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Challenge

How might we enable secure smart charging for Repsol’s residential EV chargers in low- or no-connectivity garages, while supporting real-time power balancing and remote diagnostics at scale and at a viable cost?

Repsol wants to overcome the connectivity limitations affecting residential EV chargers installed in private and community garages.

The challenge aims to identify a secure and cost-efficient connectivity and edge solution that supports charging optimization, real-time power balancing and remote diagnostics across weak, intermittent and no-signal environments.

Description

Repsol

Repsol is a global energy company operating across the energy value chain. It combines traditional and low-carbon energy activities with a strong focus on technological innovation, customer solutions and the transition towards a more efficient and sustainable energy system.

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Challenge framing

Current Situation

Residential chargers are connected to the customer’s electricity meter and may be installed in garages where domestic Wi-Fi does not reach and mobile coverage is weak, intermittent or unavailable.

The initial reference charger supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, OCPP 1.6 and local Modbus. Connectivity currently depends largely on the customer, and many chargers remain offline. Repsol has also explored using the customer’s smartphone as a Bluetooth gateway.

Current pain points include limited charger visibility, inability to guarantee real-time power balancing, missing or delayed charging and diagnostic data, customer configuration friction, heterogeneous site conditions, costly dedicated connectivity and difficulty identifying whether failures originate in the charger, network, installation or backend.

Desired Situation

Repsol wants a secure, edge-enabled connectivity solution that maintains charging optimization, real-time power balancing and remote diagnostics under weak, intermittent and absent connectivity conditions.

Depending on each site, the solution may use existing fixed connectivity, PLC, cellular or LPWAN, mesh networks, shared gateways, smartphone gateways or hybrid approaches. A common edge layer should support safe local operation, data buffering, synchronization, monitoring and recovery.

The ambition is to minimize customer involvement and site-specific engineering while establishing an economically viable approach that can scale to thousands of charging points.

Stakeholders

Stakeholders

Internal stakeholders
Smart charging and flexibility, retail energy, EV-charging product and operations, installation and field service, customer service, IT, cloud, data and AI, cybersecurity, legal, privacy, compliance, innovation and procurement.

External stakeholders
Residential customers, V2C and other charger manufacturers, connectivity providers, startups, installers, maintenance partners, housing communities and electrical-infrastructure owners.

Primary users
Residential EV customers, Repsol smart-charging and flexibility teams, power-balancing and charger-operations teams, installers and field-service technicians.

Possible solutions

Possible Solutions

  • Resilient connectivity solutions for underground and low-signal environments.
  • Edge computing and embedded intelligence for EV chargers.
  • PLC, cellular, LPWAN, mesh and hybrid connectivity solutions.
  • Shared, adjacent or mobile gateway solutions.
  • Automated communication-path switching and outage recovery.
  • Local buffering and secure store-and-forward synchronization.
  • Remote charger diagnostics and monitoring platforms.
  • Connectivity and charger anomaly-detection solutions.
  • Site-assessment and connectivity decision-support tools.
  • Multi-vendor charger and backend integration platforms.

Technical Requirements

  • Compatibility with OCPP 1.6 and local Modbus.
  • Bidirectional charger status, data and remote-control communication.
  • Real-time operation for power balancing.
  • Safe local charging when external connectivity is unavailable.
  • Persistent local buffering with ordered and reliable synchronization.
  • Automatic detection of connectivity degradation, recovery and event prioritization.
  • Integration with Repsol smart-charging, power-balancing, diagnostics and monitoring systems.
  • Secure device identity, authentication, encryption, credential management and command authorization.
  • Logging, auditability, fail-safe operation and protection against duplicated, outdated or unauthorized commands.
  • Working product or functional prototype with edge capabilities and a credible path to deployment across thousands of charging points.
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