EVE Energy Ventures
Reserve your EV Charging spot, Save money on bills, and Support the Grids!

When Nikhil Bharadwaj first moved to California in 2017, he was amazed at the sheer volume of Nissan Leafs, Teslas and other electric vehicles (EVs) on the streets that were self-parking, changing lanes, and had other autopilot features. However, Bharadwaj’s first perception of charging an EV soon became unpleasant as he saw his friends becoming a victim of “Charge Rage”—a commonly-felt emotion among EV users who struggle to find a charging station that’s available. Soon, Bharadwaj realized EV penetration was reliant on an inefficient charging infrastructure detrimental to the three stakeholders—EV drivers, charger owners, and electric utilities. While drivers were unable to find available chargers, charger owners incurred high operational costs, and utilities experienced stress on the grid due to demand fluctuations.

These roadblocks propelled Bharadwaj to find EVE Energy Ventures—a cleantech startup that is focused on facilitating the large scale adoption of EV and the seamless transition of the transportation and utility system to 100 percent electric mobility and renewables. By means of a cloud-based platform—an automated charging scheduling tool—EVE Energy Ventures sends EV owners smart charging slots to book a day in advance, swap time slots with other users, and receive timely reminders and alerts, among other features.

The “real sweetness” of the software, per Bharadwaj, is an embedded predictive algorithm that determines the best time to charge, and peak times to avoid.

“We’re a scheduler with a purpose; our smart solution sends out charging times to users when it is cheapest and cleanest to charge. For example, if there’s ample solar production at a certain hour, the predictive model in the software would strategically push for that time slot. Also, if too many power plants are being used, and the grid is stressed, we avoid that time,” explains Bharadwaj, founder and director of EVE Energy Ventures. He also adds that EVE Energy Ventures serves all three of the aforesaid EV stakeholders. The startup works with property managers of offices and apartments, charger owners, and even charging station manufacturers for direct communication with their API, PRISM.

To illustrate the benefits of EVE Energy Ventures’ charger-agnostic solution—the only EV charging smart-scheduling tool on the cloud—Bharadwaj narrated a customer success story involving a large office and manufacturing space in Southern California. The client in question had two charging stations and a dozen EV owners. “Before we stepped in, they had an inefficient charging ecosystem in which people had to wait for hours to get their cars charged. We ran a beta test and allowed a few of their employees to try our platform,” says Bharadwaj. The results showed that EV users are four times more likely to get the charge they need because they’ve reserved a slot! “They also loved the transparency feature with regard to time slots, so their EV users can coordinate among themselves and charge without hassle,” he adds.

Going forward, EVE Energy Ventures plans to add more charging stations to its platform and allow PRISM to communicate with electric utilities to enroll chargers into smart grid programs. The latter would result in utilities sending automated signals to EVE Energy Ventures when prices of electricity surge, avoid infrastructure upgrade costs, and maximize renewables penetration. EVE helps reduce electric bills from chargers at a property by 30% and shares the savings generated. The organization also aims to partner with automobile manufacturers to build a capability that allows the battery percentage of an EV to be shared with the scheduling tool. That way, EVs with lesser battery levels would get prioritized when the solution assigns slots.

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