Daloop

The best EV charging management platform? Yours (made by Daloop)

By Head of Product Pedro Teixeira

We’re never not excited by all of the growing opportunity and competition in EV charging.

One of our deepest beliefs – and greatest differentiators – is that Daloop is built for companies that want to elevate their brand and grow their business in EV charging.

We don’t just want to be the software partner to those who install, operate and monetize EV charging infrastructure – we want them to take credit for it!

That means the Daloop platform – the back-office and mobile apps for iOS and Android – can be fully branded with the logo assets and colors of our clients, so that they can get closer to their own users and customers. Beyond that, Daloop's APIs and ability to integrate other ones take the ability to white-label solutions to a whole other level.

(It’s not obligatory though – you can still use “Daloop” if you prefer!)

Your brand, your language too

Not only can you remove friction and create credibility with your end users with clear branding, you can fully localize the platform and mobile apps in your language(s) too. ¡Qué bueno!

Customer loyalty

Some software-led players are making a lot of noise in the market, but their play is a fully vertically-integrated one, and you’re interested in building direct relationships with businesses and consumers. Why should your software vendor come between you? Daloop makes it easy to offer our solutions as your own.

Cost-effective

No need to hire in-house developers or invest huge sums in building your own software solution. We’ve been doing this in one form or another since 2010, and have a team of dozens in a company fully backed by one of Europe’s largest energy firms. We’ve got the backwards-compatible, forward-looking platform, apps and dedicated support to help you succeed.

Faster to market

Not only is it cheaper, but it’s faster to deploy too. Our platform and apps are already live and being used by tens of thousands of people worldwide. You can go to market in a matter of weeks.

Let’s talk about how Daloop can work for you.

From installer to operator, how to grow an EV charging business with white-label software

As a charge-point installer (CPI) or charge-point operator (CPO) today, you are uniquely positioned as the final link to the driver charging their EV. To expand beyond hardware, though, you have a choice to make: Build a new business or seek out a best-of-breed solution to do it for you.

Installers and operators of EV charging stations are uniquely positioned as the final link to the drivers and vehicles that use them. But to expand beyond hardware and build ongoing relationships with clients and end users, you have a choice to make: create your own management software, or seek out a best-of-breed solution to do it for you.

As a charging point provider, you’re in the business of building, delivering and maintaining charging stations. You’re not in the software business. Instead of cobbling together a system with expensive internal resources, you can white label this functionality, delivering an e-mobility operations platform from the experts under your own brand.

Why should chargepoint installers white label with Daloop?

  • Moving from home charger installer to businesses requires a more comprehensive solution, including backend software. Daloop gives installers the comprehensive tools to manage operational and financial requirements of businesses.
  • Growing your business means establishing and maintaining relationships with customers beyond one-off installations. Daloop offers installers ongoing referral fees and insights to spot new opportunities for installations and maintenance.
  • You have an opportunity now to gain early mover advantage, when barriers to entry are low and others are just beginning to come into the space. Using Daloop, you can extend your reach with customers by potentially taking on monitoring and management of charge points and offering new services.

Why should chargepoint operators choose Daloop?

  • Daloop allows CPOs to proactively manage operations and optimize the costs of the charge-point infrastructure. This means CPOs can keep costs low, from procurement to installation to maintenance.
  • Daloop offers smart energy management, including alerts and alarms, load balancing, tariffs, and user access in the cloud, freeing you to deliver high uptime, availability and energy capacity.
  • Daloop’s platform offers finely tuned settings and business logic for access, usage, tariffs and penalties, providing the agility to maximize your assets’ potential for revenue generation.

In both cases, you’ll be able to:

  • Go to market in weeks using an existing platform dedicated to empowering you or your customers’ brands.
  • Establish a technology platform that is backwards compatible — it works with older systems with no customization needed — as well as designed to adapt with future advancements.
  • Tap potential new revenue streams with industry-leading tariffs, payments and invoicing functionalities built in to the platform.

Let’s talk about how Daloop can work for you.

Daloop platform guide: how to enable dynamic tariffs

By Head of Product Pedro Teixeira

A fundamental requirement for monetizing EV charging is the ability to set the right price. But “the right price” is rarely a single, unchanging number – it necessarily varies and fluctuates depending on who is paying, when, where, for how much and how long. We’ve long understood this complexity, and have sought to reflect it with matching flexibility in our platform.

Within Daloop, a “Tariff” is made of one or more pricing rules – and you can add as many of them as needed. Each pricing rule is composed of four attributes:

  • the schedule
  • the activation fee
  • the price per kWh charged
  • the € per min of charging

Dynamic Tariffs

Perhaps for ease of management, you decide to set one pricing rule for all days, regardless of the hour. However, you most likely want to stay profitable and competitive by optimizing pricing for peak energy costs, or indeed incentivizing charging during low-utilization periods.

For example: let’s say you notice only 5% usage between the hours of 7pm and 8am – you could have a lower activation fee and lower € per min price to spread demand and increase overall revenue.

Tariffs by asset type

Daloop allows you to set tariffs for different sets of connectors in charging points.

For instance, fast chargers typically fully charge an EV over an average of 20 minutes, so you can set a higher € per minute pricing rule for just these connectors.

Likewise, for slower charging, say overnight, you can have an entirely different price to account for this.

Example of a service tariff prior to any pricing rules

Tariffs by service offer

The service tariff is a differentiating feature where you can incorporate extra components that may affect the final price like local and regional taxes or incentive schemes.

It’s also a sought-after feature by e-mobility service providers (EMSPs) who may not own the underlying assets, which may or may not have their own tariff set by Charge Point Owners/Operators (CPOs).

Daloop can enable both, conjointly or separately as required – the CPOs being able to set how much they want to earn from their assets, and EMSPs being able to set how much they want to earn from their users. At the end of the day, end users don’t have to worry about this complexity – when enabled, there’s only one price for them to consider.

What’s next for Daloop tariffs in 2023?

As shown above, operators can define different prices per kWh for peak or off-peak periods. However, as we’ve seen energy prices fluctuate rapidly and frequently – often daily – around the world, there’s now a pressing need to protect margin regardless of energy price.

We are currently testing a beta feature with our current customers where you will be able to set pricing rules with fixed percentage margins pegged to live energy costs, ensuring consistent profit in an effortless manner.

Want to know more? Get in touch with our team today.

Daloop joins the EVRoaming Foundation as Full Contributor

By André Dias, CTO and Founder of Daloop

We're honoured to join the EVRoaming Foundation as a Full Contributor to improve and promote the adoption of the OCPI Protocol - Open Charge Point Interface — a true enabler of interoperability and roaming-by-design for all our CPO and EMSP customers around the world.

The objective of the EVRoaming Foundation is to facilitate roaming services for charging electric vehicles and provide transparent information to consumers about charging locations and prices, by use of the open and independent Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) protocol.

Daloop has long supported OCPI as the reference protocol for open roaming among e-mobility partners, most notably with our experience of developing and implementing version 2.2 on the Portuguese MOBI.E Hub.

The ultimate goal of the protocol is to allow any EV driver to charge at any charging station. The EVRoaming Foundation wants to ensure that OCPI is a sustainable and strong protocol that remains accessible in the long-term while allowing for different business and regulatory models to be supported.

If we’re going to continue to upwardly scale the adoption of electric vehicles, it’s vital that we have a more innovative and open ecosystem, and we couldn’t be more excited to play an active and collaborative role in developing and deploying OCPI 3.0 in the near future.

How to deploy low-cost smart EV charging with Daloop

By Jane Hoffer, CEO of Daloop

As adoption of electric vehicles continues to rise, there is one fundamental truth: EVs must be charged. But how can you weigh the value of your limited budget and finite number of parking spaces against the need to provide EV chargers?

The one thing you don’t want to do is over-invest and put tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of commercial charging station equipment in place to cover every single parking spot.

First off, charging equipment is expensive. Depending where you are in the world, the absolute minimum cost for a public charger – equipment only – can be as low as $500 per socket, but you also need to take into account the installation costs of cables, circuit boards and civil engineering. Installing 10 charging stations would probably cost you no less than $40,000, and that doesn’t include any fast chargers, which start at around $12,000 – with ultrafast hardware units going up to $50,000 – and installation coming in at around $5,000.

Secondly, EVs will have different charging demands based on their use. Most vehicles simply don’t need to be fast-charged at the last minute. For example, think of the most common use cases: an apartment complex, hospitals, universities, or transport hubs. Drivers can leave the vehicle to be charged overnight or during long-term stays—charging options that are less expensive.

Daloop’s low-cost, low-power solution

But what if you could use an off-the-shelf hardware that would create smart charging devices that bridge any parking spot and EVs with cloud-based management software?A low-cost smart device (as low as $50 per connection) could connect to standard electric outlets for charging EVs at low power, turning a basic connection into a charging station.

This kind of smart device also offers the most critical bells and whistles you need to manage a charging environment without the added hardware and infrastructure costs:

• remote on/off control
• consumption monitoring
• a scheduling and reservations system
• invoicing and reimbursement management

It’s also configurable, giving you options to offer EV charging in other ways:

• As a home-charging solution for employee fleets, able to differentiate between work and private usage and manage transactions and payments accordingly;
• To charge other electric vehicles such as e-bikes or scooters, tracking their associated consumption and costs; and for
Connecting older, non-smart charging devices to the cloud to provide some measure of control and consumption monitoring and reporting without the huge investment of upgrading existing hardware.

Want to learn more? Just ask.

Driving EV Adoption: Why Range Anxiety is a Waste of Time

By André Dias, CTO and Founder of Daloop

In this guest post, André Dias, CTO of cloud-native charging infrastructure software provider, Daloop, sets out why worrying about where to charge up your EV is a waste of time

Electric vehicles (EVs) are rapidly gaining momentum. The global EV market was valued at $163.01bn in 2020 and is projected to reach $823.75 billion by 2030. The UK, meanwhile, has seen more EVs purchased in March 2022 alone than in the whole of 2019.

Likewise, the government is getting behind the transition to EVs and has introduced a law proposing that all new residential homes and buildings have the required facilities for an EV charge point. This is good news and a necessity because, as EVs start to become mainstream, reliance on a roadside, on-demand fuel supply model won’t be cost-efficient or effective and it certainly won’t meet the increasing demand.

That’s not to say that EV adoption has reached anything nearing a tipping point yet. For government efforts to expand adoption, the electric charging network and infrastructure needs more investment to ensure the target of installing 300,000 new EV charging points by 2030 is reached. But adapting infrastructure to bring charge points to the spaces that vehicle users already frequent, such as retail parks and homes, makes the switch to EVs far easier both practically and psychologically. Without a doubt, the transition away from combustion engines is well underway. The trends show that increasing numbers of businesses and consumers are planning to switch. According to research from BP, 43% of managers and 41% of drivers expect to make the switch to EVs within two years.

A survey published in May by tyre manufacturer Bridgestone revealed that 67% of motorists intend to transition to EVs. Additionally, over the past year, we have seen Ford, Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi commit to massive investments in EV production, alongside luxury carmakers Mercedes-Benz, Bentley, and Jaguar-Land Rover announcing pledges to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

But what are the cultural changes that need to occur for a successful and confident transition to EVs? And is range anxiety a red herring?

I say this because most of the barriers to widespread EV adoption appear to be around charging infrastructure and range, with much debate around how far you can travel before you need to plug in and the anxiety that causes drivers. In other words, if you’re in an EV and have concerns that you’re not going to make your destination (or a charge point), then range anxiety may kick in.

If you’re constantly comparing the distance to your destination with the projected range of your vehicle when driving, you can only really think of it as anxiety if the calculation troubles you. But I would argue that this is exactly the same feeling you get when you’re red-lighting, running on fumes and not sure whether you’ll get to where you need to be in a vehicle with a combustion engine.

Re-imagining mobility

Range anxiety isn’t a new concept: it existed long before EVs. Probably even to some extent when true horsepower was used to move people and goods around. Water, food, and rest were needed before a journey could continue.

The difference being now, because we have grown accustomed to an on-demand roadside fuel supply model, we struggle to imagine mobility in any other way. Perhaps we should focus more on “change” anxiety rather than just on range and explore the inevitable steps that organisations and individuals will need to take to change not only their behaviour but also their working practices.

The reason I say range anxiety is a bit of a red herring is that, in my experience, there are other less apparent considerations that truly make or break a fleet electrification strategy.

For example, when a workplace needs charging infrastructure, whether in depots, office car parks, or the homes of fleet vehicle drivers, ill-considered installation can often be prohibitively expensive, removing the potential cost-benefit that, alongside sustainability objectives, may have led to the decision.

The installation of charge points for a fleet effectively creates a private charging network. In other words, it’s only accessible by authorised vehicles, but many don’t consider how they’ll be used practically.

It’s normally essential for operational vehicles to be prioritised over staff vehicles, so businesses need a reservation system to ensure priority vehicles can charge when they need to. Alongside this, strategies typically include the provision of energy into some kind of benefits package, or have a charging and reporting mechanism for it, as it will inevitably be seen as benefit-in-kind.

In many cases, fleet vehicles are kept overnight at the driver’s home, complicating overnight charging. Depending on their own circumstances, drivers will have vastly different capabilities to install chargers where they live. If a charge point is installed, the question of who pays for the installation arises, and what should happen if the driver moves? What if they don’t own the property?

The key consideration for any business looking to adopt electric mobility is oversight. Regardless of the planned infrastructure, businesses need an intelligent software solution that links vehicles, charge points, energy, and the driver to ensure that they maintain control.

A data-driven management platform can prioritise charge points in offices and depots for commercial vehicles, ensuring that these vehicles have enough journey charge on any given day.

When fleets combine their electrification journey with smart analytics, sustainable mobility becomes not just a possibility, but a more efficient way to operate fleets. So, what is all the fuss about range anxiety?

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