What is OCPP?

Open charge point protocol (OCPP) is the electric vehicle industry standard open-source protocol for communication between charging stations and central back-end EV charging management systems.

The Open Charge Alliance (OCA) oversees the continued development and enhancement of OCPP, ensuring it can keep up with the evolving market and encouraging compliance among hardware and software suppliers so eMobility industry players can better realize the potential of EV industry technologies. Compliance with the protocol streamlines operations, allowing EV charging providers to be hardware-agnostic, and choose between multiple charging network providers.

OCA members include eMobility providers, hardware manufacturers, software development companies, and research organizations.

Independent third-party compliance certification for software and hardware vendors can help avoiding vendor lock-in and mitigate the potential of stranded assets.

 

What is the latest version of OCPP?

The newest edition of the OCPP 2.0.1 was released in December 2022.

 

Why should EV charging providers care about OCPP?

As the market evolves and hardware and software technologies advance, connectivity is critical. OCPP compliance by suppliers ensures interoperability among eMobility ecosystem components optimizing communications among devices and operational management platforms.

It gives eMobility providers the freedom to choose from a wide variety of charging hardware and software necessary to serve different EV charging use-cases, allowing EV charging providers to be completely technology agnostic.

Support for open protocols like OCPP ensures that EV charging and energy management platforms are open and futureproof, eliminating vendor lock-in, as hardware and software can easily be replaced without having to rebuild the entire infrastructure.

Compliance with OCPP is critical to EV charging business operations and a seamless charging experience for drivers. Comprehensive connectivity improves network stability, utilization, and monetization while making it easier to cope with the complexities of daily activities.

Furthermore, OCPP 2.0.1 support for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communications increases the possibilities for and potential of two-way charging. V2G compliance significantly improves energy management and makes it easier to achieve grid balancing – ensuring the power supply can meet power demands. Two-way connectivity will reduce the need to enhance energy infrastructure and will lower charging costs, directing energy from vehicles to the grid.