Charging stations

A charging station is a physical box, installed at a site, with one or more plugs a driver connects to. The platform describes that with three resources:

• a Location, the site,
• an EVSE Controller, the station,
• and its Connectors, the individual plugs.

Each is a separate resource with its own configuration and status. The rest of this page takes them one at a time. If you integrate over OCPP or OCPI, the last section maps the platform's model onto those protocols, and shows where it deliberately differs.

Location

A Location is the physical site: its address, its opening hours, and the one or more charging stations standing on it. A Location is owned by an Account.

Beyond the address, a Location carries two policies that decide how the site behaves.

How the site earns. The energy a station delivers is paid for, and the Location sets who receives that money:

• business reimbursement, paid to the Account that owns the site,
• employee reimbursement, where a driver owns the station (home charging, typically) and their employer reimburses them,
• split reimbursement, shared between the two,
• or no reimbursement.

Whether the site is roamed. A Location is either published to the roaming network or kept off it. A published Location is either public, visible to drivers across the connected networks, or private, reachable only by selected tokens.

EVSE Controller

An EVSE Controller is the station itself: the unit that opens an OCPP WebSocket to the platform. It is where the live relationship with the hardware lives. It holds:

• the station's technical configuration,
• the tariff applied to a charge,
• and the EVSE Commands you send and receive over the API, to start or stop a session, reboot the station, or update its firmware.

Each EVSE Controller has an eMI3 EVSE ID, for example NL*EFL*EV*1234567: a country code, a party ID, then the station's identifier. The country and party ID are not fixed; they come from the partner's roaming-network configuration and differ from one operator to the next.

Connector

A Connector is a single physical plug on the station: its socket type (Type 2, CCS, CHAdeMO), its power rating, and the details an API consumer needs to describe the connection point. An EVSE Controller has one or more Connectors.

Coming from OCPP or OCPI

Skip this section unless you integrate over a protocol. The platform, OCPP and OCPI all describe the same hardware, but they draw the lines in different places.

The platform uses two hardware levels: an EVSE Controller with Connectors directly beneath it. OCPP and OCPI each use three levels, and the two three-level models are not the same three:

• OCPP is Station → EVSE → Connector. It has no idea of a site; it only knows the station it is connected to.
• OCPI is Location → EVSE → Connector. It has no idea of a station; a Location groups everything at a site.

In both protocols an EVSE is a single charging spot, the part that charges one car at a time. The platform does not give that middle tier an object of its own. Every physical connector hangs directly off the EVSE Controller. This is a hangover from OCPP 1.6, which had no EVSE tier either (just Charge Point → Connector).

Two things follow from the flatter model. On the way in from OCPP 2.x, the EVSE tier is flattened away; with OCPP 1.6, which never had it, the fit is exact. And publishing to OCPI reverses the shape: OCPI shows each usable point to drivers as an EVSE, and the platform gives each Connector its own OCPI EVSE, with the controller's eMI3 ID suffixed per connector (…*C1, …*C2, …). A station with two EVSEs of two connectors each, held as one EVSE Controller and four Connectors, is published as one OCPI Location with four EVSEs.

The same hardware, named in each world:

For the protocols themselves, see the OCPP and OCPI primer pages; for the roaming side, publishing to roaming.