What is EV Charging with OCPP?

OCPP stands for Open Charge Point Protocol. Basically, it is an open specification for EV charging stations enabling them to communicate with a centralised management system.

It’s similar to a smart home where your light switches, air-conditioners and even garage doors are exchanging messages with your phone so that everything can be controlled from one place.

How does OCPP work?

Let’s imagine you have several EV charging stations from different manufacturers and some of them (or even all of them) do not support OCPP.

In this case, you can’t control your charger points simultaneously as they “speak” different languages. You are also tied up to one hardware manufacturer and software provider. Taking advantage of tempting offers from other manufacturers is not possible.

And now, welcome to the OCPP world where all your charging points are working within one open standard. This open-source “language” gives you full freedom. It enables the charger, backend and management system to communicate irrespective of vendor and manufacturer.

As a result, you have control over pricing, start/end of charging and other things that matter when it comes to charging an EV.

Note: Although all data will be sent back and forth constantly within the same network, it is well protected by encryption. The OCPP developers improve the level of security with each new version. Therefore, no one but you will be able to access the OCPP EV charging information.