Built It. Now Figure Out How to Bill It.

The global view

The charging industry spent this week proving it can build infrastructure faster than anyone predicted — and then immediately wondering how to make money from it. Transport & Environment confirmed that every EU country except Malta now exceeds AFIR's fleet-based charging targets, with total capacity overshooting minimums by 180%. India crossed 52,000 public stations. Tesla opened its first 1.2 MW Megacharger. BC Hydro committed C$700 million. Pilot Flying J hit 300 sites. The hardware, it turns out, was never the hard part.

The hard part showed up in China, where investigative reports exposed pricing chaos across nearly five million public chargers — opaque fees, hidden surcharges, and multiple QR codes on the same unit yielding different prices. Chinese operators, squeezed to margins as thin as 0.04 yuan per kilowatt-hour, are pivoting from selling electricity to selling grid dispatch services via V2G and virtual power plants. It's the most honest admission yet that the traditional CPO revenue model has a ceiling — and that ceiling is uncomfortably low.

Meanwhile, the heavy-duty segment accelerated on both sides of the Atlantic. Tesla's six-stall Megacharger in Bloomington, California delivered 1.2 MW per stall using the MCS-aligned MC2 connector, while Germany's public HGV charging network surged by 40,540 kW year-on-year to reach 355 charging points. Einride's acquisition of Flipturn created North America's largest heavy-duty charging ecosystem. The race to electrify trucks is no longer theoretical — it's an infrastructure arms race with real kilowatts behind it.

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Europe

Transport & Environment delivered the week's headline number: every EU country except Malta now meets AFIR's fleet-based charging targets, with total public charging capacity overshooting the minimum by 180%. The EU reached 1.1 million public chargers by end of 2024 — five times the 2020 figure. On the motorway network, 79% of TEN-T Core corridors meet the 150 kW every-60km requirement, with T&E noting that upgrading just 70 strategic hubs would push compliance to 90%. The remaining gaps sit in Spain, Poland, and Romania, though Poland has tripled its coverage in under two years.

Germany's truck charging network quietly became one of the most advanced in Europe. Public HGV charging has grown to 88 publicly funded locations with 355 charging points and roughly 90,700 kW of capacity, including the first operational megawatt chargers — a direct follow-up to the Deutschlandnetz heavy-duty awards we've been tracking. Installed capacity surged 40,540 kW year-on-year, with Aral Pulse, EnBW, IONITY and Shell Recharge leading deployment.

In the UK, West Northamptonshire appointed Char.gy to deploy over 3,000 lamp-column charging sockets, targeting the roughly 40% of UK households without driveways. The £2.85 million LEVI-funded project highlights an unresolved VAT dispute — kerbside charging currently attracts 20% VAT versus 5% for home electricity, a gap that undermines the equity argument for on-street infrastructure.

Swedish freight-tech company Einride agreed to acquire Flipturn, a charging and energy management software firm, adding 250 megawatts of capacity and creating what it calls North America's largest heavy-duty charging network. The vertical integration play — fleet management plus charging plus energy — mirrors the direction we flagged in our consolidation analysis: the future CPO owns the stack, not just the plug.

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North America

Tesla opened its first full-scale public Megacharger station in Bloomington, California — six stalls delivering up to 1.2 MW each using the MC2 connector aligned with the MCS standard. The latest Tesla Semi can recharge to 60% in 30 minutes. Tesla has mapped at least 64 Megacharger locations across the US, with possible Canadian expansion. It's the first real-world proof point that megawatt-class charging works at commercial scale, not just in Alpitronic test labs.

BC Hydro committed C$700 million to more than triple its public charging network to 3,500 ports by 2035, up from 917 today. The rollout standardises on 200 kW chargers, with 400 kW ultra-fast units at high-demand sites, plus plug-and-charge and tap-to-pay. A separate C$18 million CleanBC program targets Indigenous, rural, and northern communities — the kind of equity-focused deployment that rarely makes headlines but defines whether a network actually works.

Pilot Flying J crossed 300 DC fast-charging locations, reaching 309 sites with 1,323 stalls after adding 50 locations across 25 states in the first half of 2026. Built through its 2022 partnership with GM Energy and EVgo, the 350 kW network now ranks as the 8th largest US operator by port count — ahead of Ionna. Truck stops turning into charging hubs is no longer a pilot; it's a rollout.

On the policy front, the Trump administration is urging Congress to cut federal EV charging station funding in the upcoming five-year, $580 billion transportation bill, which would also impose a $130 annual road-repair fee on EV owners. As we reported last week, the administration had already suspended the 2021 NEVI program — a move a judge subsequently ruled unlawful. The private sector, clearly, is not waiting for Washington to make up its mind.

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China

China's public charging network — now at 4.86 million public connectors and 22.5 million total — has a pricing problem. Investigative reports from Procuratorate Daily and Huanqiu documented widespread chaos: opaque service fees, hidden idle-occupancy charges, bundled add-on services, and multiple QR codes on a single charger yielding different prices. When your customers describe charging as opening a "price mystery box," you have a trust problem that no amount of kilowatt capacity can fix.

The deeper story is what comes after the price war. With operator profits squeezed to as little as 0.04 yuan per kilowatt-hour, Chinese CPOs are pivoting from selling electricity to selling grid dispatch services. Wuhan launched a private V2G reverse-selling pilot in July, and national policy now targets 50 million kW of dispatchable V2G capacity by 2030. It's the logical endpoint of the margin compression we've been tracking since module costs spiked — as we explored in our CPO profitability analysis, selling electrons alone was never going to be enough.

Meanwhile, BYD is deploying hundreds of Flash Chargers across the UK, offering 10-to-70% in five minutes using second-generation Blade Battery technology, backed by on-site battery storage rated up to 560 kW. And in Vietnam, TMT-EGREEN is targeting 30,000 stations by 2030 while Grab invested in charging platform EBOOST — Chinese hardware and capital continuing to reshape markets far beyond the mainland.

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India

India crossed a milestone this week: 52,718 public EV charging stations, including 16,561 fast chargers, the government told Parliament. Last week we reported Delhi and Tamil Nadu committing to 50,000 new points combined; this week's numbers show the national base they're building on. The Centre has allocated ₹2,000 crore under PM E-DRIVE for charging infrastructure and made station installation an unlicensed activity — a deregulation move that quietly removes one of the biggest barriers to private deployment.

Hyundai Motor India opened access to over 30,000 charging points via its myHyundai app, creating one of the country's largest integrated networks on a single platform — and, notably, making it brand-agnostic. The company plans to triple its own DC fast charging network from 183 to 600 stations by 2030. It's an aggregation play that sidesteps the fragmentation plaguing Indian charging.

On the highway front, National Highway for Electric Vehicles is building what it calls India's first true e-highway: a solar-and-wind-powered charging corridor along the 500 km Delhi-Jaipur route, with 40+ fast chargers per station, battery swapping, and 24-hour roadside assistance. The government plans to scale this model to 5,000 km of highways. Ambitious? Yes. But two years ago, 52,000 stations seemed ambitious too.

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Rest of Asia

Vietnam's Prime Minister ordered national technical standards for EV charging stations to be issued before September 30, responding to public petitions demanding unified standards for safe, synchronized infrastructure deployment. It's the kind of regulatory foundation that precedes real scale — and Vietnam's charging market, with operators like EBOOST (freshly backed by Grab) and TMT-EGREEN racing to deploy, desperately needs it.

South Korea flagged a problem that every market will eventually face: EV charging is destabilising the power grid because fixed time-of-use pricing fails to reflect real-time supply, wasting surplus solar power. With EV sales up 154% and penetration exceeding 20%, a think tank proposed three-stage reform toward dynamic pricing linked to wholesale electricity prices. The government will expand public charging tariffs from 2 to 5 tiers next month.

Hyundai Motor Group launched 'All Day Energy', an integrated V2X service connecting EV batteries bidirectionally with the grid. Starting in the UK and consolidating previous pilots across Korea, the Netherlands, and the US, it's the OEM's first unified vehicle-to-everything product. Between this and China's V2G pivot, the "EV as grid asset" narrative crossed from theoretical to operational this week.

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Oceania

Australian supermarket chain Coles is partnering with Evie Networks to install fast EV charging at dozens of stores over the next two years — joining the global pattern of retail destinations becoming charging destinations. Meanwhile, NSW energy distributors proposed having all electricity users fund EV charging infrastructure, drawing sharp criticism given EVs account for just 1% of registered vehicles. The "who pays" debate is heating up faster than the deployment itself.

Perth's Karrinyup bus depot was retrofitted with 56 dual electric bus chargers and 112 plugs, becoming Western Australia's largest EV bus depot under a $250 million federal and state program. The depot supports 53 electric buses scaling to 110 by year-end — fleet electrification at industrial scale, quietly building the operational expertise that public charging networks will eventually need.

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Africa

Tanzania issued official operational guidelines for EV charging stations and battery-swapping systems, setting safety, siting, and infrastructure standards including chargers every 50 km on highways. The rules allow petrol station integration and solar-storage setups, targeting 20% of imported vehicles to be electric. It's the kind of regulatory groundwork that separates markets that attract investment from markets that attract press releases.

In Kenya, electric bus company BasiGo partnered with Rubis Energy to deploy fast charging stations across Rubis' network of over 300 service stations, starting with a 100 kW site in Athi River and expanding to Meru, Nanyuki, and Nyeri. CCS2 and GB/T dual-standard support at KES 48 per kWh — a fuel retailer leveraging existing locations for charging is exactly the model that worked for Pilot Flying J in the US.

Egypt joined the infrastructure push as Hassan Allam Utilities and Infinity signed a shareholders' agreement to deploy AC and DC chargers at high-traffic filling stations nationwide, backed by the Ministry of Petroleum. Three African countries issuing charging standards or deploying infrastructure in a single week — the continent's charging story is accelerating faster than most coverage acknowledges.

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