Managed EV charging companies are helping to drive the growth of OpenADR adoption in the past three years. We are seeing this momentum continue in 2024, with a wave of companies joining the Alliance who are offering a different focus and innovative new business models to the growing EV marketplace.

One such member is Wevo Energy who joined us on our recent webinar to discuss New Frontiers in EV Charging. Here we find out a bit more about the company as we talk to Marina Hod, who’s leading Wevo Energy's EV charging optimization business in North America.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your company

I lead Wevo Energy’s business in North America. Wevo Energy is a relatively new business, founded in 2021 with a vision of electrifying every parking space, enabling dense parking lots and garages to have as many EV chargers as possible.

Today we operate across eight countries, managing EV charging at over 1,200 sites. That represents the electrification of over 150,000 parking spaces, many of which are at apartment complexes.

This year we announced that we had been acquired by SolarEdge, a global leader in solar inverters and optimizers, which allows us to do even more with EV charging optimization with other DER like solar and storage. I should also mention that we are very much about open standards, which is why we are delighted to be part of the OpenADR Alliance.

Tell us a bit more about how your solution works

Our load management solution maximizes existing building infrastructure by intelligently allocating power where and when it's needed most, allowing sites to get more EVs charged but without expensive infrastructure upgrades.Our smart algorithms learn drivers’ behaviour and create an optimal charging schedule, charging when rates are lowest, and ensuring that the vehicle is fully charged by the time that it's needed by the driver.

What’s trends are you seeing in the market right now?

In terms of what we're seeing in the EV space, certainly in North America – but this applies in other markets as well – is aggressive adoption of electric vehicles. By 2030, more than half of all new vehicle sales are going to be EVs – and most of the charging is being done at home. Not at the side of the road, or next to a grocery store, but where people live.

As adoption grows, we need more novel approaches for constrained environments. The demand arising from all this electrification is going to be unprecedented for our grid.

So, when we talk about optimizing EV charging and making the most efficient use of available infrastructure capacity, what are we talking about here? Ultimately, we want to make sure that EV charging is a win-win for the driver, for the site owner, for the grid, and for society. Most people drive on average perhaps 30 miles a day, and most EVs today have a range of well over 250 miles. So, they don't need to charge all the time. Most people charge a few times a week, and so there's no reason why EVs should be plugged in all the time.

You want to make sure that it's something that works for the driver and they're going to be able to charge at the lowest cost with the highest levels of convenience. Economic incentives are very important for driving the kind of behaviour that you want. You want people to charge during off peak times. So, then you need to have a significant differential between on peak and off-peak times. Ease of use and usability is key one, so those settings are important. Make it easy for people to do the thing that you want them to do. 

Optimizing EV charging in this way makes good business sense.

Finally, why is being part of the OpenADR Alliance important to you?

OpenADR’s mission is to standardize, automate, and simplify Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) to enable utilities and aggregators to cost-effectively manage growing energy demand & decentralized energy production, and customers to control their energy future. This is a vision and goal shared by Wevo Energy as we seek to ensure that EV charging not only doesn’t become a burden for the grid but will rather be another type of load flexibility that can provide significant benefits for balancing the grid, especially with intermittent renewables. With the proliferation of EVs on the roads of the US and beyond, EV charging will become an important grid resource and the OpenADR alliance can be a significant part of that story.

To watch the OpenADR webinar on New Frontiers in EV Charging, visit our webinar page: https://www.openadr.org/webinar-series

To learn more about Wevo Energy please visit: https://wevo.energy/