15.07.2022

Are you reimbursing your employees for charging their vehicle at home? Can you be certain that you are not also covering their partner or friend’s charging session? re.alto and UBIRCH can offer you this security and mitigate this risk with our fraud detection solution. By obtaining data directly from the car, we are able to verify that the correct vehicle has been charged. Thanks to re.alto’s integration with UBIRCH and the additional layer of trust provided by their technology, you can rest assured that the data received is received in real time, is verified and is reliable. The benefits: Improved driver experience, a trustworthy & auditable data sharing with your partners and a sound cost controlled operation of your fleet. 

The transition in the mobility sector to E-mobility raises challenges in various areas such as EV charging. Fuelling a traditional car through a vertical supply chain from the oil well over the petrochemical plant down to the filling station is an orderly sequence of bilateral interactions at each step of the supply chain. Trust in each bilateral interaction and potential data errors only impact the bilateral partners, not the rest of the chain.  

EV charging, however, is a completely different setup. First of all, transactions are no longer unidirectional. The driver does not only procure electricity to charge his car, he can also supply electricity from his solar rooftop to the car or, when vehicle2grid is commercialized, would also be selling electricity from his car. Secondly, measurement data used in one transaction is reused in various other settlement processes throughout the ecosystem. Therefore, a data error can affect many transactions and players at once.  

A short example of the latter: Paul charges his company car at a public parking lot. His charge pole registers a 45-kWh charge, which it communicates to both Paul (via the display) and his charge pole operator (CPO). The CPO communicates this data to Paul’s mobility service provider (MSP) to settle the electricity with Paul. Yet it communicates the same data to the parking lot owner (host) to trigger the settlement of electricity between the host and the CPO. The host has a specific EV rate from this electricity supplier, who is informed of the charge session as well by the host, to apply the specific rate correctly. The electricity supplier can deliver this discounted rate, because he uses the EV flexibility in the wholesale market to deliver balancing power to the grid operator. As such, the electricity supplier forwards the data to the grid operator to settle his wholesale market services with the latter. 

Back to Paul, who needs to be reimbursed by his employer for the charging session (it’s a company car for professional use, after all). So, Paul sends the MSP invoice and charging data records to his employer as an expense note. The employer imports the data into his accounting system to report his fuel consumption for professional purposes correctly in the accounting scheme, which is exporting reports to the VAT office with regards to VAT recovery on professional fuel expenditures.  

Now imagine if the measurement data coming from the charge pole shared within and used by all those different stakeholders mentioned above, which do not work on a shared infrastructure, gets falsified somewhere within the process. And how this would impact all other involved parties in the example above. Ensuring data integrity is a must in this example. UBIRCH has developed the technology to enable this assurance straight from the initial data source, the charge pole, making data verifiable for every possible data receiver.

UBIRCH offers the most flexible and privacy-friendly data trust platform and can be used to create trusted data in three simple steps. First, data gets signed at the source, in this case the charge pole. Utilizing the UBIRCH Nano Client integrated on the firmware of the charge pole, measurement data gets cryptographically certified. Step two is the attestation of data certificates by sending them to UBIRCH Trust Platform, an immutable, blockchain-based, and quantum-resistant data certificate storage, creating a public record of a certified state with a provable timestamp. The actual data flow itself is not changed or handled by UBIRCH. The final step is the data verification, done by the data receiver. Using the simple to use UBIRCH Verification API, any possible data receiver can verify the authenticity, origin, integrity, sequence and even other multidimensional proofs of the data received.  

UBIRCH creates an additional layer of trust, not forcing the MSP, the host or even the employer to use a specific system or platform for sharing data. As soon as the measurement data gets certified and attested, they all can verify the received data, independent of the actual data transmission used. The integration is as easy as calling one simple API to verify data and to get the assurance to work on trusted data, containing a proof of origin, authenticity, integrity and more. The re.alto connect platform expands this ease of use to the full automotive market by integrating all EV brands under a single API access. As such, running an EV fleet becomes easier and more secure than managing an ICE fleet straight from the start. 

Feel free to reach out to us today for more information on how we can help improve your company’s transition to EV.