Community Charging for CPOs

Use Community Charging to bill a specific user group, e.g. for workplace or residential charging

What is Community Charging?

Community Charging allows you as a CPO to offer your charging stations with special tariffs for specific user groups, like employees or residents. vaylens handles all contracting, billing and payment processing, making Community Charging a hassle-free solution for you as a CPO.

What to use Community Charging for?

You can use Community Charging whenever you want to give a specific user group access to your charging stations and don't want to have any efforts for billing your users.

You can use Community Charging:

• as an employer to bill your employees for charging their private cars
• as a landlord to bill your tenants for using your own or shared charging infrastructure
• as a company to offer your existing customers a charging service

Why should I use Community Charging?

Community Charging allows you to easily start or increase earning money with your charging stations, even in complex usecases like workplace charging or multi family home charging.

• No effort and no risk - let vaylens handle contracting, billing and payment processing for you and just receive your earnings through vaylens, directly sent to your bank account.
• Offer a cheaper tariff for your own users - and let public users still pay a regular price.
• Monetize your non-public charging stations: Community Charging works on public, semi-public and non-public charge points.
• No additional contract needed: Community Charging is fully included in our charge point commercialisation services.

How to use Community Charging?

• Activate "Community Charging" as an additional access method on charging station level.
  • Please make sure, that your charge points can easily be selected in the eCharge+ app. For multiple charge points in the same location, we suggest using QR-Codes for identification, which can be scanned with the eCharge app. QR-Code Stickers can be purchased via our webshop www.chargepoint-supplies.com.
• Define a tariff for your Community Charging EV drivers
  • If you want to have a specific fixed price for your EV drivers, that is cheaper than the price for other EV drivers via Direct Payment or Roaming, create a new price in the Community Charging menu. With this setting you can create a specific price that is used for Community Charging, which can be set cheaper than the CPO tariff assigned to a charge point.
  • If you want to have charge-point based prices for your EV drivers, you can leave the Community charging price deactivated. The CPO tariff assigned to a chargepoint will be used for your Community Charging EV drivers.
• Invite your EV drivers by entering their email address in the EV driver menu.
• Let vaylens handle everything from here on.

How to define prices for Community Charging?

You can choose between two options to define price for your Community Charging users:

• Different prices on different charging stations: You can use the already existing CPO tariff that is assigned to a charging station also for Community Charging (which is also the default setting). This allows you to have different AC and DC prices on different charging stations, e.g. to react to different energy contracts at different locations. Use the Manage CPO tariffs and Assign CPO tariffs menu in the Pay section to create and assign CPO tariffs.
• Same, cheaper price on all charging stations: You can also create a specific price for Community Charging, e.g. to offer your own users a cheaper tariff than any other public users or guests that can only charge via Direct Payment or Roaming. Use the Pricing menu in the Community Charging section to create and activate a specific tariff for your Community Charging users.

Please keep in mind, that any prices you define in the vaylens portal refer to the price that you as CPO will receive. This helps you to easily define prices that cover your costs as a CPO. The price for the end customer will be defined on your price defined in the vaylens portal, a small markup from vaylens, value added tax and will be rounded to two decimal digits (e.g. 0.35 €/kWh).

How to quit Community Charging?

If you are not happy with Community Charging, you can simply stop using it, as Community Charging doesn't cost you anything. You can deactivate Community Charging as access method on charging station level, so your stations can not be used by your Community Charging EV drivers any more. You can also request a cancellation of an invited EV driver who is already using Community Charging, so he is not able to charge at your Community Charging stations any more. Please keep in mind, that vaylens as contracting and billing partner towards the EV driver will cancel the contract with the EV driver and is legally required to give the EV driver a notice period of 30 days in case of cancellation.

How does Community Charging affect my existing charging setup?

Community Charging can be set as additional access method for your charging station. The activation of Community Charging will not interfere with any Direct Payment, Roaming or users with EMAIDs. 

In case you use EMAIDs, e.g. to hand out RFID cards, and you use the Access control feature to define which EMAID is allowed to charge at which charging stations you will need to update your access control configuration when activating Community Charging. Without Community Charging, by default we distinguish between two different charge port groups that can be assigned to an EMAID group:

With Community Charging, two additional charge port groups are created and can be assigned to an EMAID group:

Please update your access control configuration by adding the two new charge port groups to your existing EMAID groups if needed. Otherwise it can happen, that by activating Community Charging on a charging station existing EMAIDs can not start charging sessions on this charging station any more, because the charging station is moved from e.g. the group "Roaming inactive" to "Community Charging only" and might not be assigned to the EMAID group of the EMAID any more.

This is how your access control should look like with the additional charge port groups "Community Charging only" and "eMarketplace only" assigned to an EMAID group. You can find the access control via Manage > Access control > EMAID group.