Info & whitepapers

The AFIR regulation by the European Commission aims to promote the expansion of alternative fuels infrastructure, including electricity and hydrogen, throughout the EU. The regulation has several objectives, including ensuring uniform technical standards, promoting interoperability, enhancing user-friendliness, and transparency. AFIR comes into force as of April 13th, 2024. Under the regulation, EU Member States are required to provide publicly accessible charging stations for electric vehicles. This Whitepaper examines the role of OCPP within the AFIR.

In the coming years, utilities will see more and more electric vehicles connecting to their electricity grid. Cars, busses, vans, trucks, ships and airplanes will charge their batteries drawing energy from the grid. In some cases, these vehicles will also discharge their batteries and feed energy back into the grid, effectively becoming a Distributed Energy Resource (DER). It means that utilities will work together with new customers, systems and use cases. To integrate DERs safely into the grid, information exchange and control is needed. The IEC 61850 protocol for electricity grid control and OCPP for charging infrastructure control combine to ensure that the charging and discharging of vehicles takes place whilst ensuring grid stability and meeting the customers’ needs and expectations. This paper aims to help the industry better understand both protocols and help with the implementation of the combination of IEC 61850 and OCPP in charging station management systems.

The technology around charging station is still evolving. Usually most attention goes to the development of charging stations that deliver ever more power: fast chargers, ultra-fast chargers and megawatt chargers. At the same time, the need for low-cost charging stations for at home, office or parking lots is growing. For this market a new type of charging station has recently been developed: the so-called “mode 1&2-only” charging station. In this white paper we explain what it is, and how if differs from a regular charging station. We will also explain how certifying such a device differs from certifying a regular charging station.

This white paper describes how OCPP can be used to detect and (in some cases) avoid downtime of a charging station. Note, that OCPP by itself is not responsible for downtime — it is just a set of messages between a charger and its management system. A charging station operator (CSO), however, can utilize certain messages and configuration options to allow for early detection of problems.

In 2020 OCA released OCPP 2.0.1, which is a big step forward from OCPP 1.6. OCPP 2.0.1 is not an incremental extension of OCPP 1.6, even though it uses many of the same concepts and even shares some of the same messages. As a result, OCPP 2.0.1 is not backward compatible with OCPP 1.6. For example, the transactionhandling has changed, which was required in order to support configurable start and end conditions for transactions, and an entire new concept, the device model, was introduced to provide advanced configuration and monitoring capabilities. This white paper explains which features are new in OCPP 2.0.1.

In this application note we describe how the smart charging and security capabilities of OCPP can be used to achieve that a charging point [1] meets the requirements of the regulation.
The OCPP features that are used for this are supported by: CPP 1.6 with Security Whitepaper; OCPP 2.0.1 (or higher)

OCPP is the defacto standard protocol to communicate with charging stations. This paper shows how an OCPP charging station and a CSO back-end can be integrated with a point of sales (POS) terminal of a filling station, and what the flow of information is for the various payment options. Integration with a POS can be achieved via a roaming protocol that connects to the charging station management system (CSMS) of the CSO or via a local controller that sits between POS and charging station.