Brussels, Belgium and New York, NY, U.S.A. --- (METERING.COM) --- December 7, 2012 - Representatives from the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) have agreed to continue their cooperation on promoting and enabling the harmonization and alignment of standards for electric vehicles.

Meeting at a Transatlantic Roundtable last week to review the CEN-CENELEC Focus Group on European Electro-Mobility report and theANSI Electric Vehicles Standards Panel’s Standardization Roadmap for Electric Vehicles – Version 1.0, the participants made the agreement in order to prevent the proliferation of conflicting standards.

Electric vehicle standards development in the organizations is currently focused in four areas:

• Coupler safety and interoperability and fast charging: Many relevant international standards are already in place or being developed. The industry is working to make ISO and IEC standards address the different charging scenarios as comprehensively as possible, for instance through incorporating the SAE J1772TM combo coupler. However, there will always be some differences in coupler configurations as a result of specific regional electric grid requirements.
• Vehicle-to-grid communications: There is a need for common standards for communication between the vehicle and the grid, and to enable roaming of electric vehicles and smart charging. Harmonization of the communication protocols is already taking place between IEC and SAE but further work is needed. Efforts are also underway to address various interoperability issues when an EV is roaming between charging networks and to address communication of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) metering data.
• Wireless charging: Early cooperation among standardizers is taking place, including at the international level, and will help to avoid future problems with regard to compatibility. Safety aspects and seamless charging are challenges that standardization must address.
• Safety of electric vehicle infrastructure and batteries: Much standards work has been undertaken to ensure the safety of lithium-ion batteries and EVSE. Additional investigation into safe storage, transport and interoperability aspects of EV batteries is needed, for example to support the battery exchange infrastructure market, and extensive work is still needed on testing in line with standards.

Participants noted that while one global standard is always the preferred objective, intellectual property, copyright, and commercial issues sometimes result in more than one standards organization working on the same or similar issues. Regulatory and/or infrastructure differences between regions can also result in variations.

It was also recognized that governments, including the European Commission and other inter-governmental bodies, must play their part by working towards the increased harmonization of relevant laws and regulations.