Enel X Way abandoned its US EV charging customers. What happens next?

There’s no good way for a company to abandon its customers. But Enel X Way, the EV-charging subsidiary of Italian utility and energy conglomerate Enel Group, may have picked the worst way to go about it — and critics say it’s running out of time to choose a better path.

On October 2, Enel X Way abruptly announced it was shutting down its North American charging business. Effective October 11, it stated, all of its customers in the U.S. and Canada would lose access to the software that keeps its JuiceBox chargers running.

Without that software, all of the roughly 25,000 JuiceBox commercial chargers at shopping malls, multifamily parking garages, and other such sites would be essentially ​“bricked,” unable to process payments or initiate and manage charging sessions.

And while the roughly 100,000 residential JuiceBox chargers in North America could still function, they would be transformed from ​“smart” to ​“dumb” chargers, without any smartphone connectivity, customer control capabilities, or options to pre-program charging times to avoid costly electricity rates or help relieve stress on the power grid.

EV owners, commercial charging providers, and the dozens of utilities now connecting to the company’s JuiceBox chargers for demand-response and smart-charging programs are displeased, to say the least.

The utility Xcel Energy, for example, has promoted JuiceBox chargers for managed charging programs for its customers in Colorado and Minnesota. ​“We need the reliability of the ecosystem and data standardization” for those programs to succeed, Emmett Romine, vice president of customer energy and transportation solutions at Xcel, said during a panel discussion at an EV charging conference in Berkeley, California, earlier this month.

The utility is exploring the possibility of transitioning customers ​“to another vendor’s charging equipment,” Josiah Mayo, spokesperson for Xcel Energy, told Canary Media in an email. In the worst case, customers and utilities like Xcel may have no option but to replace their JuiceBox chargers, which cost anywhere from $600 for a residential charger to $1,600 for a commercial charger.

Consumers are demanding that the federal government investigate. In a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, nonprofit groups Consumer Reports and U.S. PIRG, along with 60 JuiceBox owners, complained that Enel’s decision ​“represents an egregious example of how companies are controlling the functionality of a product even after the consumer has purchased the device.”

Enel X Way’s assets will be auctioned off at the end of the month, which could allow a buyer to come in and restore service to customers. In the meantime, the uncertainty caused by the upcoming asset sale is making life more difficult for the two companies that are already doing the hard work of migrating JuiceBox customers to other charging softwares.

EV-charging experts say the whole affair could have been avoided if only Enel X Way had planned ahead — not just by taking a wiser approach to shutting down its North American operations, but by embedding open standards–based technology in its chargers, so that converting them to an alternative software platform would not be as painful and as costly as it is now shaping up to be.

The timing of the bad publicity is unfortunate for the EV-charging industry, experts say. Electric-vehicle adoption needs to rise quickly in order to get planet-warming gas cars off the road, and one of the biggest barriers facing EV adoption is that consumers — rightfully, in plenty of cases — think chargers are unreliable. Enel X Way is far from the largest provider of EV-charging equipment in North America, but at roughly 125,000 chargers, it’s not inconsequential either.

“That’s all we need is news stories like this to come out that make people say, ​‘Ah, I don’t know if I’m going to go get that electric car,’” Tom Moloughney, contributing editor at industry publication InsideEVs, said in an October 10 YouTube video.

Representatives of Enel X declined to respond to questions from Canary Media regarding the status of its chargers or its plans to support customers of its now-defunct North American EV-charging business.

EV-charging software companies to the rescue? 

After fuming over Enel’s decision, which he called ​“inexcusable,” Moloughney also identified a potential silver lining — the prospect that independent EV-charging-software developers could rescue the JuiceNet software system that keeps those chargers running.

Those potential rescuers include U.S.-based companies ChargeLab and Epic Charging. The CEOs of both companies appeared in the video to tell Moloughney how they’d been working behind the scenes for months to reconfigure Enel X Way’s chargers to keep them running on their companies’ back-end systems.

Soon after that video went live, Enel X North America updated its web page with a slightly less dire message for its customers. No longer was it planning to cut off its software. Instead, it intends to work with B. Riley Advisory Services, the third-party firm it has contracted to manage the closure of its North American charging business, to ensure that ​“Enel X Way USA software will continue to operate for an extended period, with the ultimate goal of maintaining operational continuity for customers.”

Based on these recent developments, it may be possible that the worst-case scenario for Enel X Way customers — being saddled with inoperable chargers — doesn’t come to pass. But it can’t be ruled out yet, either.

Enabling that ​“operational continuity” won’t be easy, Zak Lefevre, ChargeLab’s CEO and co-founder, told Moloughney. That’s because Enel X Way failed to use industry-standard technologies that would allow other companies to easily ​“migrate” them to their own back-end control platforms.

Specifically, a majority of Enel X Way’s JuiceBox chargers don’t use Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP), Lefevre said — or at least, they haven’t implemented a version that ChargeLab can easily integrate with.

OCPP is a widely adopted open protocol that defines how EV chargers should communicate with back-end management systems. ​“With an ideal OCPP implementation, any technician or site host can easily reconfigure their chargers and choose from over a dozen different software providers,” Lefevre said.

Many companies claim their charging stations are OCPP-compliant. But some implementations of the protocol are more or less consistent than others — and Enel X Way’s approach has turned out to be less than ideal.

In an interview with Canary Media, Lefevre explained that ChargeLab has devised a workaround to this lack of standardization that uses a ​“brute-force” method to reconfigure commercial JuiceBox chargers to run OCPP. ​“In the past week, we have migrated a couple hundred Enel X chargers, made them speak OCPP, and connected them to our back end,” he said.

But to do this, ChargeLab not only must send technicians to each charger to update its firmware, he said — it also needs to be able to complete complex back-end steps. That’s gotten more complicated since Enel closed down its North American charger business and laid off all its employees as of October 11.

The situation is even tougher for residential chargers, said Michael Bakunin, CEO and co-founder of Epic Charging. His company had worked with Enel X Way for months to devise a method to update those chargers to OCPP, and ​“a few days before they announced the shutdown, we checked all the boxes and demonstrated to Enel X that we were a good choice,” he told Canary Media.

Soon after Enel X Way announced it was shutting down its North American operations, it notified Bakunin that it was telling utilities and third-party EV-charging-management providers that have integrated with about 20,000 JuiceBox residential chargers to contact Epic Charging for help to keep their software running.

“We were on all these calls with utilities, customers, major aggregators, trying to figure out how we can migrate,” he said.

Speaking to Moloughney on the October 10 InsideEVs video, Bakunin said this migration method still requires support from the back-end servers that support JuiceBox chargers’ software and in some cases doing on-site work on individual chargers. Enel X Way was ​“working very hard on coming up with the process,” he said.

A new wrinkle: The liquidator steps in 

Another unexpected development may negate all the work that Epic Charging and ChargeLab have been undertaking for months, however.

On October 10, Liquid Asset Partners, a liquidation company contracted by the company managing the closure of Enel’s North American charging business, announced plans to auction off that business’s assets on October 29.

Those assets include Enel X Way’s North American office space and unsold chargers left in warehouses. They also include the rights to the software and back-end systems that run its residential and commercial chargers — or as Liquid Asset Partners described it, the ​“transfer of customer management” and the right to ​“implement a new SaaS” — or software-as-a-service — system for those business lines.

Bill Melvin, managing partner at Liquid Asset Partners, told Canary Media on October 18 that the company has already received a bid from an undisclosed company seeking to buy all of these assets.

“We do believe it’s a beneficial bid — one, because they have capital resources available; two, because they have a good partner in the management of the SaaS; and three, they do have a plan to continue using those chargers and keeping them active,” he said. ​“So for all the existing customers, that could be a significant benefit.”

But the prospect of a bidder taking ownership of these assets has altered the state of play for ChargeLab, Epic Software, and any other software companies who might have been working with Enel X Way on migrating abandoned JuiceBox chargers.

Those companies can submit bids in hopes of winning the auctions that Liquid Asset Partners plans to hold, but they’re far from guaranteed success. Or, they can hope to receive permission from whatever company does win to continue doing their work.

Nor is it clear if the company or companies that might end up owning the software and customer management assets would be ready and able to carry out a successful migration process at this point. ChargeLab and Epic Software had worked for months with Enel X Way North America’s team to prepare for that process before Enel X Way shut down its operations and laid off all its staff, and they’ve still only managed to do a fraction of the migration work that would be required to serve all of the company’s chargers.

As Bakunin noted in his conversation with InsideEVs’ Moloughney, helping individual JuiceBox owners migrate their chargers to a new software platform will be labor-intensive. ​“I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he said — but it will require ​“time and money.”

If the company or companies that win the bids for Enel X Way’s North American charging software aren’t able to make that migration happen smoothly or reliably, that could throw up additional barriers. And if the winning bidders decide not to invest the time and money into the process — or require that JuiceBox owners, utilities, and third-party services providers pay for it — those customers may have few options but to replace their JuiceBox chargers.

The perils of proprietary EV-charging technology 

Both Lefevre and Bakunin pointed out that this whole affair could have been managed much more smoothly if only Enel X Way’s chargers and back-end software systems had fully embraced OCPP technology standards. They also noted this issue has implications well beyond this one company.

In the European Union, government regulations have long required EV-charging-equipment providers, charging-network operators, and software providers to adhere to core interoperability standards. In the U.S., by contrast, the earliest entrants to public EV charging started out using largely proprietary technologies.

Since then, almost all EV-charging companies operating in the U.S. now claim they’re compliant with OCPP, with Tesla’s proprietary network being the notable exception. But as Enel X Way’s situation shows, just because an EV-charging company says its systems are OCPP-compliant doesn’t necessarily mean that they can actually work with other standards-compliant chargers and platforms.

Today, it’s far from clear if the most prevalent brands of public EV chargers in North America could be successfully or cost-effectively migrated to alternative back-end operating systems in the event of future business failures, Gleb Nikiforov, CEO and founder of OCPP-compliant charger manufacturer United Chargers, told Moloughney on the October 10 InsideEVs video.

“We want interoperable hardware. That will make the market way, way more fair, and create consumer confidence,” Nikiforov said. Major charging hardware manufacturers such as ABB and Eaton have been pushing for open standards to ensure the greatest possible interoperability between different charging networks.

Interoperability and interchangeability have been concerns for the EV-charging industry since its inception. Early business failures like the 2013 collapse of ECOtality highlighted the risk of proprietary technologies being stranded — although ECOtality’s Blink charging network was purchased by a U.S. company that changed its name to Blink Charging and still operates today.

As common technology standards have become more prevalent, the EV-charging industry has fewer excuses for sticking with proprietary technologies, Nikiforov said. 

Proprietary systems are even less defensible for companies that have received federal and state incentives to deploy charging networks meant to serve all EV drivers, he said.

The Biden administration has set minimum standards and interoperability requirements for public chargers receiving a share of the $7.5 billion in federal EV-charging grants created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Those guidelines and requirements remain a work in progress, however. A handful of states like California have begun work on EV-charging-standards requirements as well.

In fact, Tesla’s moves to open its proprietary charging network to non-Tesla drivers was partly driven by its desire to become eligible for federal funding, industry analysts say. The ongoing process of automakers and charging providers adopting Tesla’s newly established NACS standard for their vehicles and charging systems involves the physical hardware for plugging charging cords or adapters into vehicles, a separate set of technology standards issues from OCPP.

EV-charging standards are constantly evolving, which can complicate efforts to comply — and efforts to enforce compliance. Even so, events like Enel X Way’s fumbles over the past month illustrate why industry and government actors might want to figure these things out sooner rather than later.