Charger availability remains CPOs’ top issue as repair data falls through cracks

Ask a charge point operator how many of its chargers are working right now and the honest answer, in many cases, is that nobody knows for certain. The charge station management system holds one version of the truth. A ticketing system holds another. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet, and beyond that there are internal field teams and external contractors carrying knowledge in their heads and their inboxes. Faults get logged, someone goes out to fix them, and the record of what happened rarely makes it back to the place where the network's status is supposed to live.

That was the recurring complaint from CPOs on the floor at the Intercharge Network Conference this year, according to Titan Cloud Software, which was exhibiting there. The problem is not a shortage of tools. It is that the tools do not talk to each other, and the work done in the field falls between them.

Reactive by default, not by choice

The consequence of that black hole is a way of operating that is reactive by default. A charger fails, a driver reports it or a monitoring alert fires, a ticket is raised, and a technician is dispatched. Each step depends on the one before it, and each handoff is a chance for information to be lost. Operators are not choosing this model. It is what emerges when a CSMS, a ticketing tool, a spreadsheet, and a contractor's job sheet all describe the same asset without a shared record.

What CPOs say they want instead is something predictive: pattern recognition across the network, using machine learning and AI to flag chargers that are trending toward failure before they go offline. That ambition is reasonable, but it runs into the same underlying obstacle. Predictive models need a clean, continuous history of what went wrong and what was done about it. If repairs vanish into the black hole, the data to learn from never exists.

Availability is still the number one problem

None of this is new, and that is the uncomfortable part. After three years attending the conference, the priority CPOs describe has not moved. "It's my third year at ICNC this year, and when we're speaking to CPOs, I'm still hearing that charge availability is their number one priority they're trying to solve for." For an industry under pressure from drivers, regulators, and site hosts over reliability, three years of the same top complaint suggests that point solutions on their own are not closing the gap.

The response this year is a shift in strategy. Rather than pitching another standalone system into an already fragmented stack, Titan Cloud is approaching complementary vendors directly to integrate and address availability jointly. It named Fuse and Metagram as two of the businesses it is now working with collaboratively, with the stated aim of offering more shared value to CPOs and improving network operations as a whole.

Whether that approach delivers depends on whether the integrations actually close the loop that operators keep describing, so that a repair in the field updates the same record the network status is drawn from. If it does, the predictive capability CPOs are asking for becomes achievable rather than aspirational. If it does not, the industry should expect to hear the same number one priority at the conference next year.