{"id":32243,"date":"2026-09-15T10:33:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/?p=32243"},"modified":"2026-09-15T11:24:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T10:24:22","slug":"ev-charging-is-growing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/blog\/ev-charging-is-growing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"EV charging is growing up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Highlights from Monta After Hours in Berlin – “The energy play: who owns the next decade of charging?”, with Monta CEO and founder Casper Rasmussen, Eric Boothe of Greenpoint Partners, and Daniel Alarcon, Chief Digital Officer at ABB E-mobility, moderated by Lucie Mattera of ChargeUp Europe.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three people sat on stage in Berlin: an infrastructure investor, a global hardware manufacturer and a software company. They are paid to care about very different things, yet over the course of the evening they kept arriving at the same conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EV charging is growing up.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first decade of this industry was dominated by deployment – getting chargers into the ground, connecting vehicles, and proving that electric mobility could work at scale. The next decade will be judged on an entirely different set of questions. By reliability. By return on capital. By total cost across fifteen or twenty years. By whether revenue can be predicted, and by whether software performs when everything around it depends on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excitement is not over. But the scrutiny has started, and that changes where value will be created.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basics are solved. The next phase isn’t.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“It feels like the basics have been figured out,” said Casper, Monta’s CEO and founder, opening the discussion. “We’ve got 10, 15 years into it. We have quite a lot of assets out there. It kind of works.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry has proved that charging can be deployed. What it has not yet proved is that it can operate those assets with the reliability, predictability and economics expected of mature infrastructure – and those are two very different achievements.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Monta, that distinction has always mattered<\/strong>, and energy was one of the reasons for entering the industry in the first place. As charging scales, the opportunity moves well beyond connecting a car to a charger. It moves into how infrastructure interacts with energy markets, how efficiently assets are operated, and where margin can be created across the whole system rather than at a single point in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Alarcon sees the same transition from the perspective of ABB E-mobility. Before entering EV charging he spent fifteen years in telecommunications, an industry that went through its own journey from new technology to critical infrastructure, and the parallels are not lost on him. “We are getting into adulthood right now,” he said. “Now this is real.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He calls the phase ahead industrialisation, and the demand driving it is changing along with it. It is no longer only an individual driver choosing an electric car. Increasingly it is fleets, logistics, autonomous vehicles and, eventually, robotaxis. That kind of demand behaves differently: it can be contracted, it can be forecast, and when an asset is supporting a commercial operation, failure carries a direct financial consequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric Boothe sees the same shift through capital. Greenpoint Partners has deployed roughly $2.3 billion into energy and mobility assets across Europe and the US, and he described an industry coming out of its hype cycle into a much more sober phase of investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This is the first year I’ve probably seen the industry kind of settle down and go, okay, what is the future in order to raise money, deploy money, expand my network, and forecast demand.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five-year assumptions become fifteen-year assumptions. Growth projections meet interest rates. Technology decisions meet exit valuations. That is what professionalisation looks like, and it means charging is starting to be measured by the same questions as every other infrastructure business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once that happens, some of the industry’s accepted weaknesses become much harder to tolerate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reliability stops being a technical metric when someone is paying for failure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The clearest example is reliability, and Eric described the lengths infrastructure investors will go to in order to remove risk from a site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His sites can have battery backup on the gates so vehicles are never trapped. Connectivity can be hardwired, backed by Starlink, with 5G behind that. Batteries can protect against instability in the grid, and in some locations Greenpoint is testing kinetic flywheels. Almost every physical risk can be given a backup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he arrived at the exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The only place where we don’t have redundancy is in software.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That single gap changes the standard software has to meet. “It has to be near perfect. It has to be as reliable as embedded systems architecture. It just does not fail.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Daniel, coming from telecoms, the distance between that expectation and today’s charging industry was startling. “It was a shock four years ago when I entered this industry that the plug-in success rate was so poor,” he said. Telecommunications spent decades turning reliability into something consumers no longer think about: calls connect, networks work, and the complexity underneath disappears from view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charging is not there yet, and the reason is structural rather than technical. The significant number of interconnected systems involved mean a high-performing platform can still be dragged down by another system somewhere in the chain. Reliability in charging is therefore not primarily a hardware problem. It is a systems problem<\/strong>, and it tends to surface at the boundaries between systems rather than inside any one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Casper sees exactly that from the software layer. “We see a lot of failed charges which are purely on the software side.” A roaming transaction disappears. A payment fails to settle. Connectivity drops before the session begins. Individually these look like small operational failures, but at scale they are not small at all, and Monta’s own data shows that a driver whose first charging experience fails can generate materially less revenue over the long term – in the region of 20\u201330% less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly there is a more immediate consequence too. Eric’s contracted sites operate under service-level agreements, and missing the required uptime during guaranteed peak periods can wipe out an entire month’s profit on a deal in a single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the shift. Uptime used to be something an operations team measured. It now sits in a contract with a financial penalty next to it, and professionalisation turns reliability from an engineering aspiration into an economic obligation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cheapest charger can be the expensive decision<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The same shift is happening in procurement, where infrastructure investors are used to thinking in decades. Buildings, foundations, doors, power systems and grid connections are all evaluated over their useful life. Charging technology very often is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Everything else at the site is being measured on a TCO basis,” Eric said. “The doors, the walls, the windows, the concrete foundation, the structure. It’s all measured on useful life cycle.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That inconsistency shows up plainly in how the industry buys. Most tender documents still ask what a charger costs at the point of purchase and say almost nothing about what it costs to run for the next fifteen years. “It’s hard to see anyone that is thinking in total cost of ownership,” Daniel said of the RFPs that reach him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry has spent years optimising the purchase price of the charger. A more mature industry asks a different question<\/strong>: what does it cost to deliver five million rides from this depot every year, across the life of the asset?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That reframing changes the buying decision completely. The lowest upfront price matters considerably less if the system requires more maintenance, suffers more downtime, consumes more engineering capacity, or limits what an operator can do five years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For an investor, uncertainty carries its own price. “I’d rather have a known bad TCO than an unknown TCO,” Eric said, “because at least I know how to forecast and underwrite the potential losses.” If the operating cost of an asset cannot be predicted, neither can its future income, and if a future buyer cannot confidently value that income they will discount the asset accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which means a technology decision made during procurement can eventually show up in an exit multiple. The software platform, the hardware and the operating model are no longer simply technical choices. They are capital allocation choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mature companies decide what not to build<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Professionalisation also changes how companies think about engineering. During the early phase of an industry, building everything yourself feels like control. As the ecosystem becomes more complex, it can become the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This industry has severely underestimated software,” Daniel said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the problem is duplication. Companies across the ecosystem have spent years independently building many of the same non-differentiating layers – protocols, integrations, payments, roaming, device communication. All of it is necessary work, but very little of it is where any individual company creates unique value, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on something a customer would notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A mature industry needs better standards, open implementations of those standards, and much clearer decisions about what any single company should build for itself. The things a company chooses not to build then have to become genuine strategic partnerships rather than procurement exercises. “You decide what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do,” as Daniel put it. “What do you buy versus what you make?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Casper made the same point from Monta’s side of the table. “Be clear about where you can outbuild all the industry players right now, and where you should put your bets.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That discipline matters because the technical burden underneath a charging operation keeps increasing. Operators have more chargers, more protocols, more roaming relationships, more payment methods, more energy requirements and more customer expectations than they did five years ago, and every one of those is compounding. At some point, owning everything stops being a strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked for the clearest signal that an operator has outgrown its setup, Casper did not reach for a number of chargers or a revenue threshold. It is when the organisation is “just operating the chargers they have installed, and don’t have time to do anything else than firefighting.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That may be the most practical test of professionalisation. Not how much infrastructure you own, but how much organisational capacity your infrastructure consumes.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predictability may be worth more than growth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

All of this ultimately leads back to value, and here the difference in perspective is instructive. Technology industries are used to celebrating growth. Infrastructure investors celebrate something else entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I worry less about the next euro of profit,” Eric said, than about “the next turn of multiple I can get out of the exit.” His definition of a valuable asset was strikingly simple. “Stability to me is: I can tell you what the economics are going to be, and within a 5% plus or minus variance I can achieve those economics, and I can do it for 10 to 20 years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he pointed out what was missing. “Note what I did not say in that statement, which was growth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a significant change of perspective for an industry that has spent much of the last decade measuring success in deployments. A scarce grid connection producing stable, predictable income can be extremely valuable – not because it grows fastest, but because an investor can understand what it will produce, and understanding is what gets an asset financed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the basic charging layer becomes dependable, the competition moves somewhere else. Daniel compared it again with telecommunications. In the early days of mobile networks the central question was whether a call would connect and stay connected; today nobody buys a phone because it can successfully make a call. That capability simply became assumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charging will go through the same transition. Reliable infrastructure becomes table stakes, and the differentiation moves above it – into energy optimisation, customer experience, fleet operations, flexibility, automation and the ability to create more value from the same physical asset. “The enabler for that – of course the hardware has to be there – but it’s software,” Daniel said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So who owns the next decade of charging?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Not necessarily the company that installs the most chargers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The discussion at Monta After Hours pointed to a different answer. It will be the companies that can make charging behave like infrastructure: companies that can make reliability predictable, that understand the lifetime economics of an asset rather than only its purchase price, that know which technology they genuinely need to own and where partnership creates more value than another internal build, and that can use software and energy to extract more from infrastructure once the basic act of charging becomes assumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first phase of EV charging proved that the industry could build. The next phase will prove whether it can operate. That is a harder standard, and it is also where the next decade of value will be created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Casper ended the evening with a thought that captures the contradiction well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What is in front of us is all the exciting stuff, where things get a lot harder, a lot more sophisticated, and technology-wise more complicated. But that’s also where the margins will be found.”<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Highlights from Monta After Hours in Berlin – “The energy play: who owns the next decade of charging?”, with Monta CEO and founder Casper Rasmussen, Eric Boothe of Greenpoint Partners, and Daniel Alarcon, Chief Digital Officer at ABB E-mobility, moderated by Lucie Mattera of ChargeUp Europe. Three people sat on stage in Berlin: an infrastructure … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":32226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[558,555,12],"tags":[540],"article_tags":[],"class_list":["post-32243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-insights","category-cpo-strategy","category-monta-news-updates","tag-charge-point-operators"],"acf":[],"featured_media_global":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32243"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32251,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243\/revisions\/32251"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32243"},{"taxonomy":"article_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monta.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_tags?post=32243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}