When you buy a charger, a converter or a battery system, you also buy a way of making decisions. Someone has programmed when it draws power, how much it asks for, which system it talks to and what data it shares. The question is who: you or the manufacturer.
For a lot of equipment on the market, the answer is the manufacturer. Control lives in closed firmware, integration only works with their platform, and every change goes through their service team. That is what we call a black box.
What a black box costs you
- Vendor lock-in. If the management platform only talks to one manufacturer, changing operator or software means changing hardware.
- Value captured by someone else. An asset’s flexibility (shifting load to cheap hours, shaving peaks, exporting to the grid) is worth money. If you do not control the asset, that value is not yours.
- Obsolescence. When regulation changes, closed equipment depends on the manufacturer’s schedule to be updated, if it is updated at all.
There is a structural reason this does not fix itself: a manufacturer selling closed platforms cannot open control to the owner without cannibalising its own service model.
What we do differently
At teknoCEA the principle is simple: the owner sets the intent; the equipment executes it. That translates into four design decisions.
1. Genuinely open standards. Wallare speaks OCPP 2.x to any management system: the owner’s own, a contracted operator’s or a public authority’s. To the vehicle, ISO 15118. In marine and industrial settings, Modbus TCP/IP. No proprietary layer in between.
2. Business rules, not fixed setpoints. The equipment decides in real time according to rules the owner defines: contracted capacity, tariff, each vehicle’s departure time, user priority. In Wallare, power sharing runs in the hardware itself, with no cloud dependency.
3. Bidirectionality. An interface that only lets energy flow one way limits what the asset can do. Our equipment is designed so energy can flow back: from vehicle to building or grid (V2G), from a yacht’s battery to its switchboard, from port storage to the quay.
4. Our own hardware and firmware. Because we design the power stage, control and firmware, we can fit the equipment to the asset and update it over the air when standards change. That is how Wallare adds ISO 15118-20 bidirectional charging without replacing installed hardware.
Who it matters to
- Charge point operators and public authorities, who need to switch software or operator without switching charge points.
- Fleet and car park owners, who want to capture the savings of shifting charging to cheap hours.
- Ports and distribution system operators, who need assets that respond to the grid’s needs, not the manufacturer’s.
- Engineers and researchers, who need access to the control loops to develop their own algorithms.
In one line
Advanced grid interfaces. Control that stays yours. It is our way of saying power electronics should give more power to the people who buy it, not less. We apply it to EV charging, to vessels and to ports.
Want to see how it integrates with your system? Talk to an engineer.