The full agenda — with receipts

Standard logistics slot — arrive early if you want informal access to OCA staff and DSO reps before the formal program starts.

Sets the frame for the day; watch for signals on how much weight organisers give to grid-integration topics versus payments/interoperability, since that split shapes the rest of the agenda.

OCA sets direction for OCPP globally, so this is the closest thing to a state-of-the-standard address — worth attending if you need to know what's prioritised in the 2.x roadmap versus left to national profiles like CSIP-AUS.

As DSOs push for direct visibility and control over distributed EV load, the gap between charge point protocols (OCPP) and grid-side DER standards (CSIP-AUS) becomes a real integration bottleneck — not a theoretical one. This session should clarify where translation actually happens today: is it CPO-side middleware, aggregator platforms, or native protocol bridging, and what latency/data-model mismatches remain unresolved. Anyone building for Australian DER regulatory compliance (dynamic connections, flexible export limits) needs a concrete answer, not a standards overview.

A joint OCA/CSIP-AUS whitepaper effort turning into practical guidance is exactly the kind of standards work that later becomes mandatory connection requirements — early insight here is a lead indicator for compliance costs.

Break — no content.

Local controller placement decides who bears the cost and liability of offline resilience and grid compliance when connectivity drops — a real design tradeoff for anyone deploying DER-integrated sites at scale, not a theoretical one.

Charging infrastructure is increasingly treated as critical infrastructure, and Australia's regulatory posture on this is still forming — CPOs need to know now whether obligations will mirror existing OT/critical infrastructure law or create EV-specific rules.

164 security measures is a lot to prioritise with finite engineering budget; the value here is in what gets flagged as must-do versus nice-to-have for Australian operators, given network-connected chargers are a documented attack surface.

Break — no content.

Field intelligence from the EU Plugfest and European regulators/grant bodies is useful mainly for spotting which interoperability and funding mechanisms Australia is likely to import next — a leading indicator, not a retrospective.

AEMO's 2026 ISP sets system-level expectations for bidirectional and coordinated charging that industry now has to build capability against; the real question is whether current standards and market design actually remove the access barriers AEMO is assuming will disappear.

Break.

Conformance gaps are still a leading cause of field failures and costly interoperability disputes between CPOs, CSMS vendors, and hardware OEMs. This session should clarify where debug testing ends and formal OCTT certification begins, and what ROI justifies the investment for teams shipping OCPP 1.6/2.0.1 stacks today.

ARENA funding has directly shaped Australia's public charging rollout, so its read on what worked in VGN pilots signals where government support and compliance requirements are headed next. Anyone building or bidding into Australian charging infrastructure should track what structural gaps ARENA flags for industry to fill.

V2G viability hinges on load management standards actually working across mixed-vendor fleets, and OCPP 2.1's smart charging profiles are the mechanism most likely to make or break bidirectional deployments at scale. With CharIN and KERI on the panel, this is where to hear whether interoperability testing is catching up to the hardware ambitions.

Transition into the plugfest testing days.

Networking reception.

Hands-on interoperability testing between charge point and CSMS implementations — the real value is in which vendor combinations fail and why, data that rarely surfaces outside events like this.

Continued plugfest testing; each slot typically pairs different vendor combinations, so coverage across slots matters more than any single session.

Continued plugfest testing; each slot typically pairs different vendor combinations, so coverage across slots matters more than any single session.

Continued plugfest testing; each slot typically pairs different vendor combinations, so coverage across slots matters more than any single session.

Continued plugfest testing; each slot typically pairs different vendor combinations, so coverage across slots matters more than any single session.

Final plugfest slot — the cumulative results across all six sessions are what actually matter for anyone deciding which CSMS or charge point firmware to trust in production.

OCPP interoperability failures between CPOs and CSMS vendors are still a leading cause of field downtime and delayed rollouts. This slot is a hands-on interop test — the questions to answer are which vendors and OCPP versions are being tested, and what failure modes get surfaced. Relevant to anyone shipping chargers or backend software who needs certainty before deployment, not just spec compliance on paper.

Interoperability gaps between charge point firmware and management systems remain a top driver of support tickets and stranded assets. This is a live test slot — worth knowing which OCPP version/features are in scope and whether results feed into public conformance data. Matters most to hardware OEMs and CSMS providers validating claims before customer deployment.

Plugfests exist because OCPP certification alone doesn't guarantee two systems actually talk to each other correctly in the field. Key unknowns here are the specific vendor pairs and message flows under test, and whether edge cases like Smart Charging or ISO 15118 bridging are covered. Anyone integrating third-party chargers into an existing CSMS should track what breaks.

As the final scheduled test slot, this session likely closes out a multi-day interoperability sweep across OCPP implementations — the value is in aggregate findings, not just this one run. Open questions: what results get published, and do they name specific vendor/version combinations that failed or passed. Procurement teams and standards-committee members should care about the answers.