Originally posted on SGO Insight.
In this episode of Energy Insight, Shana Patadia, head of business development at Synop, shares her thoughts on the role of interoperability, automation, and power management in scaling EV fleets. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
SGO
For listeners who may not be familiar, could you briefly describe the work Synop does in this field?
Shana
Synop is a fleet charging management platform. What that means is that we are able to do energy management, charging management, and all of that for electric vehicle fleets. We really focus on interoperability because we know how important that is to fleets to have a single place to be able to look to as opposed to having to switch between things. And so we’re interoperable with all hardware. And we also try to be interoperable with as much software as is relevant, like telematics or other platforms that our customers may use. So it’s really all about helping a fleet’s operations be as smooth as possible, specifically from the charging perspective, but in as many ways as we can help.
SGO
You were recently involved in Jacksonville Transportation Authority’s autonomous shuttle program. What do you see as the future of autonomous fleets and their impact on the charging network?
Shana
Yeah, we’re really excited about autonomous fleets. As you look at the trends in the past year, the numbers have been small, but they have been trending upward very quickly, which is exciting. I think autonomy is going to bring some new opportunities and challenges to this space. If we just think in a very basic sense, if you look at where the autonomous vehicle pilots are right now, all of them are in city centers. They’re not starting out in some more rural area. They’re starting right in the middle of Vegas, right in the middle of San Francisco. And autonomy, because of all of these extra loads of cameras and lidar and all the other things on the vehicle, tends to be very, very inefficient from a vehicle/fuel usage or battery usage perspective. And so all of that adds up to meaning you need to charge these autonomous vehicles in the city center. You don’t want it driving way out and coming back in. And as folks may be aware, the power grid can be really constrained in city centers. That’s a really interesting thorny problem we’re going to have to face as we see more autonomous vehicles because they’re bringing this really exciting experience and opportunity for people. I think there are a lot of benefits, but I think there’s going to be an infrastructure challenge in how we meet their needs. And as a result, I think we’re increasingly going to see that there’s just not physical space and power for everybody to have their own dedicated depot. So we’re going to see increased sharing. And of course, all of these things require really thoughtful hardware and software planning to make them work.
SGO
With Synop increasingly integrating vehicle-level data and becoming more embedded across charging hardware and fleet software, how do you decide which, if any, charging decisions are safe to automate? Does that threshold change as fleets scale up?
Shana
First I want to make sure we frame the word “safe” properly. In the case of charging management software there’s really no true kind of safety issue as the word is typically used. The issue that may exist is more around readiness, ease and peace of mind. If we think about the life cycle of a fleet, it’s really interesting because when a fleet is small, they don’t seem to need a CMS. If you’ve got two vehicles or three vehicles, I could imagine you’re looking at your parking lot and saying, “I can see them from here. I know they’re plugged in. What’s the big deal?” And then as you start getting that fifth and sixth and tenth and fiftieth vehicle, all of a sudden it’s really not manageable anymore. It’s hard for you to know whether or not that vehicle got plugged in. Will it be ready on time? Was there a fault? Did it look like it got plugged in, but the plug didn’t actually click in? Are you going to spike energy and get a really high utility bill? All of these questions start to arise. Most fleets start with a pilot, they start with two or three and they start in this phase of saying, I don’t think I need this. And then very quickly they realize, wow, I really, really need it.
So I would say that as the fleets grow, automation becomes more important because there’s just too many things to monitor and deal with. Optimizing the charging management schedule can absolutely be automated, especially with the kind of approach that Synop takes, which is interoperability. When we have your telematics data, we have your charging data, we have the vehicle profile and information, with automation we can send the most optimal schedule to your vehicle, or to each vehicle in your fleet to make sure every single one is ready. Maybe you have one that’s just constantly running around the yard and you need that thing charged right away, but maybe you have a box truck that doesn’t need to be ready till the morning. The automation in the background can take all of those variables, take into account the site level peaks and then spit that all out.
So you might think that when you have two to three chargers, two to three vehicles, you don’t need CMS. But I would argue you do. And the reason that you do is that you need to be able to learn, test out the solution, and be prepared for when you scale up. You don’t want to wait until there’s an emergency and suddenly you need software and automation to get it. The best time to do it is when you’re piloting, even though it’s easy enough for you to manage so you can figure out what the right tools are for when you scale.
SGO
Interoperability is a core part of your service. But your messaging emphasizes that interoperability goes beyond just being able to plug a given vehicle into a charger. Can you elaborate on that?
Shana
In one sense, if everybody’s using OCPP, everything should just work. And I think that’s a very nice vision and a vision that would be lovely if it were completely true. The reality is that there are different kinds of implementations and uses of OCPP. Sometimes people are adhering really closely. sometimes not so much. And so one of the things we have held really fundamental is even just for OCPP, even just for charging basics, we make sure that when we say we’re interoperable with a charger, with an OEM, we have brought in a charger from them into our physical lab or had one in the field repointed to us and run through a battery of testing.
This testing is really a range of things. There are things that you may not think of as a fleet, but that are really important. For example, certain chargers, if you bring them down to one kilowatt, they’ll just end the charging session and then there’s no way to start it remotely. So we try to make sure we test for things like that. What is that low threshold, what are the ways that it ramps? What are some of the other quirks on how it responds to energy management? We work through those issues with the charger OEMs before our customers are deploying them so that when you deploy them, things just work really smoothly. We want that initial period to just work.
And I will say I got to experience that firsthand. I had a customer who requested that I go to their site for onboarding, which was an unusual request, given everything kind of happens on a computer. But I said, sure. And I showed up and it was an amazing experience; literally 10 minutes from start to finish, we repointed that charger and demonstrated a test session and energy management. So when the interoperability goes right, it just makes everybody’s life so easy and streamlined and it makes it feel very plug and play.
Interoperability is a lot broader than that though -- that’s just charging, and that may be the most obvious thing people talk about, but there’s telematics. We are integrated with several telematics players -- Samsara, Zonar, Geotab... And again, what that means is if you’re using any of those things or some of the other names I haven’t mentioned here, when you onboard with us, all that data can be ingested immediately and work seamlessly. We can show where those vehicles are. We don’t expect our fleet managers to think through all these details. That’s our job. But the benefits really come to those fleet managers.
As a simple example: if I’m a fleet manager, I just switched to EV and I’m kind of stressed about this. How is this going to work? Is everything going to run smoothly? I’m thinking as I lie in bed, did I plug that vehicle in? Is it going to be ready in the morning? That’s where the advantage of interoperability comes in. Because now if we have the charger information, because we’re OCPP compatible and interoperable with whatever charger you’ve got, and we have the telematics information, we know where your vehicle is its state of charge. We can send you an alert to let you know, hey, that vehicle was at your depot for an hour, but it didn’t get plugged in. So all of a sudden that stress is off of you and you have that peace of mind to just know things worked. That’s really what interoperability is about; making sure all of those pieces connect to give you this actionable information that you need and peace of mind.
SGO
What are Synop’s biggest strategic challenges in accelerating commercial fleet electrification? For example, utility relationships, regulatory environments, customer adoption?
Shana
I’m sure plenty of people are talking about the political environment and other things that impact the current moment, so I’ll set those aside. I’ve felt for years that the biggest challenge in this space is education. When we think about fleets, when they’re using a traditional fuel they put fuel in the vehicle, they park the vehicle, and they know the fuel’s in there because they put it in. Now we’re in this new paradigm where you plug in the vehicle, and unless there’s some way of monitoring or verifying the schedule, you don’t know. So it becomes really important to educate customers as to how EV is different, not worse, than traditional fuels. There are a lot of benefits to it, but it’s just different and you need to make sure you deal with it appropriately. I think educating them on that is really important. And educating them on the fact that making sure that you have software as another line item. You might think to yourself, why do I need to purchase one more thing? This whole EV program is already pretty expensive. Well, if you’re not purchasing that software, guess what, you might spike a utility bill that’s 10x what the cost of that software was. Customers have all these problems that they’ve never experienced before and we need to make sure that they understand them before they have to deal with them.
SGO
Do you have any final thoughts on what to expect in 2026 in this industry? What should we be looking out for?
Shana
Between autonomous, between other fleets, between the rise of data centers, I think we’re going to see a lot of power constraints and grid constraints. So I think there’s going to be a really big trend this year of battery energy storage systems, of microgrid solutions, just kind of creative solutions around sharing charging infrastructure and other things, just to make sure that programs that are already in motion or that are continuing to grow have a way to keep moving forward. And I think utilities are going to be even more central to this as we look to the future. Innovation from utilities, programs like Flex Connect are going to be really critical to taking a creative approach to getting that power to where it’s needed, when it’s needed. And there are really cool programs like EPRI’s GridFAST and other things like that that are going to help people navigate that utility interface and experience better. That’s what I think the year is going to be centered around, the power challenges and the ways that people are addressing them.
