OUTCOMES AWARD FINALIST: Counties Energy – Driving change for the Kiwi EV market 

Outcomes Award (New Zealand Energy Excellence Awards)

Counties Energy’s OpenLoop platform has brought competition into the EV charging market while simplifying billing and reconciliation for infrastructure providers and motorists.

The system began life as a charging platform for electricity distributors moving into the EV charging market and has grown into a fully customisable shared platform across public chargers, commercial charging sites for large fleets, electric buses and trucks, and home charging.

One of OpenLoop’s biggest outcomes was introducing competition to the New Zealand EV charging market by providing an alternative option. Where there had been a monopoly dominated by one player, OpenLoop opened up the market, creating an open ecosystem for EV charging.

The service also enables the opportunity for demand response offerings, as well as further collaborations with other electricity industry participants which will create cost-savings for end consumers.   

Driver

Besides driving change to open up the EV charging market, Counties Energy says that to drive growth in the e-mobility market, charging and managing an electric vehicle had to be made easy, intuitive and informative, whether for a single user, a transport operator, or a fleet manager.

OpenLoop takes the hassle out of the process and delivers a real-time, data-driven experience for drivers, charge point owners (CPOs) and fleet managers.

Counties Energy says the experience is seamless, regardless of EV charging brands from most manufacturers, and benefits CPOs by allowing them to be part of a larger EV charging network. Firms offering EVs to employees can be billed when vehicles are charged at home or at work sites.

The system is a standards-based platform and is available to EV users and CPOs on mobile, tablets and the web. The main customer interface is the mobile app, which can be used on OpenLoop public and private charging stations. It allows users to register an account, top it up, view historic data, find charge points, start/stop transactions and register radio-frequency identification tags.   

Customers without smart phones can access OpenLoop through a web-based tool that lets them register an account, top-up and view historic transaction data. CPOs, large users and vehicle fleet owners have access to an interactive web-based admin portal to view and extract data on their charge point use, perform reconciliation activities, manage user permissions and view available dashboards.   

The Outcomes Award is sponsored by the Electricity Authority

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