Saving Lives With Bi-Directional Charging, Plus Open Standards are Important

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The dock workers strike is over and there’s nothing going on politically in the United States, so what is there to talk about? Fortunately, I have some follow-up regarding that whole nasty JuiceBox situation, and there’s some legitimately good YouTube advice that experts would charge you thousands of dollars to hear!

In This Issue

• ChargeLab Saves The Day… Sort Of

• Bi-Directional Charging

• The Best YouTube Advice You’ll Receive This Year

• My Appearance on Wheel Bearings

• More Goodies

ChargeLab Saves The Day… Sort Of

Last week, I pushed my Thursday edition out a day early for fear that the news was going to be old by the time the publication went live regarding Enel X deciding to abandon the U.S. and Canadian market. Enel X, makers of JuiceBox home and commercial charging equipment, cited things like interest rates and a cooling EV market as a reason to pack up and go home.

The problem with doing this is, of course, what happens to the charging equipment. JuiceBox chargers aren’t just dumb chargers, they have internet connectivity and connect to an App Store. Additionally, there is an entire enterprise suite of software and commercial chargers that can’t just fail over to dumb charging mode without serious repercussions.

Fortunately, Enel X supported the open standard OCPP so another company can swoop in. On Friday we learned that company appears to be ChargeLab.

Per reporting on The EV Report, commercial chargers can be migrated to the company’s platform. Presumably, that includes the level 2 EVSE commercial equipment and the company’s DCFC hardware. Owners of commercial equipment are encouraged to contact ChargeLab.

There’s no solution for residential users, though. That equipment will retain basic charging functionality, but none of the smart features will continue to work. It’s apparently too complex to merge that equipment over. For those using JuiceBoxes with electric company management and incentives, I’m not sure what’ll happen.

The key take-away is that supporting open standards prevented this from being a true catastrophe. How many commercial chargers are in place is yet to be seen, but the number must be significantly less than home users.

It’s nice to be able to program time-of-use charging at the charging hardware, especially if you review cars for a living. Having to set up with each individual car you get every week can be a time consuming pain in the rear. But that’s the most first-world problem in the history of first-world problems.

Normal users can, and should, set up charging profiles and charging time from within their vehicles. This allows you to buy a relatively inexpensive dumb home charger, saving you money, and if the company goes kaput you don’t have to worry about losing that support.

Many cars will now supporting location-based setup. So you can set up time-based charging at home, but when the car isn’t at home, it can full charge as soon as you plug it in. These things are getting pretty clever.

If it weren’t for the open standard support here, the consumer would definitely lose. As we move to more software-defined stuff and things, automakers and hardware manufacturers need to anticipate that they might someday be out of business. Stories like this are just going to encourage people to keep their old cars on the road, which is something automakers most certainly do not want.

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Bi-Directional Charging

The effects of Hurricane Helene are still being felt across the country, and sometime soon we’re going to have to reckon with the fact that weather is worse and that living some places just isn’t feasible with our changing climate. But that’s for another time.

The Atlantic ran a piece talking about a benefit of electric vehicles – right now mostly electric trucks – and that’s bi-directional charging. As it turns out, if your power goes out and you have 100 kWh just sitting in your garage, you can use that to power your house for days or weeks.

While this is nothing new to people who follow the industry, it’s another reminder that there are some benefits to EV ownership that you don’t have with gas-powered vehicles. Whenever a big storm hits, fear mongers take to their keyboards to say “wow, no power means no electric vehicles.” Or, specifically with Helene, flooding causing cars to “blow up.”

(Note: Quoting The Sun is basically quoting the National Enquirer, but I digress.)

As it turns out, as days turns into weeks without power, owners of electric vehicles who have the ability to power their homes from it are keeping the lights on, food fresh, and medications cooled. If you’re someone who needs electricity to survive (think medical equipment), an electric pickup truck could quite possibly save your life.

The point is, electric vehicles can be just as beneficial in bad weather as in good weather. Flooding hurts and damages all types of cars – not just EVs – and houses flooding with salt water probably isn’t good on home wiring, either.

Whether or not you believe that the climate change we’re experience is made worse by humans, the fact remains the climate is changing. While it makes good sense to have a generator for your house if you live in an area prone to power outages, gas or diesel generators aren’t a perfect solution. Neither are EVs, but they will provide an alternative to help keep the lights on, and unlike gas generators you can also drive an EV.

That’s what they call in business a “win/win.”

The Best YouTube Advice You’ll Receive This Year

Having spent 4 years working on building a YouTube channel, and working with some of the best and brightest in the field, there’s a few things that I’ve learned through the process. Whether or not you’re in marketing or you want to create a channel yourself (perhaps automotive), there’s one important thing you need to know. And you’re going to get it for free right now.