The bankruptcy of POWERDALE is sad news that has shaken the world of Electro-Mobility. A Belgian pioneer in the manufacture of charging stations and the famous “Nexxtender Mobile” portable charger, the company is no more.
Its activities have been taken over by two companies: one from Luxembourg (DIEGO Luxembourg) for the Nexxtmove platform, the other (ELOY & BECKER) for the takeover of the intellectual property (IP) relating to the hardware, with the intention of developing new products.
This is reassuring, but we also hear legitimate concerns.
Indeed, many of the customers who had placed their trust in POWERDALE had not imagined that the long-term viability of their investment would now be in question, nor that they would now be charged for a service that had become partial, and therefore considered expensive.
NETiKA, developer of the NEOFLEET solution, had also equipped itself with some of these POWERDALE chargers:
- NEXXTENDER ADVANCE
- CLUSTER
- NEXXTENDER Mobile
As a reminder, NEOFLEET advocates a clear separation between the charging hardware (the terminal) and the intelligence (the software), for several reasons:
- Putting the intelligence inside the kiosk (an electronic unit) makes it more fixed, unlike software (hosted on a server) which can be easily adapted to market needs.
- As kiosks are subject to climatic conditions, they suffer more than a server, and therefore require maintenance. Even if they are maintained, they will not last as long as a charging station that simply supplies electrical power to the car under the control of components placed in an electrical panel (inside). Furthermore, these components, designed to serve electrical cabinets, are “industrial”, meaning that their reliability and longevity are well established,
- These systems integrating both hardware and software are closed systems, meaning that they can only manage power distribution (LOAD BALANCING, and soon the obligation to load shed) between chargers of the same brand, or even the same model. Now that POWERDALE is no longer in business, the question is what are customers going to use to complete their installation, how quickly, using what management platform,…?
It was undoubtedly to address the first two reasons that POWERDALE then developed the “CLUSTER” model, as long as it respected this logic of placing the intelligence in the electrical panel, and powering an ultra-simple outdoor terminal, equipped with a simple power cable.
NEOFLEET was developed in 2016, initially on NETiKA‘s parking lot, equipped with 44 chargers.
In line with the NEOFLEET logic of an OPEN (multi-brand) system, we had already integrated the management of these POWERDALE bollards into the development.
Today, customers using POWERDALE charging stations or mobile chargers do not need to worry about this announcement of bankruptcy, as NEOFLEET can communicate with their POWERDALE charging stations in their parking lot, via a single small module to be placed in their electrical panel, called the “ SMARTMASTER ».
As NEOFLEET controls the SMARTMASTER, which in turn controls any OCPP 1.6j-compatible charging station, it enables companies equipped with POWERDALE charging stations to add charging stations from other brands to their installation.
NEOFLEET will therefore be able to control their “multi-brand” configuration.
SMARTMASTER’s compatibility has already been validated with the following charging stations:
- POWERDALE (Advance and Cluster)
- ALFEN (EV Double and Single S-Line)
- ABB (Terra AC and DC)
- EVBox (Elvi)
- SCHNEIDER (EV Link)
- Mennekes (AMTRON Professionnal)
- SMAPPEE, …
Concerning the transmission of charging information from POWERDALE chargers in employees’ homes, we have learned that DIEGO Luxembourg charges €5/month for this simple transmission of information from POWERDALE Nexxtender Mobile chargers…
According to IT usage and customs, this type of information, available via an API, should be offered with the charger; at worst, it should be billed at a fraction of this price.
NRGkick, for example, offers this kind of information retrieval for just €2/month…
So it’s likely that customers who feel compelled to pay a high price will soon be looking for another solution, in a growing catalog of chargers with which NEOFLEET is compatible.
Interested? Contact us here !