Your Chargers Are Sitting on a Flexibility Market
Every public charger does two jobs at once. The visible job is selling electricity to a driver. The invisible job is sitting on top of a large, controllable, and increasingly bidirectional electrical load that energy markets will pay to manage. For most charge point operators (CPOs), and for the utilities now entering their market, only the first job is on the books. The second is the difference between a network that survives on a thin retail margin and one that earns a second income from the grid. Smart charging solutions, demand response, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) have moved past the pilot stage. In 2026 they are becoming bookable revenue lines, and regulation across the UK and Europe is turning them from optional into expected.
Why the kWh Margin Alone Won’t Keep the Lights On
The economics of selling kilowatt-hours have compressed. In a public charging market with more than a thousand players and mature operating margins that industry analysis puts in the low single digits, the price per kWh converges toward a level the whole market can match. Footprint and price are no longer where a network competes — the more durable question is what a saturated charging network should monetize instead. The asset you have already paid for — the connector, the grid connection behind it, and the software that controls both — can earn from more than the session itself.
That reframing matters because the flexibility a charging network can offer is not a side project. It is energy flexibility that EV charging is uniquely positioned to supply: large, deferrable, and aggregable across hundreds of connectors. The question for whoever owns new revenue at a CPO or utility is no longer whether flexibility pays, but which tier of it to bill first.
The Flexibility Revenue Stack: Smart Charging, Demand Response, and V2G
Flexibility is best understood as a stack of three revenue mechanisms, each more capable than the last and each enabled by a specific layer of software and open protocols.
| Revenue tier | What the network sells | Enabling protocols | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smart / managed charging | Shifting demand into cheaper, cleaner hours and deferring grid-capacity upgrades | OCPP, OSCP, ISO 15118 | Driver (lower charging cost) and operator (time-of-use arbitrage, avoided grid fees) |
| Demand response | Curtailing or shifting charging load on a grid signal when the system is stressed | OpenADR, OSCP | Grid operator / aggregator (capacity and balancing-market payments) |
| Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) | Discharging stored energy back to the grid when prices and grid need peak | ISO 15118-20, OCPP 2.x, IEEE 2030.5 | Energy market / utility (export at a premium, ancillary services) |
The first tier, smart (or managed) charging, shifts demand into cheaper and cleaner hours. It earns through time-of-use arbitrage and by deferring the grid-capacity upgrades that throttle expansion. The second tier, demand response, sells the ability to curtail or shift load when the grid is stressed, paid for through capacity and balancing markets. The third tier, V2G, turns parked vehicles into distributed storage that discharges energy back to the grid when prices and grid need peak.
Codibly has already proven the middle tier in production. For a global technology solutions provider, our team built an EV fleet aggregator that performs automated demand response with load shedding across a multi-vendor estate, bridging MODBUS, the ChargePoint API, and OCPP in a single multi-tenant platform. The top tier is proven too: with Flux, Codibly validated bidirectional vehicle-to-everything energy exchange with major automotive OEMs. These are the mechanics of a second revenue line, running today.
What Vehicle-to-Grid Actually Pays in 2026
V2G has carried a reputation for being perpetually two years away. The 2026 signals are different because they are commercial, not experimental. Octopus Energy’s Power Pack, the UK’s first domestic V2G tariff, reports that a typical driver saves around £620 a year against a standard variable tariff, with the company’s own modelling putting average savings as high as £850. The BYD Dolphin became the first car on the UK market to support V2G natively, removing the bulky, expensive hardware that early adopters needed. ISO 15118-20, the standard that authenticates bidirectional sessions and underpins Plug & Charge, is what makes that exchange repeatable at scale.
Those per-vehicle figures are consumer-facing, but they map directly onto operator revenue. The £620 a single household now recovers is the same value pool a CPO or fleet operator can aggregate across a network of connectors and bid into flexibility markets. The standards that make a single bidirectional session bankable are the ones Codibly has documented in its work on V2G readiness and IEEE 2030.5. The counter-argument that flexibility revenue is still marginal against core charging holds in some markets today. It misses the direction of travel: flexibility is the differentiator at exactly the margin where saturated networks now compete, and the regulatory floor beneath it is rising.
The Incoming Mandates That Turn Flexibility From Optional to Expected
Regulation is compressing the timeline on both sides of the Channel. In the UK, the Electric Vehicle (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 already require new home and workplace chargepoints to ship with smart functionality, including default off-peak charging schedules and demand-side response capability. Smart charging is no longer a premium feature; it is the legal baseline for new hardware.
In the European Union, the Network Code on Demand Response is the framework that will standardize how flexibility — including charging load — participates in electricity markets across member states. The Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) submitted its proposal to the European Commission in 2025, and national enforcement is expected to follow around 2027. Operators that treat 2026 as the year to build flexibility into their platforms will meet that deadline already earning; those that wait will retrofit under a clock. The same interoperability-as-grid-revenue logic Codibly has argued turns the 2026 AFIR mandate into a grid revenue asset applies here: a mandate is also a market opening for the networks ready to monetize it.
Build the Revenue Line Before the Mandate Forces It
The chargers are already in the ground. What decides whether they earn a second income is the software layer that lets them speak to energy markets — the OCPP, OpenADR, and ISO 15118 capabilities that turn a connector into a flexibility asset. The operators that re-architect now, around smart charging, demand response, and V2X, will treat the incoming mandates as a revenue opening rather than a compliance cost. The flexibility market is sitting under every charger on the network. The work of 2026 is to start billing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
By billing the load their chargers represent, not only the energy they sell. Three mechanisms stack on top of the charging session: smart charging earns through time-of-use arbitrage and deferred grid-upgrade costs; demand response earns capacity and balancing payments for curtailing or shifting load on a grid signal; and V2G earns by discharging stored energy back to the grid when prices peak. Each depends on the software and open protocols — OCPP, OpenADR, OSCP, ISO 15118, and IEEE 2030.5 — that connect a network to energy markets.
In the UK, Octopus Energy’s Power Pack V2G tariff reports typical savings of around £620 per vehicle per year against a standard variable tariff, with the company’s own modelling putting averages as high as £850. For a charge point or fleet operator, that per-vehicle value is the pool that can be aggregated across a network and bid into flexibility markets, rather than a single household’s bill saving. The exact figure varies with driving patterns, tariff, and market, but 2026 is the first year the number is being booked commercially rather than estimated in a pilot.
It is the European framework that standardizes how demand-side flexibility, including EV charging load, participates in electricity markets across member states. The Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) submitted its proposal to the European Commission in 2025, and national enforcement is expected to follow around 2027. For CPOs and utilities, it signals that flexibility participation is moving from a voluntary revenue opportunity toward an expected market function — and that the platforms ready to participate will be the ones positioned to earn from it.