German-based energy company RWE is the newest member of the international Open Charge Alliance (OCA), a growing global consortium of public and private electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure leaders that have come together to promote open standards in EV charging.
Dortmund, 17 July 2014 Today German energy company RWE became a member of the Open Charge Alliance, a global organisation responsible for management, further development and compliance testing of the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) and other protocols, which are used world-wide by many organisations for both slow and fast chargers for electric vehicles and management systems. RWE will participate in the different workgroups to improve the protocols and to assist with the compliance and marketing activities of the OCA. Norbert Verweyen, CTO of RWE Effizienz explained the reasons for RWE joining the Open Charge Alliance: “To maximise and promote a good, affordable EV charge infrastructure, it is important that open free available interfaces are used between systems in the charge infra chain. This will prevent vendor lock-in situations, reduce the cost of the charging stations and management systems, and reduce installation and support costs. RWE recognises this as a need in an open market.”
RWE and ElaadNL have previously worked together on an OCPP implementation project and have maintained a good relationship since then. This good relationship will continue within the Open Charge Alliance.
The fact that RWE has joined the consortium is an important signal for the e-mobility market. The OCA consortium is very happy to have its prominent new member on-board. Onoph Caron, Chairman of OCA Boards: “We welcome all new members of the Open Charge Alliance. Anyone embracing open standards in EV is welcome to join us. With its substantial power network and a large system of over 3,200 charging points in different countries, RWE is considered an especially valuable addition in terms of further extending and expanding the standardised protocols.”
About the Open Charge Alliance OCA is a global consortium of public and private electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure leaders that have come together to promote open standards such as adopting the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP). Since 2009, OCPP has become the de-facto standard protocol in 50 countries on all continents and over 10,000 charging stations. The enduring nature of OCPP—an open protocol with no cost or licensing barriers to adoption—has given it a strong foothold and major relevance in Europe and other markets. The Open Charge Alliance is further developing OCPP to provide a powerful, open and interoperable charging station-to-network communication protocol which supports all the functionality needed by today’s advanced charge management systems. The Open Charge Alliance members represent a broad range of interests in the EV sector, including government organisations, utilities, charge point vendors and site operators. Founding members of the Open Charge Alliance are the E-laad foundation (Netherlands), Greenlots (North America), and ESB (Ireland). OCA members embrace the global benefits of open EV standards. For more information: www.openchargealliance.org
As an active member, RWE Effizienz helps to support the goals of the OCA. By joining the OCA and implementing the OCPP, RWE now offers an OCPP interface to its IT backend. RWE can now extend IT services such as customer authentication, remote monitoring and settlement to include the charging infrastructure of other manufacturers.
For its own charging points, RWE will continue to rely on the open communication protocol LG2WAN. It made this protocol freely available as early as October 2013. It is an advanced protocol that RWE continues to refine, and it already supports the international smart charging standard in accordance with ISO/IEC 15118 and an electricity billing mechanism for charging processes in Germany in line with the laws on calibration.