The Protocol Trap
Every few months, someone asks me which charging protocol will "win." The question reveals a misunderstanding of how infrastructure actually evolves.
Standards Don't Win — They Accumulate
The EV charging industry has OCPP for charger-to-backend communication, ISO 15118 for vehicle-to-charger, OCPI for roaming, and a dozen others for various edge cases.
None of these will disappear. None will become truly universal. And that's fine.
The internet runs on TCP/IP, but also HTTP, SMTP, DNS, BGP, and countless application-specific protocols. The power grid has its own stack of standards that took decades to evolve. EV charging will be the same.
The Real Challenge
Protocol standardization matters less than protocol implementation. I've seen perfectly standard OCPP deployments that couldn't reliably start a charging session because:
- The charger interpreted "Available" differently than the backend expected
- Time synchronization drifted by minutes over months
- Error codes were technically correct but operationally useless
The standard told everyone what messages to send. It couldn't tell them what those messages meant in practice.
Building for Ambiguity
The operators who thrive accept that protocols are starting points, not solutions. They build systems that handle ambiguity gracefully:
- Retry logic that adapts to failure patterns
- Monitoring that catches semantic drift before customers do
- Fallback paths for when the "standard" path fails
This isn't elegant. It's necessary.
Related: Grid Constraints Are Features, Not Bugs