Why the charging market has to be industrialised first

In short

The charging market sits in a craft phase and tries to play platform at the same time. That is not a matter of teething problems. It is a phase error. AFIR makes it visible. The consolidation wave now under way does not solve it, because it changes the owners, not the operating model. Industrialisation is not a strategy. It is the stake you pay to be allowed at the table at all. Only after that does thinking about strategy pay off.

At first glance the European charging market looks dynamic, innovative and competitive. New providers appear, apps get built, roaming networks grow, subscription models arrive, charging power keeps rising.

And still the user’s reality is a different one. Apps work unreliably. Roaming is expensive or opaque. Prices feel unfair. Chargers are offline or fail to start. Invoices do not add up. Support is hard to reach.

Many read this as the teething problems of a young market. That falls short. What we see today is not a matter of detail. It is a structural phase error.

The charging market is still in a craft phase

Today’s charging market largely works like a craft market. Project-driven instead of series-capable. Every site different. Every piece of hardware different. Every software different. Every tariff logic different. Every maintenance regime different. Every permit different. Every integration different.

Many individual solutions, little repeatability. That produces variety among providers. It does not produce industrialisation.

This structure is typical of an early market phase. It is not wrong. It simply does not scale.

The phase error

At the same time, many providers try to play an entirely different phase. Platform logic, roaming, apps, subscription models, white-label solutions, interoperability, charging as a service.

Those are end-phase mechanics. They presuppose standardised operating models, normalised processes, stable hardware, automated billing, clear end-to-end ownership, low tolerance for error. In the charging market, all of that exists only in fragments.

The result is not progress. It is chaos at a higher level of abstraction.

Why apps, roaming and platforms fail

Few apps fail on UX design today. The majority still fail on the reality behind them. You see only a slice of the market. You see no real-time data. At times prices are hidden in time windows or behind subscriptions. Chargers offline, failed starts, inconsistent billing. An app cannot simulate industrial reliability.

Roaming does not fail on interfaces. The eMSP, and a CPO can itself become an eMSP for third-party networks, fails on sensible pricing and above all on the margin that inserts itself, in any shape it likes, between customer and provider. On top comes the protectionism of one’s own business model by CPOs and others, and the deft exploitation of the weaknesses in journey and destination logic. Roaming in its current form presupposes that a fight over the customer becomes necessary, rather than a bottleneck management of chargers that gets served up or withheld depending on interest. And it presupposes standardised operations, not the other way around.

Platforms do not fail on APIs. They fail because there are no normalised value chains to abstract from. You cannot scale chaos in an orderly way. Unfortunately it scales in a very orderly way.

The maturity cycle

Phase 1, craft: project-driven, manual, fragmented, individual, error-prone.

Phase 2, industrialisation: standardised operating models, repeatable setups, end-to-end value streams, automation, high reliability, measurable processes.

Phase 3, digitalisation: software-defined operations, plug and charge, automatic billing, predictive maintenance, load management.

Phase 4, platform: interoperability, fleet APIs, energy marketplaces, white-label operations.

Phase 5, service: charging as a service, mobility as a service, invisible charging, autonomous systems.

An excursion that belongs in an article of its own, but has to be laid down here already. At the end of this development stand multi-layer revenue models. A charging park, and even more a charging network, will not finance itself otherwise. Anyone who still believes it can be done through the provision of kilowatt-hours alone, through a scaling volume of electricity sold, is on the wrong track. And this too can already be learned from the truck-charging market, because there several revenue layers are thought through from the start, something the passenger-car market too often forgot at the beginning. What such models look like for CPOs, eMSPs or charging parks is a subject in its own right.

The charging market sits in phase 1 and the transition to 2. Many try to play phase 4 and 5. Without phase 2 there is no phase 3, 4 or 5.

And then AFIR lands on top

Into this immature structure the legislator poured AFIR. Every requirement in AFIR is a requirement for an industrialised system. Uniform payment, transparent pricing, simple use without technical hurdles, and that is only the UX part.

The market, though, is still in the craft phase. Not because AFIR is wrong. Because it lands on an immature system.

AFIR enforces roaming, card payment, price transparency, APIs. Without normalised operating models, without automated processes, without clean end-to-end ownership. The result is more sources of error, more friction, more OPEX. Precisely the things you can only get right after industrialisation.

AFIR forces providers to play the end phase. What gets standardised is the chaos, not the operation.

That is the irony. AFIR wants consumer protection, market opening, competition, interoperability and price transparency. In the short term AFIR delivers more friction, more errors, more support cases, more UX problems and more cost.

The market is fragmented and monopolised at once

This is where it gets interesting, because two findings appear to contradict each other.

On one side, fragmentation. Hundreds of operators, each with their own hardware, software and tariff logic.

On the other side, concentration. In its monopoly analysis, LichtBlick measures an average market share of 72 percent for individual operators within their region. Under German competition law, the threshold for a dominant position sits at 40 percent. The reason is structural: many CPOs are corporately tied to the local grid operator. The Monopolkommission adds that municipalities award charging sites preferentially to their own municipal utilities, and recommends a legal duty to tender public land transparently and without discrimination.

For context: LichtBlick is here, if anything, an interested party. As an independent electricity retailer it benefits from this diagnosis. The figure remains verifiable, and the Monopolkommission’s finding stands alongside it.

Many providers nationally, a near-dominant one almost everywhere locally. That is not a contradiction. It is the signature of the craft phase. Many islands, each dominant on its own, none of them at scale.

Consolidation is already running

And the market is reacting. Not through industrialisation, but through acquisitions. One operator has taken over three competitors within six months and now runs more than 15’000 charge points. In Norway, two of the largest fast-charging providers have merged, becoming the largest provider in the country and the Nordic region, with around a quarter of the Norwegian market. Industry consultants see the consolidation wave already under way and give it another two to three years. In Denmark the process has gone further, where the largest charging network operator was merged with two sister companies into a single integrated unit.

The economic pressure behind it is real. In fast charging, 50 kW was once considered acceptable. Now 400 kW is demanded. Assets get replaced earlier than planned. An eight to ten year depreciation period turns into three to five. The fixed costs are not only high. They age faster than the calculation assumes.

Consolidation is not industrialisation

And this is where I see the thinking error everywhere right now.

Consolidation changes the owners. Industrialisation changes the operating model. That is not the same thing.

Buy 6’000 charge points and you own 6’000 different charge points under one roof. Different hardware, different backends, different maintenance cycles, different failure modes, different tariff logic. The value chain does not get normalised. It gets bundled. You cannot scale chaos in an orderly way. You also cannot buy it and thereby order it.

Defragmentation means fewer players with open interfaces. Consolidation without interoperability means fewer players with closed islands. The first is market maturity. The second is an oligopoly with 72 percent local market share.

Economies of scale only appear above a critical size, and quality standards can only be held with high network density and high utilisation. In that sense consolidation is necessary. It is simply not sufficient. It compresses the maturity problems instead of solving them, as long as industrialisation does not accompany it.

Why the pass-through model is the wrong repair

As a way out of the local monopolies, a pass-through model is proposed. The operator provides only the infrastructure, and the electricity comes from a freely chosen supplier. The model separates roles that are mixed today, and it addresses a real imbalance. Only CPOs participate in the revenues from emissions quota trading. Third-party providers pay extra in roaming, sometimes considerably.

The problem is the sequence. The pass-through model presupposes what the market does not have: session-level balancing in regular operation, comprehensive interoperability of protocols, uniform metering and timestamp requirements, functioning market communication between suppliers and operators. Technically it has been permitted for years. In practice it exists in pilot projects.

It is a phase 4 mechanic. You can impose it on a phase 1 market, just as AFIR was imposed. The result would be the same. More interfaces, more sources of error, more friction, and a price that consists of two components for the user, one of which remains freely shaped. The opacity does not disappear. It shifts from the electricity to the usage.

Above all, the model shifts the problem instead of solving it. Reduce the CPO to a pure provider that only supplies the infrastructure and prices it, and it has to calculate on a full-cost basis. Because you take away its basis for going after several revenue streams at all, let alone building a multi-layer revenue model. Precisely the parts of the value chain that will have to finance a viable charging business in future are taken from it. I hear the same demand in truck charging, and there too it holds: it sounds like competition and produces an operator that can no longer make the numbers work.

This is not a defence of monopoly structures. It is a statement about sequence, and about the calculation behind it.

Industrialisation is the stake

Which brings me to the core.

Industrialisation is not a strategy. It does not differentiate, it does not lower the price, it does not win a customer. It is the stake you pay to be allowed at the table at all.

Whoever has no standardised operating models, no end-to-end ownership, no automated processes and no measurable journeys is not playing badly. He is not playing. He sits at a table where he cannot hold a hand.

Only after that does thinking about strategy pay off. Differentiation through trust, or cost leadership through volume. Both paths presuppose repeatability. Without phase 2 neither is passable.

So the strategic task in the charging market is not more sites, better apps, more aggressive prices. It is standardised operating models, end-to-end value streams, automation, high reliability, measurable journeys, and utilisation as the measure of success.

That is not a vision. That is repair work.

What this means for new ventures

Whoever builds a charging business today that is site-centric, app-centric, marketing-driven and project-driven is building for a market that is currently disappearing.

A new charging company must not be optimised only for today’s market. It has to be updateable in live operation, for a market that abolishes today’s logic by itself. Modular operating models. Value streams that can be re-cut. Extensible automation. Replaceable integrations. New revenue models.

The half-life of a strategy is markedly shorter than twenty years ago. Build the company without that in mind, and you will lose yourself in transformation projects later and wear yourself out.

Closing

The charging market is not broken. It is immature. And it tries to mask that immaturity with end-phase mechanics. AFIR makes the phase error visible. Consolidation compresses it.

Industrialisation is therefore neither an option nor a strategy. It is the condition for everything that is supposed to come after it.

And without it the market stays fragmented. Not because the ideas are wrong. Because the sequence is.

Sources

Nordic consolidation, Eviny and Mer merger, July 2026

Market concentration, LichtBlick monopoly analysis 2026 Average 72 percent market share of individual operators within their region, surcharges for third-party providers, emissions quota revenues. LichtBlick, as an independent electricity retailer, is an interested party in this question.

Monopolkommission, site tendering and concentration data

Consolidation wave, utilisation and depreciation pressure

Acquisitions in the German CPO market, company announcements

Denmark, consolidation and grid connection

https://www.elektroauto-news.net/news/daenemark-zeigt-deutschland-lademarkt-zukunft

Regulatory framework

AFIR, Regulation (EU) 2023/1804: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32023R1804
Grid access rules for electric mobility (NZR-EMob), Bundesnetzagentur 2021: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sachgebiete/Energie/Unternehmen_Institutionen/E-Mobilitaet/NZR_EMob.pdf

Last accessed 10 July 2026.

Two points with open status

The Danish grid connection pause was initially limited to three months from early March 2026. Whether it has since been lifted, extended or replaced by another arrangement, I have not checked.

The Monopolkommission updates its concentration data continuously. Whether the figures referenced here from the 2025 sector report have since been revised, I have not checked.