Powercast is an innovative solution, including a data sharing and notification solution with delivery partner ev.energy. Powercast provides real-time data sharing and notifications to EV customers, alerting them about planned and unplanned power outages in their area. This gives them the opportunity to plan and make alternative plans to keep their vehicle charged.
What is the project about?
Over 500,000 of UK Power Networks’ customers rely on their electric vehicles [EVs] being charged to get to work, school, or even just running errands. We forecast this number could increase to over 3.6 million customers by 2030. This makes these customers more vulnerable when there’s a power outage (planned or unplanned), meaning their EV might not get charged, leaving them unable to travel. With increasingly frequent extreme weather events like storms Ciara, Dennis, and Eunice, or heatwaves like the one in July 2022, the reliability of the electricity network is at risk. The challenge is ensuring UK Power Networks’ customers are supported through unavoidable planned or unplanned power cuts as more people switch to Low Carbon Technologies, making them even more reliant on the electricity network. There is a risk that UK Power Networks could be a barrier to switch to an EV if customers are unable to reliably charge their vehicles when they need it.
How we’re doing it
The solution is live, with real time power outage data available through a new application programming interface (API), Powercast, hosted on UK Power Networks Open Data Portal. ev.energy has integrated the API into their mobile charging application, ensuring that registered users receive timely notifications via the app or SMS about outages affecting their property. Users are also notified once power is restored.
What makes it innovative
Powercast has developed a data sharing and notification solution with delivery partner ev.energy. Powercast provides real-time data sharing and notifications to EV customers, alerting them about planned and unplanned power outages in their area. This gives them the opportunity to plan and make alternative plans to keep their vehicle charged.
What we’re learning
User research interviews and surveys: This involved research interviewing six and surveying 100 of ev.energy customers in the UK Power Networks region. It was incredibly insightful to help design the scope and scale of the user trial.
SMS was the main type of notification users wanted (73%), but email (47%) and push notifications (50%) were also popular. This led to rollout of SMS to the ev.energy consumer engagement platform.
There was no demonstrable need to have a basic and enhanced customer experience for users identifying with PSR (Priority Services Register) criteria.
Users mostly wanted start and end times of power cuts, status updates and whether the power cut was planned or unplanned.
Users were familiar and preferred the experience provided by ZapMap for finding public charge points.
Three-month user trial with 500 ev.energy users: Running a trial with real data and users provided significant learning and benefits. This approach allowed a progressive rollout from small numbers, steadily increasing to 500, allowing bugs and issues to be ironed out. The solution has moved from the trial to a production solution in business as usual. The learnings from this exercise can steer other charge point operators into some good practices for their own integrations.
Final Powercast API and ev.energy rollout: With the success of the trial, Powercast has launched a publicly available API, granting access to real time fault data from UK Power Networks. This API empowers third parties to create or enhance services and customer experiences, similar to what’s been achieved with ev.energy. All EV drivers should have an opportunity to benefit from automated notifications. UK Power Networks aims to collaborate with other Charge Point Operators to encourage the adoption of fault data in their customer applications.
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