The full agenda — with receipts

Framing sessions rarely carry technical weight, but this one sets the conference's operating thesis: that EV charging's fragmented vendor and protocol landscape needs a shared language to scale. Worth attending only to calibrate expectations for the day's technical and policy content ahead.

ESB's century-old rural electrification build-out is a useful reference point for anyone estimating how long grid-scale infrastructure transitions actually take versus how fast EV charging rollout is being asked to happen. The real question for attendees: what specific lessons from that program (financing, standardization, universal access) transfer to charging infrastructure, and what doesn't.

A hands-on interoperability test slot, not a talk — relevant to CPOs, CSMS vendors and charge point manufacturers who need to verify OCPP conformance against real implementations rather than spec documents alone.

OCPP's growth from a single-market fix into the default global charging protocol says a lot about why open standards win over proprietary lock-in when infrastructure needs multi-vendor interoperability. Anyone building or procuring CSMS/charge point stacks should care about how OCA's governance model handles competing commercial interests as it scales.

Charging networks are becoming grid-connected, remotely-controllable infrastructure at national scale — which means they inherit the threat model of critical infrastructure, not consumer electronics. CPOs, utilities and regulators should be listening for concrete guidance on where responsibility sits: OEM, CPO, CSMS provider or grid operator.

The pitch for open standards is well-worn, but the stakes have changed now that charging infrastructure sits inside grid flexibility and cybersecurity conversations, not just billing and roaming. Relevant for anyone evaluating vendor lock-in risk against a market still consolidating around OCPP, ISO 15118 and OCPI.

Continuation of live interoperability testing — useful for tracking whether specific implementations pass conformance under real conditions, which matters more to engineers than any keynote claim about standards adoption.

Ireland's ZEVI is building out national policy on EV data, PKI and infrastructure standards in real time — a live case study for any market watching how a national regulator operationalizes AFIR-style requirements. Attendees should listen for what's mandated versus aspirational, and the timeline for enforcement.

As DSO, ESB Networks has direct visibility into how EV load actually stresses local grids versus how it's modeled — the gap between smart charging theory and V2G deployment reality is where this session should focus. Relevant to CPOs and aggregators building flexibility products that depend on DSO cooperation, not just OEM capability.

A binary framing — open/interoperable versus fragmented/proprietary — that's more useful as a lens for evaluating vendor and platform decisions than as a prediction. Worth attending to hear what OCA considers the concrete tipping-point risks pushing the market toward the fragmented scenario.

Final round of live conformance testing — the practical payoff of the Plugfest track for engineers verifying multi-vendor OCPP compatibility before deployment.

Brings policy (ZEVI), standards (OCA), cybersecurity (EY), utility (ESB) and international V2G perspective (Climate KIC Australia) into one room — the value is in where these stakeholders disagree on pace and priority, not where they agree. Listen for how AFIR's regulatory timeline and bidirectional charging economics are reconciled with what utilities can actually support today.

Standards fragmentation and cybersecurity gaps remain the two biggest drags on charging network scalability, so a closing call for shared protocols and coordinated policy is a direct read on where OCA, regulators and CPOs still disagree. Watch for what concrete commitments (if any) come out of this beyond the rhetoric — that's the real signal for 2025 roadmaps.

Networking function, not technical content — the value here is informal deal-making and relationship-building among CPOs, OEMs and standards bodies rather than any disclosed data or roadmap.

Plugfest sessions are where OCPP 2.0.1/2.1 implementations get tested against each other for real, exposing the interoperability gaps that spec documents alone can't catch. Anyone shipping CSMS or charge point firmware should care about which vendors show up and what failure modes surface.

A continuation slot in the ongoing interoperability testing — the cumulative pattern of pass/fail results across all slots matters more than any single session, since it indicates whether OCPP 2.x is converging toward genuine plug-and-play across vendors.

Mid-conference testing slot; for implementers the relevant question is whether the same interoperability issues (message sequencing, security profile negotiation, smart charging edge cases) keep recurring across vendor pairs.

Another round of live OCPP conformance testing — value lies in whether previously identified bugs from earlier slots get resolved and retested, a proxy for how mature the ecosystem's OCPP 2.1 support actually is.

Closing testing slot of the plugfest; the cumulative results across all nine slots are what CPOs and hardware vendors should request afterward, since isolated slot outcomes say little without the full interoperability matrix.

Interoperability testing continues — for procurement teams evaluating CSMS or charger vendors, plugfest results are a harder signal of real-world compatibility than vendor self-certification against the OCPP spec.