The next-level digital communication layer for the upcoming mass market of electric vehicle charging
Charging an Electric Vehicle is a very digitized process: finding the preferred charging station, controlling the charging session and many more use-cases. A lot of great work in that regard was already done, but right now at the dawn of the mass market, we think it is time to pause briefly. Let’s take a deep breath and make smart decisions on how we as a whole EV charging value chain move forward.
Learnings from the development of the Internet
From our experience over the last three years working for the digital infrastructure in EV charging, we think we are still where internet technology was in the 1980’s and early 1990’s: The digital infrastructure is complicated, expensive and not secure; and worst: closed and innovation-hindering (do you remember logging into the internet by using the AOL login screen?).
Fortunately, in the case of the internet, the developer community made many smart decisions, one example being an open-source core infrastructure. This facilitated the development of millions of websites and web services, something from which we as end-customers benefit a lot from nowadays (just think about all the web pages that you’ve visited today alone).
We are afraid that mass-market adoption of Electric Vehicles will fail if we don’t take the learnings from the creation of the internet seriously and apply them to how we build the digital core infrastructure for the EV charging value chain.
The Open Charging Network (OCN)
With the aim of bringing the EV charging community the same and even more benefits, we have built the Open Charging Network (OCN). With the OCN, digital communication between Charge Point Operators, eMobility Service Providers and many more EV charging players becomes
- Simple (connect with anyone with just one connection)
- Cost-efficient (communicate for free without intermediaries in between)
- And secure (verify identities and messages on the network).
It is based on the open de-facto standard for digital interoperability in EV charging, the Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) and other tools like blockchain technology. All core components are built open-source and everyone can freely join the network. To get you started with the Open Charging Network visit this page: https://shareandcharge.com/open-charging-network/
The OCN Store: Unleashing the power of innovation in EV charging
Inspired by the variety of innovative solutions on top of the internet core infrastructure, the OCN wants to facilitate the same for EV charging. Add-on solutions for an EV charging service (like for example a payment solution, a contracting service or a cross provider smart charging solution…) can be easily plugged into the system and offered to any user of the network. There is a place for all these applications, which we call the OCN Store. If you want to learn more about the possibilities that this will open up for the EV charging community, just visit this page: https://shareandcharge.com/ocn-store/
Let’s put the EV driver in the focus of our endeavors. Let’s jointly build a digital core infrastructure that helps the EV charging community to build awesome EV charging solutions. Let’s make the story of Electric Vehicles a successful one.
We are convinced that the Open Charging Network will play a vital role in that regard and we are looking forward to the collaboration ahead.
More information about next steps and how you can support the movement can be found here: https://shareandcharge.com/open-charging-network/