The platform
ZAPPP Depot: Energy orchestration
The highest 30 minutes of your month sets a large part of your energy bill. ZAPPP Depot sequences and rate-limits every charging session against a live demand budget, so the peak never happens.
- Charging orchestration over OCPP 1.6 and 2.0.1
- Demand-charge management against a live budget
- Readiness-priority charging so the right vehicles leave full
- Charger health monitoring and per-vehicle energy cost
01 · The asset
The depot is no longer a car park with cables.
A depot with 30 electric buses holds 6–12 MWh of battery capacity, comparable to a small grid-scale storage installation. It is simultaneously a fleet facility, the largest single electricity load on the site, and a distributed energy resource with real market value. ZAPPP Depot manages all three at once, in real time.
02 · Capabilities
Every charging decision, optimised every 60 seconds.
Capability 01
Charging orchestration (OCPP 1.6 / 2.0.1)
A continuous optimisation loop, not a static schedule. Every cycle it evaluates who is plugged in, each vehicle's charge state, departure times, the energy budget and the constraints in force, then sets which chargers run, at what power, in what sequence. A vehicle arriving at 04:30 instead of 06:00 triggers an immediate re-plan.
Capability 02
Demand-charge management
A rolling demand budget tracks site load (HVAC, workshop, lighting) against your demand ceiling. Charging power flexes with building load so the billing-period peak stays under the threshold. Staggered charge events replace simultaneous draw.
Capability 03
Fleet-readiness-priority charging
Every vehicle's projected charge state at its next departure is tracked continuously. High-urgency vehicles take priority automatically. Hard constraints hold (a vehicle reaches its target state of charge by departure) while cost and load are optimised within them.
Capability 04
Charger health and anomaly detection
Every session is compared against the charger's own baseline: power curves, session durations, energy delivered against SOC delta. Deviations are flagged before a driver finds a dead charger. Reactive call-outs become scheduled maintenance.
Capability 05
Per-vehicle energy cost attribution
Not a monthly bill. A cost per vehicle, per session, per route, across flat, time-of-use and demand-charge tariff structures. The true cost of operating each vehicle, defendable in a budget meeting.
Capability 06
Grid-services readiness
The platform tracks the combined capacity of plugged-in vehicles as a dispatchable resource and exposes it to demand-response programmes. As vehicle-to-grid infrastructure matures, the same control layer coordinates export events. The revenue pathway is designed in, not retrofitted.
03 · Architecture
It runs at the depot. It does not need the cloud.
ZAPPP Depot runs on an industrial edge server inside your depot, rated -20°C to +60°C, low idle draw, UPS-compatible. All charging decisions execute locally over the depot network with sub-second latency. Cloud sync happens when connectivity permits; operations never wait on it. Sensitive operational data stays on-site. Depots are not data centres. This is built accordingly.
04 · The cost line
Depot energy failures add 15–25% to the cost of fleet electrification. This recovers it.
Peak demand overruns, reactive charger maintenance and unoptimised charging windows are not rounding errors. Across GoMetro's African and UK fleet operations they add 15–25% to the effective cost of electrification. ZAPPP Depot is designed to recover that cost and convert it into operating margin.
[VERIFY: publish reference-depot economics: internal concept figures]
05 · The stack
Ops Pack says what the fleet needs. Depot executes the charging response.
With EdgeAI on the vehicles, Depot charges against real battery state (calibrated SOC, live thermal state, degradation-adjusted charge profiles) instead of BMS summaries. Vehicles get the charge they actually need for their next duty. Hot or weakened packs are protected automatically. Deployed standalone, Depot still delivers orchestration, demand management and readiness against any OCPP charger.