How EDP is building a home energy super-app with Enode’s EV API
EDP is a global energy producer, manager and retailer with over 9 million customers worldwide. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, it’s one of the world players in renewable energy production and serves clients with innovative decarbonization solutions across four global regions. EDP develops its electric mobility business in Portugal, Spain and Brazil.
As well as selling energy, EDP is also a leading provider of solar panels and installations. EDP’s solar products are pivotal to its efforts to lead decarbonization, increase the use of renewables, and accelerate the energy transition. The company is the European leader in solar distributed generation, with around 2GWp of capacity installed across family homes and corporate buildings.
For residential clients, the EDP Solar app gives customers real-time information about their household energy consumption and production, as well as insights about how much money their solar installations are saving them.
But EDP wanted to take the app one step further.
They noticed that although most solar owners in Portugal don’t have home batteries connected to their solar system, many own electric vehicles (EVs). That meant there was significant battery capacity already sitting in their driveways.
EDP knew that connecting EVs to the Solar app would unlock huge value for their customers, enabling a range of new home energy management use cases like smart charging and solar charging. And it would make the Solar app more engaging, turning it into a centralized hub from which customers could see and control all of their devices and consumption.
Out-of-the-box EV smart charging
In particular, EDP wanted to offer EV smart charging and smart solar charging in the EDP Solar app. EV smart charging algorithms automatically identify the lowest-cost energy hours, and adjust EV charging windows accordingly, helping customers save money. Smart solar charging lets customers use excess energy generated by their inverters to charge their EVs, rather than releasing it back to the grid.
First, EDP needed to be able to remotely connect to customers’ EVs – and that’s when they came to Enode.
With a small in-house engineering team, EDP knew that building and maintaining individual integrations with every single EV make and model would be far too time- and resource-intensive. Instead, they decided to use Enode’s Connect API, which connects to a wide range of EVs through a single integration. Working with Enode would enable the broadest possible market coverage while avoiding back-end complexity.
By using Enode’s out-of-the-box smart charging algorithm, EDP was able to save on additional costs and effort. Enode’s purpose-built Optimize API takes the challenges of real-time data collection and always-on algorithms and turns them into one reliable and easy-to-implement endpoint.
Support for hundreds of energy devices through one API
Besides the quality and coverage of Enode’s APIs, EDP was also impressed by our extensive documentation and support. The Enode team was on hand to advise throughout the UX design process, providing inspiration and feedback in collaborative workshops.
And the partnership only just begun. The potential to develop more innovative solutions and add more functionality to the Solar app in the future was another major selling point.
Because Enode offers connection to over 1000 energy devices – including solar inverters, home batteries, and HVACs as well as EVs – there’s the possibility to integrate many more of them in the future.
