What is OCPP?

How an industry standard can help protect your investment.

If you are looking to purchase and install electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, one of the questions you may ask is "How will I know that the EV charging stations I install today will not be soon obsolete?"

One way to make sure your charging stations are viable for the foreseeable future is to ensure that they are fully compliant with the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) software standard.

So what is OCCP exactly and why does it matter?

Here is part of the answer, from the FAQ on the Open Charge Alliance website:

What is the importance of OCPP?

The goal for OCPP is to offer a uniform solution for the method of communication between charge point and central system. With this protocol, it is possible to connect any central system with any charge point, regardless of the vendor. A uniform standard prevents all kinds of coordination problems and is therefore an advantage for the whole electric vehicle market.

If all market players make use of the same protocol, then total costs will drop. And by making use of each other's experience, new developments will be executed more quickly and adopted by other parties. For this latter advantage, the OCPP (project) organization or community needs to be further developed.

Flexibility is another gain in this open approach; new features and improvements can be added relatively easily through the openness of the protocol. The legibility makes it easy to discuss improvements / change requests and determine the impact it has on implementation (costs). Also the binding to XML/SOAP helps in this flexibility. Flexibility will be needed in the coming years considering the maturity of the EV developments.

So, as you can see, OCPP compliance is important to ensure the future viability of your charging stations. However, some companies claim that they are OCPP compliant but really are not. ChargePoint in particular seems to be somewhat misleading in their statements about OCPP-compliance.

Here are some other facts that will help clear up the confusion ChargePoint may be creating:

• ChargePoint charge station cannot be managed by any other network (we have proven this in actual tests we have performed).
• The ChargePoint network does not have the ability to manage any standard OCPP-compliant charging stations that are not ChargePoint-branded.
• ChargePoint is not listed as a member of the Open Charge Alliance on their website. The reason for that is simple: they don't support the vision and ideals of OCPP.

EV Connect is both a supporter and innovator of the Open Charge Alliance. Our commitment to OCPP and the continued value of your charging station infrastructure is more than promises.

If long-term use is important to you, contact EV Connect.

To find out why EV Connect, by choosing to exclusively focus on enterprise charging stations that are fully OCPP compliant, is your best charging station partner, call or email EV Connect today, or complete the contact form here.