S44, the leader in electric vehicle (EV) charging software for automotive OEMs and top EV network operators, today announced the open source project CitrineOS. CitrineOS delivers critical back-end software required to quickly stand up EV charge management compliant with Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) 2.0.1 and National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) standards. Based on real-world EV charging use cases and the need to improve reliability, the modular software enables widespread interoperability between charging equipment, vehicles and networks and is available worldwide.

The Biden administration aims to have 500,000 public EV chargers and for half of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030. But unreliable and inconsistent charging experiences have consumers putting their foot on the brakes. Even in cities with advanced EV adoption, only 72% of fast charging stations are operational — below the 97-99% uptime required for federal funding. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has invested $7.5 billion in EV charging, and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary grant program offers an additional $2.5 billion. To qualify for this funding, EV charge management software must be OCPP 2.0.1 compliant by February 28, 2024. 

“Even with an experienced team, you’re looking at six to eight months to build NEVI-compliant EV charge management software from scratch,” said Julian Offermann, co-founder and CEO of S44. “With CitrineOS, you can do it in a month. Democratizing access to the software is the only way to be fast enough to hit the state and federal certification deadlines.”

Everyone from enthusiasts to the largest global charge point operators, fleet managers and car manufacturers can use CitrineOS to:

• Provision new charging equipment 
• Complete charging transactions 
• Remotely control charging equipment
• Monitor charger equipment uptime, power levels and degradation
• Manage energy consumption and throughput

“Reliable, standardized and open back-end communication is key for commercial, fleet, public and autonomous electric vehicle charging infrastructure,” said Cliff Fietzek, board member of CharIN North America. “CitrineOS is a game changer for this communication, built natively on the latest charge point protocol standard, OCPP 2.0.1. Now anyone can leverage the open source libraries to get to work quickly — to bring even legacy networks to OCPP 2.0.1 compliance.”

CitrineOS enables industry-wide collaboration on a single code base. The ability to build and apply fixes for broad use will make back-end communication more reliable across the board. 

To learn more about CitrineOS and how it can help strengthen and accelerate EV charge management worldwide, visit www.s44.team/citrineos or check out the code on GitHub.