Proposal 1 – Leading the way on international standards

9 November 2019

UK to take a leading position in defining international interoperability standards.

The interoperability needed to give consumers convenience and choice will only be achieved if common design approaches are adopted across the EV sector. Against this ambition, it is important to recognise that EV charging is an evolving marketplace where technical innovation is to be encouraged. Premature standardisation can have a dampening effect on this innovation. Proposals have been developed that seek to balance these objectives, with greater market freedom earlier but a clear direction of travel that the development of appropriate standards, combined with market forces, will lead to greater interoperability sufficiently quickly. It follows that Government should encourage industry to move towards interoperability in the short-term whilst monitoring developments with a view to intervening if interoperability is not delivered by industry.

Government should work with industry to encourage the adoption of common international ‘whole-system’ standards to cover all aspects of EV charging (cyber security and grid security are discussed in Proposal 2), whilst allowing companies to go their own way, if needed, for new services that are beyond current standards. Given the wide range of industry stakeholders who will benefit from this process, a coordination body should be identified by government and industry to oversee the proposed review. This work has been started by BEIS and OLEV who have sponsored the development by the BSI of two Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) to cover Energy Smart Appliances (ESAs) [25] and Demand Side Response (DSR) [26] . 

It is proposed that Government should:

• In collaboration with industry, establish a body to coordinate their involvement in agreeing the adoption of international and open standards as the basis of EV charging based on the outcome of PAS 1878 and PAS 1879;
• Support interoperability between all EVs and chargepoints, including internationally;
• Support interrogation and control of public chargepoints by legitimate 3rd parties;
• Protect consumers through transactional traceability;
• Mitigate whole-system risks by designing robust approaches to data sharing, automation and fault diagnostics, across all industry stakeholders;
• Refrain from mandating specific choices of standards in the immediate future in order to allow innovation in technology and commercial offerings to deliver consumer benefit; 
• Encourage the development of common standards that will enable the remote change of a smart chargepoint operator; and
• Retain an agreed level of ‘smart’ performance in the event of loss of communications or if the chargepoint operator ceases to support the chargepoint.