Next step in smart and sustainable cross-border charging

News release - Utrecht

Successful NL Kick-off European Electric Mobility Project: evRoaming4EU
Next step in smart and sustainable cross-border charging

On July 4, 2018 we celebrated the Dutch kick-off of the European evRoaming4EU-project. Together with Dutch project partner MRA-Electric we invited all Dutch EV market players to meet our European project partners and to discuss urgent EV-roaming challenges, national and international.  A large group of interested and committed participants and EV-drivers contributed to several constructive discussions. Overall conclusion: roaming for EV’s is the logical next step, for cross-border charging and for reliable information. The sooner the better!

Building partnerships
The event at the COBRA Museum in Amstelveen was a successful start to build necessary partnerships to speed up EV-roaming in Europe. The evRoaming4EU projects’ ultimate goal is to make sure that every EV-driver can charge anywhere in Europe by use of the independent open OCPI protocol. At this Dutch kick-off, the situation for EV-drivers in the Netherlands has been discussed and compared to other European countries. The infrastructure in the Netherlands is relatively well organized. When traveling to other European countries however, the situation is quite different.  For a trip from the Netherlands to Poland, you may need 7 different charging cards. When traveling to Portugal you may need as many as 12! Other difficulties that EV-drivers experience are the limited information available for navigating and charging, the difference in charging rate (paying per minute or KWh, additional tariffs) and the amount and quality of the charging stations. 

Create an open infrastructure
The challenge is to get different partners to work together and open their network. The evRoaming4EU project tests and promotes the possibility to create an open infrastructure without any technical or regional limitations or obligations. In the coming period, technical, legal and fiscal roaming issues will be analyzed by participating companies, using the open roaming protocol OCPI. Scientific partner Technical University of Eindhoven will contribute by investigating the best way to harmonize existing market protocols and to keep the independent OCPI protocol royalty-free. The results per country will be shared during upcoming events in all participating countries and via our project website www.evroaming4.eu. EV-market parties as well as individual EV-drivers are all welcome to give their feedback and test the pilots!

18 September 2018 Kick-off Denmark
The next evRoaming4EU-event will be held in Copenhagen on 18 September 2018. More information on our website: www.evroaming4.eu. evRoaming4EU is an Electric Mobility Europe (EME) project funded by the European Commission.

More about evRoaming4EU
This NKL project is a collaborative partnership between four countries (Denmark, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands) to facilitate roaming services and provide transparent information about charging in Europe through the use of the open independent OCPI protocol. Local and international partners, suppliers and EV drivers are welcome to contribute to the project and share knowledge and experiences. The project’s ultimate goal is to enable all EV drivers to charge hassle-free anywhere in the EU. The Dutch partners of evRoaming4EU are NKL – Netherlands knowledge platform for charging infrastructure, Eindhoven University of Technology and MRA-Electric. 

Photo's © 2018 MRA-Elektrisch