Summary
EV charging infrastructure has largely solved the problem it set out to solve — the chargers work, the networks exist, drivers can find a plug. But at ICNC26 in Berlin this September, the industry's largest annual gathering built its entire theme around what comes next: "Collaboration at Scale: Establishing the Open Smart Charging Ecosystem." The premise is that interoperability can no longer stop at plugs and protocols; it has to extend into smart charging, grid data, and the deeper convergence of the energy and mobility sectors.
In this special multi-guest episode, recorded live on the ICNC26 show floor at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, Christophe sits down with four people building pieces of that open ecosystem from very different vantage points. Joakim Arvidsson, co-founder of Peak Energy, brings a sales and solution-development background from the IT and security industries to the unglamorous but critical problem of grid cost transparency. Bradford Crist, CEO and co-founder of ChargeMate, spent a decade in EV charging — including leading DC fast-charging product development at Volta — before building an AI support layer for drivers and CPOs. Oumaima Bounouadar, co-founder and CEO of OCPP Lab, brings a data science background to a problem she lived firsthand: the slow, manual, physical-hardware-dependent grind of testing charging interoperability. And Jaap Burger, an independent EV grid-integration consultant, has spent years translating between EV charging innovation and the regulatory and policy world that governs it.
Together, these four conversations trace a single throughline: the industry has moved past "does it work" and into "does it pay off, does it scale, and does it actually talk to itself" — cost, revenue, testing rigor, and regulatory collaboration, all in service of the same open ecosystem ICNC26 put at the center of its stage.
What you'll learn
- Why grid connection fees and transfer costs are a genuine "jungle" — scattered manually across individual DSO websites with no standardized definitions of peak, average, or seasonal pricing, according to Joakim Arvidsson.
- How the EV charging market's priorities have shifted in distinct phases: first hardware rollout speed, then reliability and user experience, and now — per Arvidsson — cost and profitability.
- Why Bradford Crist believes AI-driven driver support should be judged on revenue recovery and retention, not just cost reduction, which he calls "cost of entry" rather than a real differentiator.
- What ChargeMate's new partnership with Percepta (a Ford tech joint venture) adds to its AI-plus-human support model for large automotive and charging providers.
- Why Oumaima Bounouadar and her co-founder built OCPP Lab's continuous interoperability testing platform after experiencing firsthand how slow and resource-intensive manual OCPP/OCPI testing was — up to 30 minutes per basic scenario, requiring a physical charger, an EV, and two specialized engineers.
- Why component-level testing (unit and integration tests) isn't enough on its own — drivers experience the full charging journey end-to-end, and many real issues only surface when systems interact.
- Why Jaap Burger sees a widening gap between technical maturity and regulatory conversation: charge point operators are constrained by grid capacity but rarely bring the resulting flexibility-value opportunity directly to regulators and DSOs.
- Why real-world vehicle-to-grid deployments are still earlier-stage than expected two years ago, even as unidirectional smart charging has become close to a default assumption in depot and HGV charging business cases.
Notable quotes
"I think it's a hidden cost that not anyone understands. You have the utility cost, the kilowatt hours, and then you have the grid cost — the connection fee, the transfer fees. And the grid owners can define them as they want." — Joakim Arvidsson, Peak Energy
"There's a lot of people able to offer lower costs with AI tools. That's cost of entry. What we're really focused on is providing an experience that recovers revenue and retains customers." — Bradford Crist, ChargeMate
"Ultimately the driver experiences the entire charging journey, not just an isolated component — and many issues only appear when those systems start interacting." — Oumaima Bounouadar, OCPP Lab
About the guests
Joakim Arvidsson is co-founder of Peak Energy, which helps charge point operators and CPMS providers understand and control the hidden costs of grid connections — including capacity fees and peak charges that vary widely and opaquely across distribution system operators. Arvidsson brings a background in solution sales from the IT and security industries, applying that same "translate a complex technical cost into something a business can act on" approach to grid economics for the EV charging sector.
Bradford Crist is CEO and co-founder of ChargeMate, an AI-powered support platform for EV drivers and charge point operators. He spent the last decade working across the EV charging industry, including several years as a product manager at Volta Charging leading DC fast-charging, payments, and mobile app development, and earlier experience with Hubject during its US market entry. Crist founded ChargeMate after seeing firsthand how even highly "online" charging networks still generated significant friction at the point of use.
Oumaima Bounouadar is co-founder and CEO of OCPP Lab, a Paris-based (Station F) startup building a continuous interoperability testing platform for the EV charging ecosystem. With a mathematics background and five years of experience as a data scientist — including at an e-mobility operator, where she first encountered the problem she'd later build a company around — Bounouadar co-founded OCPP Lab roughly ten months ago to let companies simulate and test integrations across protocols like OCPP and OCPI without needing physical hardware for every test.
Jaap Burger is an independent consultant focused on EV grid integration — smart and bidirectional charging viewed through a combined regulatory, policy, innovation, and user-facing lens. His work centers on translating between what's happening in policy and regulation and what's happening at the leading edge of EV charging innovation, helping each side understand what's realistically possible today and in the near future.
Episode chapters
- 00:00 — Welcome & episode intro
- 02:25 — Joakim Arvidsson (Peak Energy): The grid cost jungle
- 08:24 — Bradford Crist (ChargeMate): AI support built for revenue, not just cost
- 16:29 — Oumaima Bounouadar (OCPP Lab): Testing the full charging journey
- 23:51 — Jaap Burger: Bridging the CPO–regulator gap
- 32:03 — Wrap-up & key takeaways
Runtime: ~34 minutes
Links
- Joakim Arvidsson: linkedin.com/in/joakim-arvidsson-ab0135
- Bradford Crist: linkedin.com/in/bradford-crist-787a5519
- Oumaima Bounouadar: linkedin.com/in/oumaima-bounouadar-a31221198 | OCPP Lab: www.ocpplab.com
- Jaap Burger: linkedin.com/in/jaapburger
Related listening
For more on the regulatory and DSO side of the flexibility conversation Jaap Burger raises here, check out our episodes with Julia Hildermeier, Zsuzsanna Pató, and Jan Rosenow of RAP (Regulatory Assistance Project), three separate deep dives into grid congestion, smart charging economics, and time-of-use tariff policy across Europe and the UK.
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