Guidelines for Selecting a Communications Protocol for Vehicle-Grid Integration

What utilities need for full-scale EV deployment

Utilities are launching electric vehicle (EV) pilots and demonstration projects by the dozen. One factor of vehicle-grid integration (VGI), including managed charging and vehicle-to-everything, is required for long-term success – open communication protocols.

A communications protocol is analogous to a “language” whereby two entities speaking the same language can easily understand each other.

Standards-based communications protocols encourage innovation, enable economies of scale, and lower the cost of communication between different systems. Download this report for a four-step process that will help you choose the best protocol(s) to fit your VGI use case(s).

This paper was developed in partnership with QualityLogic, Inc. and Kitu Systems.

Key Insights:

• Identifying and selecting communication protocols is critical to scaling and unlocking the value of VGI
• The need for interoperability standards increases with the number of devices and size of systems deployed
• Four leading open communication protocols are available today that can be used to aggregate EV charging activities for managed charging and vehicle-to-everything

In the report:

• An overview of interoperability standards and communication protocols and examples of EV communication mandates to date
• An overview of today’s top three Vehicle-Grid Integration use cases.
• An overview of EV stakeholders and a definition of communication architectures and messaging pathways.
• Potential information exchange requirements to support use case messaging.
• An overview of four common VGI protocols
• Guidelines for selecting a messaging protocol.