Apr 07, 2025

LF Energy CitrineOS Expands Support to OCPP 1.6, Enhancing EV Charging Network Management

LF Energy, the open source foundation focused on harnessing the power of collaborative software and hardware technologies to accelerate the energy transition, announced that CitrineOS, the premier open source Charging Station Management System (CSMS) software stack, has released version 1.6.0, and now supports OCPP 1.6. This milestone expands CitrineOS’s compatibility, enabling a broader range of electric vehicle (EV) chargers to leverage its modular, extensible architecture.

Originally developed by S44 Energy and contributed to LF Energy as an open source initiative, CitrineOS is designed with modularity at its core. It consists of logically separated modules that align with OCPP 2.0.1 and now include comprehensive support for OCPP 1.6, the widely adopted standard for EV charger communication. This update ensures seamless message handling across multiple OCPP protocols, furthering the platform’s flexibility and industry applicability.

The CitrineOS 1.6 release makes other key enhancements including:

  1. New Dynamic UI – A redesigned, operator-friendly user interface facilitates more efficient charger management. The new UI moves away from a general content management system, introducing a specialized EV charging network management experience with detailed views for:
    • Authorizations
    • Transactions
    • Charging Stations
    • Locations
  2. Technical Improvements:
    • Addition of GraphQL into CitrineOS-Core for enhanced data querying and flexibility.
    • Refactoring of CitrineOS-Core to seamlessly support multiple OCPP protocols.
    • Improved file storage flexibility, including support for S3-compatible MinIO.
    • Deprecation of Directus CMS as a core dependency, reducing complexity and improving performance.

“CitrineOS’s expansion to support OCPP 1.6 is a significant step in our commitment to providing an open and interoperable EV charging software stack,” said Alex Thornton, Executive Director of LF Energy. “By enabling a broader range of chargers to leverage an open source CSMS, we are accelerating the adoption of flexible and vendor-neutral charging infrastructure.”

S44 Energy, the original contributor of CitrineOS, continues to play a vital role in its ongoing development. "S44 Energy has spent years building EV charging software that is both robust and adaptable to real-world infrastructure challenges," said Olga Haygood, CEO of S44 Energy. "By expanding CitrineOS’s support to OCPP 1.6, we’re ensuring that more charging networks—regardless of hardware—can benefit from an open, vendor-neutral solution. Open source is the key to accelerating EV adoption, improving charging reliability, and reducing barriers to entry for operators looking to scale."

Join the CitrineOS community on April 9th at 9:00am US Pacific for a webinar discussing the latest version of CitrineOS. Register for free at https://community.linuxfoundation.org/events/details/lfhq-lf-energy-presents-citrineos-bridging-the-past-and-future-of-ev-charging-with-ocpp-16-amp-2x-support/. 

For more information on CitrineOS and how to get involved, visit https://lfenergy.org/projects/citrineos/. 

LF Energy Resources

LF Energy | https://www.lfenergy.org

S44 Energy | https://www.s44.team/