargers, which they can in Europe. Gas and oil, a big part—Shell is an example globally. Fuel retailers and convenience stores represent one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, in the US especially. And most of the convenience store chains globally are actually using Driivz.
Charged: I see a couple of categories on your web site that we don’t talk about much here in the US. What’s the difference between an electric mobility service provider and an EV service provider?
Oren Halevi: An EMSP is an app-only provider. They don’t own or operate any chargers, they just manage the driver’s side. You would see those usually as automotive OEMs. Volvo is one example—they don’t own any chargers, but they allow their drivers to roam across multiple CPOs. As for EVSP, the idea is that a CPO can also be an EMSP. They have their own app and have their own registered drivers, so they play as both a CPO and an EMSP.
Charged: So, for instance, Ford in the US is an EMSP because they have an app that lets you use a bunch of different networks.
Oren Halevi: They’re also a CPO on the fleet side. They have their own solution that manages chargers in depots.
Charged: Do you have some competitors out there? There’s another software-only company called AMPECO, and they seem to have a pretty global footprint.
Oren Halevi: I would say our most significant differentiator is our proven experience in managing some of the largest EV charging networks in the world. We offer a scalable and comprehensive solution to global customers with everything that is behind that—customization, support and reliability. There aren’t many players that are software-only, and we’re at the top of that market and we’ve been here the longest.
Charged: A lot of companies are offering a turnkey charging solution, including hardware, software, even the vehicles sometimes, and some of those have their own proprietary software. Are some of them your customers?
Oren Halevi: Not typically, no. This is a good idea, especially for the smaller customer that doesn’t want to handle selecting the best of breed in hardware, software, services, etc. For larger customers, I recommend avoiding proprietary software solutions, as they can hinder growth by limiting compatibility with evolving industry regulations, protocols and charger types.
Charged: So, it’s only large fleets and CPOs that are your customers, and they’re managing their own fleet solutions as opposed to using one company to handle it all. They’re buying software from you, but choosing hardware and services on their own.
Oren Halevi: Right. And for those reasons, we tend to work with larger fleets. We tend to work with what we call FMCs, fleet management companies. A good example of that is Shell. Shell operates around 30,000 fleets globally. And it’s actually not their fleets—it could be a municipality or a trucking company or something else, but Driivz operates all the chargers on behalf of the fleet. We provide the back end for Shell to do that.
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