Charging toward a more dependable experience: CA proposes nation’s first session-reliability rules

We’ve all experienced it – or know someone who has: You pull up to a charger. It’s online. It says it’s available. But it won’t charge your EV. Maybe your payment won’t go through, or perhaps the charging session stops after a few seconds.

Charger reliability – or, rather, lack thereof – may be holding back our clean-energy transition. After all, if folks can’t depend on getting the charge they need when they need it, will enough people adopt EVs?

Tackling this too-pervasive issue requires accurately measuring charger reliability. To date, “uptime” – whether the charger is online and available – has been the metric du jour. (Many grant programs, like NEVI, require chargers to achieve at least 97% uptime.) 

But, as many EV drivers have experienced, just because a charger is “available” doesn’t mean it works. 

Simply put, “uptime” as a reliability metric captures only part of the story. Measuring charger reliability accurately also requires a way to measure session reliability: Was the driver successfully able to charge the EV?

This is why we were so excited to see recently proposed reliability regulations from the California Energy Commission (CEC), which would – for the first time in the United States – define and measure “successful charge attempt rate” (SCAR) to gauge session reliability:

Ninety percent of the time that a customer attempts to initiate a charging session at a regulated charger the charging session must last at least five minutes, which will be considered a successful charge for this regulation. The minimum SCAR is defined on a per-port and not-site basis; each charger at a charging site must achieve a SCAR of at least 90 percent to comply.

We believe that establishing session reliability standards, as CEC proposes doing, will go a long way toward addressing reliability issues, improving the driver experience, and spurring greater EV adoption.

There may be some tweaks here and there worth considering to make the proposed regulations more workable and enforceable, but we applaud the CEC for leading the charge toward a more reliable and dependable charging experience for all.

We at Electric Era see the CEC’s regulations as a collective call to action for the entire industry, and we’re excited to do our part in providing a charging experience worthy of our customers and the driving public.