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Thoughts on an interoperable EV charging network

A gas station stall is held for few minutes. A fast charger, on the other hand, is held for twenty to fifty minutes, and it is hard to know when the charging will finish. Duration depends on battery chemistry, connector type, starting and target state of charge, whether the pack was pre-warmed, whether the site has hit its sanctioned peak demand, and whether a demand response event is running. A good deal of what makes EV charging awkward seems to follow from this one asymmetry. Long dwell times mean queues form, and high variance means those queues are hard to quote reliably. Taken together, the two mechanisms a petrol station leans on — physical first-come-first-served, and the assumption that everyone clears quickly — no longer work. Ensuring a good customer experience, despite these issues requires a tight coordination between forecasting, queue management, navigation, which is harder to achieve in an interoperable network, where charge point, charging app and vehicle OEM could be ...
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Just add imagination: building with India Energy Stack

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Lately I have been marveling at the genius of the Lego block, the humble, unremarkable, stackable connectable brick. Having grown up with Meccanos, when I first saw the brick, I did not think much of it. But now, looking at it through my son's eyes, I see how it hides the untold possibilities and makes any imagination real as long as one has patience and the ability to see the possibilities. Through simplicity, modularity, composability in design and micrometer level precision in moulding, Lego bricks can stack their way to make a Hogwarts castle or a full Jurassic park... It is the purest form of seamless interoperability, the true ideal of cooperation without complex coordination. No glue to put down and cure, nothing to tighten, in fact no tools needed. Just press and watch the magic happen. Today, I am going to talk about another such stack. This one is in a totally different domain and is built purely in software, but has tons of parallels and emergent properties like Legos. E...
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Goodness in Tesla

It has been more than 4 months that I turned in my badge at Tesla. By now, I have mostly gotten over the constant tick to check ercot.com for the latest market price spikes, upcoming scarcity days and check internal dashboards to track how VPP dispatched. Elasticity of brain to adapt to new work rhythms is amazing.. and so is its capacity to forget. So before I forget the lessons I learnt and cultural patterns that made Tesla hum, thought of writing those down, in order to preserve and grow them. I sincerely believe some aspects of Tesla's culture are worth emulating. This is an effort to list them without disclosing any non-public information, and capture the emotions and quiet integrity of engineers that used to run the small sliver of Tesla I had the honor to work within. I tried to organize the post below around cultural building blocks to make it easy to read. Joining Tesla I have been following Tesla since 2009, including listening in on most investor calls. The grit and sac...
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A beautiful bifurcation

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 The world of work is often viewed as a sterile pursuit of checklists, project plans, meetings, coding.. the whole grind, without many emotions or drama. Those last things belong in a movie or TV soaps that we watch after returning home from work . But work does have its moments, of inspiration, serendipity and clarity.. all dramatic enough to be put in a movie, which are the breadcrumbs that show us the way to our life's calling. One such moment happened to me in Bangalore early in my career, and made me decide to pursue control design as a career path. I wanted to pen this down for a long time.. but was not sure if I could share this publicly, despite it being of no commercial value. Since it has been almost 20 years since that incident, writing it down to share an oddly satisfying science discovery and its personal impact on me, without disclosing the business context around it. Hoping it spurs others to remember what drew them to their life's work, and for others who might ...
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