The Autumn of 2026 Chargalytics conference awards

This Wednesday, 23 September, the EV charging industry holds six conferences at the same time. Haikou, Blomberg, Dublin, Birmingham, Katowice and Detroit. If you run a charging company with a normal number of employees, you are missing at least five of them.

We are missing all six. Chargalytics keeps guides to 87 industry events and has exhibited at none of them. Our founder’s autumn conference schedule, according to our own database, is empty. So we did what people who stay home have always done. We read the agendas and judged everyone who went.

The season is a big one. Between 1 September and New Year’s Eve our calendar holds 51 events and 140 conference days squeezed into 88 working days. Only 28 weekdays this autumn have nobody, anywhere, on a stage talking about charging. Germany hosts six events. So does China. Europe takes 19 of the 51, which is the calendar’s way of telling you where the money is and where the flights are shortest.

The awards

Most tireless speaker

Lucie Mattera, Secretary General of ChargeUp Europe. Seven distinct events since 2023 that we know of, twelve appearances, and three this autumn: Berlin on 1 September, Katowice on 23 September, Brussels on 24 November. Running a Brussels trade association means being in the room, and she is in every room. Honourable mention to Christian Hahn, CEO of Hubject: six distinct events, 27 stage appearances across the last four editions of icnc and two more at the Nordic-Africa EV Summit in Addis Ababa. Most of that is Hubject’s own conference, so it counts the way winning most-improved player at your own birthday party counts. Addis Ababa was an away game, and we give full marks for it.

Air miles

Lonneke Driessen, Director of the Open Charge Alliance. OCPP Plugfest in Dublin on 22 September, Africa E-Mobility Week in Stellenbosch six days later, then OCA Plugfest in Canberra on 21 October. That is 20 748 km in thirty days in the service of protocol interoperability. Every charger she tests speaks OCPP. No airline does yet. Runner-up: Baerte de Brey of the Dutch grid operator Stedin, Berlin to Addis Ababa to Brussels, 10 964 km, which is further than most of Stedin’s cables go.

Most tireless exhibitor

Kempower. Six events since 2023 and three booths this autumn, twelve booth days in all, Berlin then Hannover then Stockholm. The Finns are not alone. Eleven companies have had a stand at icnc every September since 2023: Alpitronic, Autel, ChargeUp Europe, Deftpower, Driivz, GreenFlux, IOCharger, Kempower, Last Mile Solutions, Plugsurfing and Spirii. Four of the eleven sell charging management software, which tells you what the Berlin show is really for. It is not for drivers.

Home advantage

Hubject filled 44 speaker slots at its own conference in 2025 and 19 this year. AMPECO took 42 and 30, and in 2026 upgraded from speaking to owning the room. Of icnc’s 133 sessions, 39 ran on the AMPECO Ecosystem Stage and 15 on the GreenFlux Insights Stage. Forty percent of the programme happened on a stage with a sponsor’s name over the door. The keynote is so 2023. The 2026 move is to bring your own stage. A nod also to EVCharge Live UK in Birmingham, billed as the UK’s premier charging exhibition with more than 100 global exhibitors. Seventy-two of the 125 are British.

In conversation with ourselves

Seven icnc sessions this year put only one company on stage. AMPECO managed three, including a session called “Inside AppSpark: how AMPECO turns internal ideas into Marketplace products”. Hubject took two, one of them the official opening. And EY-Parthenon presented “Unlocking value through consolidation” with two speakers, both from EY-Parthenon. Consolidation achieved.

The vocabulary award

We read 455 session titles and descriptions from the ten European autumn events that publish an agenda. “Ecosystem” appears in 62 of them, one session in seven, for a word our own style guide bans. At icnc it was in 50 of 133 sessions. In fairness, the conference theme was “Collaboration at Scale: Establishing the Open Smart Charging Ecosystem”, so the speakers were only doing as they were told. “Scale” shows up in 15% of sessions, “collaboration” in 13%, “the future of” in 12%.

Then there are the words about money. Profitability or the business case: 5%. Utilisation: 7.5%. Consolidation and M&A: 4.4%, in a year in which our transaction tracker has logged 295 deals by mid-September. And AI: 5.9%. The charging industry may be the last sector on earth where artificial intelligence is under-discussed. We would like to keep it that way.

CEO density

Of the 2 424 speaker slots in our data since 2023, 307 carry the letters CEO and 406 once you add “Chief Executive”. There are 208 founders and 88 moderators. There are three CFOs. One finance chief for every 102 chief executives. If you have ever wondered why every panel agrees that the business case is just around the corner, that is why. The person who would disagree is back at the office doing the numbers.

Longest job title

Asuka Ito of the Government of Japan, on the programme of New Mobility Congress in Katowice as “Cross-Ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) International Advisory Board (IAB) Member for Development of Smart Mobility Platform”. 147 characters. Silver stays on the same stage: Filip Springer, author and curator of a KNM topic path, runs to 134. Bronze goes to Hannover, where the president of the Polish parts distributors’ association SDCM needs 103 characters at IAA Transportation. The longest session title of the season belongs to IAA Transportation in Hannover, at 25 words: “Bringing Innovation to Mass Production: How Startups, Small and Medium-Sized Businesses, Industry, and Government Are Working Together to Strengthen Value Creation in the Automotive Sector”. By the time the moderator has read it out, the session is over.

Trend of the decade

icnc is the one event we can follow through four editions, 342 sessions in all, and it is the best barometer we have of what the industry frets about. In 2023 one session in seven was about profitability or the business case. In 2026 it is one in eleven. Reliability spiked in 2024, at 27.5% of sessions, the year AFIR arrived with its uptime obligations, and has been fading since. Trucks went from 4.5% to 17.3%. The grid went from 3% to 22.6%. Four years ago the industry asked whether it makes money. Now it asks whether it can get a grid connection.

One more icnc number. In 2023 the conference had 116 speaker slots and 63 exhibitors, roughly two speakers per booth. In 2026 it had 247 and 69, three and a half per booth. The industry now has more people explaining it than selling into it. We recognise the business model. It is ours.

Thought leader

Exactly one speaker among 3 964 appearance rows gives “Thought Leader” as their affiliation. It is a banned phrase in our style guide, and we salute the honesty. Everyone else on the circuit hides it under “Founder”.

Data quality, awarded to ourselves

Until this morning, the most-travelled speakers in our database were an oncologist from Genentech and a regulatory affairs director at Sandoz, each credited with five EV charging conferences in 2017. They were at a biosimilars congress. One of our event scrapers took a wrong turn a while ago and a few dozen biotech scientists have been quietly touring the charging circuit ever since. They were shown the door this afternoon, all 363 of them. We stand corrected. By ourselves, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, on the other continents

A fair objection from the editor: is this a portrait of the industry, or of Berlin? Partly Berlin. So we ran the same keyword count on every autumn agenda outside Europe that we hold: ten Asia-Pacific events with 180 sessions, two African summits with 107, and one Canadian conference with 12. It is a thinner sample and it shows. Three differences survive it anyway.

Trucks are a European obsession. They turn up in 18% of European sessions, 4% in Asia-Pacific and 7.5% in Africa, where the heavy vehicle on the agenda is a bus. “Ecosystem” is European too: one session in seven at home, one in thirty in Asia-Pacific, one in fifty in Africa. Whatever Europe is collaborating at scale on, the rest of the world has not been told.

Best supporting continent

Africa, for being the only region where financing outranks interoperability. Thirteen percent of the sessions in Addis Ababa and Stellenbosch are about financing, investment and capital, against 4.6% in Europe. Buses and public transport take 21% of the African programme, against 9% of ours. The continent with the least capital talks about it most. The continent with the most has moved on to grid connections. Both are rational. Only one of them is comfortable.

Asia-Pacific is thinner in every sense. Interoperability leads at 15%, which is what happens when a region hosts two plugfests and a CharIN Testival in one autumn. But the most common words in its session titles are “session”, “panel” and “slot”. An agenda that reads “Panel session” belongs to a conference that has not yet decided what it thinks, or is waiting for a sponsor to decide for it.

China talks about export. The one Chinese event on our calendar with a programme, WNEVC in Haikou, runs 18 forums, in Chinese, on heavy commercial vehicles, testing and certification, China–Germany industrial cooperation, globalisation and the Hainan free-trade port, vehicle-to-grid and AI-driven vehicles. Every one of those is a door out of the country. The other five Chinese events are expos: 45 exhibitors between them, 26 of them hardware makers, and 33 speakers in total. Europe talks. China exhibits.

North America is our blind spot. Eight events on the calendar, one with a published agenda, and that one lists “Conference programming (meals, plenary sessions, breakout sessions, workshops)”. Honest, at least. If you know what Detroit is discussing this week, our inbox is open.

What the circuit says about the industry

Put the trophies side by side and you get a fair portrait of the charging industry in September 2026, painted mostly in Europe, because that is where the agendas are. It is collaborative to the point of sharing a stage with itself. It has more chief executives on stage than there will be companies left after the consolidation it rarely mentions. It has moved its anxiety from the profit line to the grid connection, and it brings a truck to every party now. And it is growing faster than the number of people who can be in Blomberg, Dublin and Birmingham on the same Wednesday. The accents change with the continent. Africa talks about the money, China talks about the exit, and North America, as far as we can tell, talks about lunch.

We will be at none of them. That is fine. Somebody has to keep score, and the guides are open all season.