EV Charging Resilience 101: Keeping Stations Online When Networks Fail

VP of Engineering, Sith Dharmasiri takes you behind the scenes of this real-world test of EV charging resilience, showcasing why reliable infrastructure is critical for the future of transportation. Discover how our innovative edge computing and rapid response kept drivers charging through a complete network outage.

I’ve had a few guiding north stars that are cemented in my head since I started here at Electric Era, but there is one that, given recent events, has really been shining bright…

EV charging stations are critical transportation infrastructure. Reliability in transportation infrastructure is not convenience - it is the lifeblood of economic and social security for our nation. It is required to enable transportation electrification at scale.

This means that we have to take reliability seriously - with the same attitude that space launch providers take the reliability of their spacecraft, and the same attitude that vehicle manufacturers take with the safety equipment in their vehicles. In an industry plagued by frequent outages, unreliable chargers, and frustrated drivers, our commitment to reliability stands out, as this example demonstrates.

Our operations team is the core of making sure that deployed stations operate reliably, and I want to share a recent event that I think is both technically relevant and, frankly, makes me quite proud to work here.

A common cause for EV station outages is loss of backend connectivity, given that 1) stations can be in remote locations and LTE-based Internet is less reliable than people think, and 2) that cloud-based services themselves actually do suffer outages. Typical solutions for charging rely on a backend to authorize charging sessions, and for payment terminals to be online to function. The EV station “body” is thousands of miles away from its “brain”.

Electric Era’s charging stations utilize edge compute to manage charging sessions directly on-site. This allows our charging stations to colocate their brain and body, and authorize sessions and payments, even if offline. 

Last weekend, one of our sites had two LTE providers experience a simultaneous outage, knocking our redundant Internet connections offline. Within a few minutes, our on-call operators were notified by our monitoring systems that a station was offline and began investigating. Telemetry determined within a few more minutes that this was either a total equipment failure or a total Internet outage. 

We knew that we had to act quickly to determine if this was a total equipment failure, since neither LTE provider was reporting an outage. Within 2 hours, a technician was on the road to the site. At the same time, the operations team prepped a spare parts kit with replacement parts for a total power systems failure. Within 3 hours, the technician reported that the site was in fact operational. There was even an ID.4 charging without issue when they arrived.

We verified the system was functional and left the site, making note for the future that we can expect multi-carrier regional outages often (it’s possible that carriers can share the same physical infrastructure).

Nothing went wrong for drivers that night, but it was amazing to watch the operations team follow through. Rich telemetry up until the moment of connectivity loss allowed us to debug and narrow the issue within minutes. If the site had in fact suffered a total equipment failure, we would have had equipment and technicians out on site for an in-field swap within 8 hours. 

This is the kind of thing that makes me proud to be a part of this team. It’s the team’s relentless pursuit of operational excellence that I see as both awe-inspiring and necessary to ensure EV charging’s place as part of this nation’s critical transportation infrastructure.

Watch Sith’s video interview 'Q&A: EV Charging Resilience with Electric Era’s VP of Engineering’ below