Solving the EV flexibility gap

April 7, 2026 • READING TIME 4 MIN

Speaking on a panel at a recent ChargeUK event, I was struck by a clear trend: while the conversation around electrification is maturing, the electric vehicle (EV) industry is still overlooking a critical structural issue. We are investing heavily in physical rollout — chargers, depots, vehicles — but not paying enough attention to how that electricity is bought, priced and managed. Electrification is not just an infrastructure programme. It is an energy supply question.

In commercial terms, installing chargers is the visible part. The harder part — and the one that determines ROI — is operating those assets inside a volatile power market. Power prices vary by half-hour, driven by both changes in the commodity price and time-variable non-commodity charges like Distribution Use of System (DUoS) and Capacity Market (CM). Some non-commodity charges use time-based pricing to mirror and mitigate network stress. They can create 10x price swings within the same day and make up more than half of the final electricity bill.

While today’s power market moves in half-hourly price swings, many EV projects are still being supplied on flat, analogue logic. That mismatch is where value is lost. We are effectively trying to operate a 21st-century mobile power plant on 20th-century market infrastructure.

The CPO identity crisis

For Charge Point Operators, the issue is more fundamental: it’s an identity shift. CPOs are not infrastructure providers. They are electricity retailers.

Every public charging session is a retail energy transaction. The CPO buys power in a volatile market, marks it up to recover its capex, and resells it to a driver, often absorbing market fluctuations through various membership tiers or fixed-rate sessions. That is retailing.

Yet much of the sector still competes on hardware — capex efficiency, charger speed, number of plugs. In a mature market, infrastructure will not be the sole differentiator. Competitive advantage will lie in managing total power price volatility better than your competitors.

As the industry scales, the winner won't necessarily be the one with the most chargers, but the one who can most effectively manage the relationship between variable energy costs and customer demand. To do that, CPOs must pivot from thinking only about sites and installations to optimising for market spreads.

Realities for fleet operators

If public charging operators are retail electricity businesses, fleet operators face a different, but related, constraint.

For fleet operators, the clash is between operational logistics and energy market timing. A bus timetable cannot be redesigned around price spikes. Uptime comes first.

But most commercial vehicles have dwell time. Charging can be automated within those windows without disrupting operations.

If charging ignores price signals, fleets become peak amplifiers, compounding costs for firms and strain on the grid at the exact moment the system is most expensive. If charging responds intelligently, fleets become flexible assets capturing value rather than leaking it.

The commercial path

Whether you are a CPO retailing electricity to the public or a fleet operator managing depot charging, the commercial challenge is the same: aligning behaviour with volatile energy costs. The underlying economics are universal, but the way you trigger a response depends entirely on whose behaviour you are trying to shift.

For CPOs, the challenge is external. It requires distilling wholesale and system cost swings into simple, public-facing incentives like dynamic pricing to shift driver behaviour.
For fleets, the challenge is internal. It means embedding energy-smart logistics into everyday operational decisions so that "low-cost charging" becomes the default for staff and dispatchers.

This isn't gimmicks or marketing; it’s a structural shift required to make the flexibility chain work.

The bottleneck

For flexibility to scale it must move from manual intervention to automated, invisible defaults. But in today’s energy market innovation is being choked. Many CPOs and fleets are attempting to optimise assets while tethered to legacy suppliers who lack the technical infrastructure to provide granular, real-time data or dynamic pricing.

To start capturing the commercial upside of the energy transition, firms require three key things:

Smart infrastructure: Optimisation must be embedded directly into hardware and site systems to ensure assets respond automatically to market signals.
Invisible automation: The most cost-efficient charging choice must be the system default for the operator, requiring zero manual oversight.
Contracts: A shift away from "blunt" pricing towards contracts that reflect real-time system conditions.

The bottleneck isn't the technology; it’s the lack of deep integration between market volatility and day-to-day operations. Until firms bridge the gap between power price movements and operational logistics, true commercial alignment remains out of reach.

Solving the flexibility gap

If you are a Finance or Operations Director, you can’t afford to view the EV transition as a simple procurement exercise. The constraint facing the EV transition today isn't physics or battery chemistry; it is market design and software integration. The hardware is a sunk cost, the ROI lives in how you buy and manage electricity.