You can start an EV charging company tomorrow

A practical starting guide to the EV charging market: the players, the protocols, and what it actually takes to operate.

As electric vehicles become mainstream, a reliable and convenient charging infrastructure matters more every year. But who builds it, who runs it, and how do all the moving parts actually talk to each other? This guide walks through the players, the standards that connect them, and — because the title promises it — the concrete steps to stand up your own charging operation.

First, the basics: AC vs DC

There are two ways to get energy into an EV battery.

AC charging delivers alternating current to the car, where the onboard charger converts it to the DC the battery needs. Because the conversion happens in the vehicle, the speed is capped by the car's onboard charger. In Europe, AC charging is typically single-phase (up to ~7.4 kW) or three-phase (11–22 kW). A full charge usually takes several hours, which makes AC ideal for places where cars sit for a while: homes, workplaces, and on-street parking.

DC charging converts the power before it reaches the car, so it can push energy straight into the battery at much higher rates — from 50 kW up to 350 kW+. That brings charging times down to roughly 20–40 minutes, which is why you find DC fast chargers along highways and at transit hubs.

A note on terminology: you'll often see "Level 1" and "Level 2" in articles. That's North American terminology — Level 1 is a 120 V household socket, Level 2 is 240 V (usually single-phase in US homes). In Europe we don't really use those terms; we talk in kW and in single- vs. three-phase. Worth keeping straight if you're reading sources from both markets.

The players you'll deal with

Operating in this market means working alongside several types of organisations:

• Governments and municipalities fund and tender public charging infrastructure, set concession rules for on-street charging, and increasingly regulate pricing transparency and accessibility.
• Grid operators (DSOs) own the physical grid connection. They matter more than people expect: grid capacity, connection lead times, and grid fees often make or break a site's business case.
• Charge point operators (private companies) install and run the stations — at retail sites, depots, car parks, and along roads.
• Vehicle manufacturers sometimes build their own networks (Tesla's Supercharger network being the obvious example), and increasingly open them up to other brands.
• EV drivers, finally, are the end customers — and the only party that actually pays the bill.

The two roles that define the market: CPO and eMSP

Almost everything in EV charging comes back to two roles. Getting these straight is the single most useful thing you can do early on.

The Charge Point Operator (CPO) owns and operates the charging hardware. The CPO is responsible for installing stations, keeping them online, setting the energy tariffs at the socket, handling maintenance, and managing the data the chargers produce.

The e-Mobility Service Provider (eMSP) is the party the driver has a relationship with. The eMSP issues the charge card or app, authorises charging sessions, and sends the driver a single, readable invoice — no matter whose chargers they used. Think of brands like Shuttel, Electroverse, or any fleet card you've held.

This is the most common point of confusion, so to be precise: an eMSP is not a car-sharing or ride-hailing company with its own fleet. It's the billing-and-access layer between the driver and the charging network. A driver charges at a CPO's station using an eMSP's card — and the two companies settle the cost behind the scenes.

A company can be a CPO, an eMSP, or both. Deciding which role (or roles) you want to play is the first strategic choice you'll make.

The backend nobody sees — but that runs everything

Behind every charging network sits software the driver never notices: the Charge Point Management System (CPMS), sometimes called the CSMS (Charging Station Management System).

This is where the real operational value lives. The CPMS monitors every station in real time, starts and stops sessions, sets and changes tariffs remotely, detects faults, manages firmware updates, meters energy for billing, and feeds data to roaming partners and reporting tools. If you operate chargers, your CPMS is your control room — and choosing it well is one of the highest-leverage decisions you'll make.

The protocols, done right

This is where a lot of explainers get the details backwards, so it's worth being exact. Two open standards do most of the connecting, and each links a different pair of systems.

OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) connects the charging station to the CPO's backend (the CPMS/CSMS). It's the language the hardware speaks: starting a session, reporting meter values, sending fault alerts, accepting firmware updates, and receiving smart-charging instructions. Because OCPP is open, a CPO can mix chargers from different manufacturers and manage them all from one system.

OCPI (Open Charge Point Interface) connects the CPO's backend to the eMSP's backend — it's the roaming standard. OCPI is how an eMSP learns which stations exist, what they cost, and whether they're available, and how the two parties exchange the session and billing data needed to settle a charge. It does not connect stations to each other; it connects companies to each other.

The clean mental model:

• OCPP = station ↔ CPO (operating the hardware)
• OCPI = CPO ↔ eMSP (roaming and settlement between companies)

Get this right and the rest of the ecosystem suddenly makes sense.

Roaming hubs and the glue between networks

In practice, no CPO wants a separate OCPI connection to every eMSP on the continent, and vice versa. Roaming hubs sit in the middle and let one connection reach many partners — the same way a payment network lets one card work at millions of terminals.

Industry bodies such as the EVRoaming Foundation (the steward of the OCPI standard) help keep this interoperable, so that a driver with one card or app can charge across borders and across networks. Roaming is what turns thousands of isolated stations into something that feels like a single, seamless network to the driver.

The grid layer: smart charging

As more EVs plug in, the constraint shifts from "is there a charger?" to "can the grid handle it?" That's where smart charging comes in: shifting and shaping charging load to match grid capacity, energy prices, and renewable availability.

A few standards you'll encounter here:

• ISO 15118 — secure communication between the car and the charger (enables Plug & Charge and, eventually, bidirectional charging / V2G).
• OpenADR — signals for demand response and grid-aware charging programmes.

Done well, smart charging lowers energy costs, avoids expensive grid upgrades, and can even turn a fleet of EVs into a flexible grid asset. It's increasingly not optional — grid constraints are now one of the biggest limiters on rollout.

So you actually want to start a charging company?

Here's the part the title promises. Stripped to its essentials, launching a CPO operation looks like this:

1. Pick your role. CPO, eMSP, or both. This decides which licences, partners, and software you need.
2. Choose OCPP-compliant hardware. Don't lock yourself into a single vendor — OCPP support keeps you free to mix AC and DC chargers as your sites demand.
3. Get a CPMS. This is your operating system. Buy it as SaaS rather than building it; the standards are deep and the maintenance never stops.
4. Sort out the grid connection early. Capacity and lead times from the DSO are often the real bottleneck — start before you've even chosen a site.
5. Set up payment and pricing. Under the EU's AFIR regulation, new public fast chargers must offer ad-hoc card payment and transparent per-kWh pricing. Plan for compliant metering (MID-certified meters) from day one.
6. Connect to roaming. Hook your CPMS into the OCPI ecosystem (directly or via a hub) so eMSP customers can use your stations and you can settle sessions.
7. Add smart charging. Build in grid-aware and price-aware charging early — it protects your margins and keeps you compliant as grid rules tighten.
8. Stand up operations. Monitoring, fault handling, driver support, and maintenance are the unglamorous work that determines whether your network is trusted.

None of these steps is trivial — but none of them requires reinventing the wheel either. The standards exist precisely so you can plug into an open ecosystem instead of building it from scratch.

In short

The EV charging landscape is a layered system: hardware at the edge, a CPMS backend running the show, OCPP connecting stations to operators, OCPI connecting operators to service providers, roaming hubs tying networks together, and a smart-charging layer keeping the whole thing in balance with the grid. Understand those layers and the roles of the CPO and eMSP, and you understand the market.

The barrier to entry is lower than it looks — the open standards do a lot of the heavy lifting. The hard part isn't the protocols; it's running a reliable operation on top of them.

Ready to plug in?

The fastest way into this market is to skip building the backend and start with infrastructure that already speaks OCPP, OCPI, and the smart-charging standards out of the box. That's exactly what a managed CPMS and roaming adapter give you — a control room and a roaming connection from day one, so you can focus on sites, customers, and growth.

Want to talk through what your charging operation would need? Get in touch — we'll map your setup, from hardware and backend to roaming and grid-aware charging, and show you what "starting tomorrow" actually looks like.