Two collapses and one acronym your charger salesman would rather you didn't have. In October 2024, Enel X Way — a division of one of Europe's largest energy companies — shut down its North American operation and cut off tens of thousands of JuiceBox charger owners. Months later, Engie began winding down EVBox, one of the biggest charger manufacturers on the planet. Chargers are 10–15 year assets. The thing that decides whether news like that is an inconvenience or a write-off for you is one protocol — OCPP — and whether your hardware genuinely runs it.
This post is about the least glamorous acronym in EV charging, and why it's the single most important line in any charging contract you sign.
OCPP in 60 seconds
OCPP — the Open Charge Point Protocol — is the open standard that lets any charger talk to any charging management software. It's maintained by the Open Charge Alliance, it's free to implement, and it exists for exactly one reason: so the hardware you bolt to your car park isn't married to the software company that sold it to you.
Without it, your charger only speaks its manufacturer's private language. Which is lovely for the manufacturer. It means every price rise, every 'updated' subscription tier, every feature moved behind a new paywall lands on a customer who can't leave without ripping hardware out of the ground.
With OCPP, the relationship flips. Don't like your software provider? Point the charger at a different one. Vendor goes bust? Migrate. The tarmac-side investment — the expensive part — survives whatever happens to the software side.
The villain of this post isn't a company. It's the proprietary lock-in model itself — and the industry habit of dressing it up as 'a seamless integrated ecosystem'.
1.6 vs 2.0.1: what you actually get
There are two versions of OCPP you'll be offered in 2026, and the difference matters.
OCPP 1.6 shipped in 2015. It's still the most widely deployed version worldwide, and it does the essentials: start/stop charging, basic smart charging and load balancing, remote monitoring. It's fine. It's also eleven years old, and its security model belongs to an era when nobody imagined charge points as attack surfaces on a corporate network.
OCPP 2.0.1 shipped in 2020 and became an international IEC standard (IEC 63584) in 2024. The upgrade is not cosmetic:
- Security that exists at protocol level — encrypted comms without VPN workarounds, signed firmware updates, security event logging. If your IT team has opinions (they do), this is the version they'll approve.
- Proper device management — the back office can see charger status, fault codes and diagnostics in detail, instead of the 1.6-era guessing game of 'it says offline, send a van'.
- Native ISO 15118 support — the standard behind Plug & Charge, where the car authenticates itself and billing just happens. No apps, no RFID card graveyard in the glovebox.
- Smarter smart charging — vehicles can communicate what energy they actually need, so load management stops being a blunt instrument.
- Tariff display messaging — chargers can show drivers what a session costs. UK price-transparency rules already require public chargers to display pricing in pence per kWh; 2.0.1 makes that native rather than bolted on.
For completeness: OCPP 2.1 arrived in January 2025 and adds bidirectional charging (V2G) support via ISO 15118-20. You don't need it today, but it tells you where the road goes — and hardware that's genuinely 2.0.1-capable is what keeps that door open.
If you're buying new hardware in 2026 and it only speaks 1.6, ask why. There are legitimate answers. 'It's what we've always shipped' isn't one of them.
'OCPP compatible' — the two most abused words in charging
Now the marketing trick. Any vendor can print 'OCPP compatible' on a datasheet. It's a claim, not a test result. Plenty of chargers implement just enough of the protocol to demo nicely and then fall over on the messages that matter — or run OCPP alongside a proprietary layer that quietly does all the real work, which is lock-in with extra steps.
What you actually want is certified. The Open Charge Alliance runs a formal certification programme, with independent test labs, for both 1.6 and 2.0.1. Certification means the implementation was tested against the standard by someone other than the vendor's own marketing department.
So ask the question in exactly this form: 'Is the charger OCA-certified for OCPP 2.0.1 — and can you show me the certificate?' Watch what happens. A vendor with certified kit answers in one sentence. A vendor with 'compatible' kit starts a story about their ecosystem.
When the vendor folds — and eventually, one of yours will
The EV charging market is consolidating, hard. Enel X Way and EVBox weren't garage startups — they were backed by two of Europe's largest energy groups, and both still exited. Over a 10–15 year infrastructure life, the odds that every company in your charging stack still exists, still supports your model, and still charges what they charge today are approximately zero.
When it happens, the difference between open and proprietary is brutal:
- Open-protocol site: pick a new management platform, repoint the chargers, carry on. Days of admin.
- Proprietary site: the cloud service dies and takes your payments, your load management, your reporting and sometimes your basic start/stop with it. The hardware becomes street furniture.
And there's now a compliance angle. Under the UK's Public Charge Point Regulations, operators of public rapid chargers (50kW+) must average 99% reliability, with annual reporting from 2026 — plus live status data, contactless payment and a 24/7 helpline. Try hitting a 99% uptime obligation on hardware whose only management platform no longer exists. Open protocols aren't just resilience anymore; they're how you stay on the right side of the regulator when your supplier doesn't make it.
The clause to put in every charging contract
If you take one action from this post, it's this. Before you sign anything, get the following in writing:
- Certified protocol: hardware is OCA-certified to OCPP 2.0.1 (or 1.6 at absolute minimum), with the certificate supplied.
- No paywalled openness: OCPP connectivity to a third-party management system is available at no additional licence fee, forever — not as a 'premium unlock'.
- Exit assistance: on contract end or supplier insolvency, the supplier (or their administrator) must provide credentials and configuration needed to repoint chargers to another OCPP platform within 30 days.
- Firmware escrow or continuity: firmware updates remain available for a defined hardware life, independent of the software subscription.
A vendor who won't sign that is telling you, in advance, exactly how the relationship ends.
Already on 1.6? The migration path is boring — which is the point
If your existing estate runs certified OCPP 1.6, don't panic and don't rip anything out. Most decent 2.0.1-ready management platforms run mixed estates, so the sane path is: keep 1.6 hardware running; check which units are 2.0.1-capable via firmware update (many recent chargers are — vendors just don't push it); specify certified 2.0.1 for every new bay; and let the estate converge over its natural replacement cycle. No drama, no stranded assets. Boring is what winning looks like in infrastructure.
The uncomfortable summary
Chargers are 10–15 year assets in a market where software vendors are dropping like flies. Open protocol is the only thing that makes those two facts compatible. Specify certified OCPP 2.0.1, put the exit clause in the contract, and your car park survives anybody's bankruptcy but your own.
We install OCPP-certified hardware as standard — because we'd rather win your business every year than trap you into it. If you're specifying chargers, or you've just realised you don't know what protocol your current estate runs, talk to us. We'll tell you in plain English what you've got and what it's worth.
Contact SalesRead this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/ocpp-vendor-lock-in-ev-charging. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.