Public charging hub

Most of a public hub’s return is decided by its configuration rather than its capacity, and configuration can be changed at any point in the site’s life.

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Overview

A public hub succeeds on three things:

• A consistent, intuitive, and reliable charging experience.
• Payments captured successfully across every method.
• Energy bought cheaper than it’s sold.

This guide takes you through the end-to-end flow: The last two repeat for as long as the site operates.

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Before you start

For an operator running or taking over public charging sites on Spirii. Grid connection, civil works, hardware, and installation sit with you and your installer. At least one charge box should be online first; Quick start for CPOs covers that. Who owns the site decides where the location sits in your customer hierarchy, and with it how you reach the charge boxes for firmware, who receives which share of the payout, whose VAT number appears on a terminal receipt, and which service commitment the site carries. Which payment channels you can offer sets the ceiling on utilisation. Establish the terminal first, since an existing multi-year merchant contract can decide it for you.

• In-person — terminal hardware, a merchant agreement, and a decision on who acts as Merchant of Record.
• In-app — no hardware, no acquiring setup. Available on every location.
• Roaming — a public location, a roaming tariff, accurate coordinates, and eMI3 connector IDs.
• Token billing — a token issued to the driver by you, their employer, or their mobility provider.

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Configure

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Upfront decisions

Four choices shape what the site can do later, and each takes a site visit, a renegotiation, or a re-registration to change. Spirii validates models per capability, so confirm support for each capability you intend to use before you commit hardware.

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The configuration checklist

All of this has to be in place before the site is discoverable.

• Location details and an accurate map pin. Drag the pin to the bays, not the entrance. Coordinates are what drivers navigate to and what roaming networks receive.
• A tariff and a roaming tariff. Both are required before the location reaches roaming networks.
• Publishing settings. Publicly available, and enabled for roaming. Publishing controls discovery, not permission; who may charge is Location access.
• Opening hours, if the site isn’t open around the clock. Outside them, only a driver whose token or voucher is tied to the location can charge.
• A service level agreement, where you’ve committed response times to a site owner.
• Firmware brought current before drivers arrive, since an update takes each charge box out of service for ten to fifteen minutes and can’t be rolled back.
• An operator prefix such as DE*SPI, registered with your national registry. Connector IDs derive from it.

On a customer’s site, firmware management acts in the owner’s context, so use Impersonate to reach their charge boxes.

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Pricing a hub

Start with a fixed base fee. A driver leaving a motorway decides in seconds whether to stop, and a price they can read and trust does more for utilisation than one tracking the market. Fixed also gives you a stated price for a site host or a tender, and makes the AFIR price-transparency obligation straightforward. Fixed doesn’t mean flat. Set the base fee at your overnight rate, then layer energy fees onto daytime and peak timeslots so the price rises with demand and your own costs. The driver still sees one clear price per kWh when they plug in, gross and including VAT. Conditional fees also manage bay turnover: a time fee switching on after 180 minutes moves a finished driver along, and the app warns them first. Pricing options and logic covers how fees stack and resolve. Choose a dynamic base fee instead where your energy contract is spot-linked and margin protection matters more than a predictable price. The roaming tariff is separate: one flat rate per kWh, entered gross but billed net to eMSPs, and effective at the next midnight rather than immediately. Partners add their own margin on top. Plan roaming price changes on a 24-hour cycle, and account for the platform fee so the margin you intend is the margin you get.

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Validate

To make a clean launch, publish the location and enable roaming, but hold each EVSE in Commissioning — a temporary EVSE status that changes only what drivers see. Apps and Hubject show Out of Service; OCPI partners see Planned. The charger stays fully live underneath. That gives you a site published, connected to the roaming ecosystem, and running real sessions on real hardware, with no driver able to arrive while you work. Prove the pipeline, fix what doesn’t hold, then open a site that already works.

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Operate

Utilisation and reliability move a hub’s return more than capacity does. Three levers change them.

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Coverage: every way a driver can pay

Most drivers arriving at a public hub don’t have your app, which makes contactless a requirement rather than an upsell. Public charging in the EU also carries an ad-hoc payment obligation under the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR). Billing and payout flows compares the four channels side by side. Enabling Plug & Charge reboots the charge box, so schedule it when no connector is in use.

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Reliability

An unreliable bay costs more than the sessions it loses, because a driver who fails to charge doesn’t come back. When a bay needs work, choose deliberately. Setting a connector Inoperative takes it genuinely out of service. A temporary Maintenance status changes only what drivers see, leaving the unit live for a technician on site. Where you’ve committed response times to a site owner, record them as a service level agreement bound to the location. Create your default before you add locations: new locations inherit it at creation, and changing it later doesn’t rebind the ones already on the old one.

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Power and energy cost

Energy management works at the location, on the circuit the chargers belong to. Load balancing always wins on precedence, so the fuse is never at risk whatever your EMS asks for. Prioritised charging has no effect unless a limit is already active, since there’s nothing to prioritise while every charger can deliver full power.

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What to measure

The Dashboard carries sessions, energy delivered, active users, occupancy, uptime, and a heatmap of the busiest hours, each figure set against the preceding window. Read the metric definitions there before reporting any figure onward, particularly uptime, which measures something narrower than the word usually implies. For what the page can’t answer, use exports. The Dashboard export writes one row per connector per day, which finds the underperforming outlet inside a healthy-looking site. The charge detail record export carries each session with its tariff, fee breakdown, and VAT split, for utilisation analysis and reporting to a site owner. The charge detail records API returns the same data as a feed, for reporting you run monthly. Two things to watch. The heatmap counts a session at the hour it ended, so a long session lands in one block: read it as when bays free up. And sessions ending with almost no energy delivered appear in your payout specification file as an exclusion, which makes that file a good place to spot a charger accepting drivers and then failing to deliver.

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Settle

Roaming revenue is paid out in the same month Spirii invoices the roaming partner; app, terminal, and token revenue follows the month after. The document is a self-billing invoice Spirii raises on your behalf, one per country and currency, with a single consolidated line. You don’t invoice Spirii, and you don’t invoice roaming partners or eMSPs for sessions Spirii collected on. Self-billing follows when a session ended, so one completing late, or arriving late because a charge box was offline, lands in the earliest open period. A specification file lists every CDR, included and excluded, and is what you reconcile against. Three exclusions recur at a public hub: sessions under 0.2 kWh, sessions where the charge box allowed charging without authentication, and terminal sessions under your own acquiring agreement. Understanding your payout covers the full list and the method. Platform and payment fees arrive on a separate invoice rather than line by line. Where a site owner takes a share, configure the split on the location and Spirii issues each party their own self-billing invoice, with no manual transfer between you. See Revenue sharing. Every session also produces a driver-facing document: a receipt carrying VAT where the driver paid at the moment of charging, a statement where the session is invoiced afterwards, as roaming and token sessions are. You can add up to 200 characters of your own text to receipts, set on the customer that owns the location, for a support number or compliance wording. A public location in an AFIR member state also carries a reporting obligation: static and dynamic infrastructure data published to your member state’s National Access Point, which Spirii provides as DATEX II endpoints. See AFIR compliance.

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Continuous optimisation

A hub is never finished, only re-tuned. A tariff that held through your first quarter may not hold when a competitor opens two junctions away, a bay faulting twice a month is a hardware conversation rather than a support one, and adding outlets sends you back through the upfront decisions. The monthly rhythm is short. Read the Dashboard against the preceding period, pull the connector-day export wherever a figure looks wrong, reconcile the payout against the specification file, and act on whichever lever the data points at.

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Next steps