In order to promote the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EV) in Europe and to reduce the different regulatory, commercial or political barriers, it is imperative that EVs, Charging Points (CPs) and all kind of systems needed to allow the charging and other additional services are compatible to some extent.

EVs emerge as a great challenge for the grid infrastructure. During the last years most OEMs are producing new EV series, which are slowly spreading in the market. In parallel, intelligent systems of very different functionalities and technologies, aim to open new markets of added value services.

The performance and interoperability of all those systems need to be assessed from different perspectives, including electric energy, communications and information management. This way, the whole system will be able to offer charging and other services, which will allow the creation of sustainable new business models. COTEVOS considers all these needs, and verifies the functionalities that the different systems require to manage the EV charging and the associated smart grid infrastructure.

COTEVOS aims to develop optimal structures and capacities to test the conformance, interoperability and performance of the different systems to be included in the infrastructure for smart charging of Electric Vehicles. Based on the partners’ contrasted experience and a decade of collaboration around the facilities, standardization and research infrastructures for DER and aligned with ongoing standardization development under M/453, M/468 and M/490 (CENELEC SG-CG, E-Mobility Smart Charging WG among others), COTEVOS will address key issues such as the cross-national transparency, the interaction between grid infrastructure and vehicles and the operational reliability, while reducing the time-to-market of equipments, so that they will be available in line with the arrival of electric vehicle. For that purpose, a number of on-going demo projects will be used as a reference.