DOI: 10.3390/su18136677 ISSN: 2071-1050

Sustainable Campus EV Charging via a PV–Storage Microgrid: An OCPP-Compliant Proof-of-Concept Field Deployment

Ching-Chuan Luo, Cheng-En You, Ming-Feng Yeh

Sustainable EV charging infrastructure is fragmented by proprietary applications, vendor lock-in, and weakly time-differentiated pricing, blunting its contribution to urban-mobility decarbonisation. This paper asks whether an open-protocol, super-app-mediated photovoltaic–storage charging architecture can jointly resolve these three fragmentations under deployed field conditions and what its sustainability profile then looks like. We report a campus photovoltaic–storage microgrid integrating heterogeneous EV chargers under an open, vendor-neutral charging-control protocol with super-app authentication and payment replacing dedicated charging applications and a time-differentiated tariff aligned at the meter-interval level with the underlying utility wholesale rate; the deployment is exercised through a researcher-scheduled commissioning campaign of 13 sessions designed to establish functional correctness across the operating envelope rather than to measure user behaviour. Three results emerge across cross-vendor compatibility, onboarding friction, and grid alignment. First, basic message-level OCPP compatibility is sustained across two charger vendors under a single cloud management system—in sequential single-vendor sessions—including the full charging profile up to near-rated DC peak power. Second, the super-app-mediated workflow, which requires no charging-specific application installation and no new charger-operator account, structurally eliminates the dedicated application installation and the email/SMS/credit-card verification round-trips of conventional onboarding, compressing measured first-use end-to-end interaction to 31 s; relative to reconstructed commercial-operator baselines, this is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, an order-of-magnitude reduction rather than a controlled benchmark. Third, mid-day energy delivery aligns incidentally with the utility off-peak window, not user-driven demand shifting, while PV-displacement and BESS-discharge contributions to charging are bracketed by scenario rather than being separately metered. The paper’s contribution is therefore a replicable, policy-embedded sustainable charging architecture validated at field scale within the New Taipei Net-Zero Carbon Demonstration Site Programme, with no claim of global novelty; the same architecture is structurally positioned to convert the observed incidental grid-friendliness into a deliberate, user-facing benefit via a hardware-free mid-day-discount redesign.

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