Europe has built one of the most ambitious regulatory frameworks for EV charging anywhere in the world. The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) mandates ISO 15118 and ad-hoc payment. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) requires smart charging provisions in new buildings. The Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) opens the door to flexibility markets. On paper, it all fits together.

On March 31, Codibly co-hosted a live panel with smartEn, the European business association for smart energy, to pressure-test that assumption. Jeanne Herve from smartEn brought the policy perspective. Codibly’s Liam Callaghan brought what he hears every week from CPOs and fleet operators across Europe. And Aron Lazarchick brought a question shaped by years of working on plug-and-charge at Skoda: if the regulation is this comprehensive, why is the integration still this fragmented?

Forty-five minutes later, the panel had some answers. Three of them stuck.

The Protocol Fragmentation Starts Inside the European Commission

The most striking moment came when Herve was asked why three EU regulations each mandate smart charging capabilities but none mandate interoperability between the protocols that deliver those capabilities. Her answer reframed the entire conversation.

AFIR sits under DG MOVE. RED III and EPBD sit under DG ENER. Type approval sits under DG GROW. CO2 standards sit under DG CLIMA. Four Directorates-General, each managing a piece of the e-mobility puzzle, none historically required to coordinate with each other on it.

That organizational structure maps almost perfectly onto what operators experience in the field. OCPP handles the charger. OpenADR handles the grid. ISO 15118 handles the vehicle. OEM APIs handle everything else. Each protocol solves its own problem. None of them talk to each other by default. And no regulation tells them they have to.

Layer on top of that the reality of 27 member states transposing these directives on different timelines. By the May 2025 deadline for RED III, only Denmark had fully transposed. EPBD transposition is due this May. The regulatory framework exists. Its real-world implementation depends on which country you are in and which ministry is responsible.

This is a diagnosis, not an excuse. But it shifts the conversation: the missing coordination layer between charger and grid reflects an institutional structure that was designed before cross-domain integration was the priority.

Fleet Operators Are Further Along on Flexibility Than Most CPOs

Callaghan described something that has been visible in fragments across the European market but rarely assembled this clearly: the CPO landscape has split into two tiers when it comes to smart charging readiness.

Tier-one CPOs, the large multi-corridor operators with engineering teams and R&D budgets, are ahead on AFIR compliance and exploring demand response. Some are co-locating with solar and storage. But even they hit the same wall: there is no standard coordination layer between the Charge Point Management System (CPMS) and the aggregator or grid operator. The charger-to-vehicle side works. The charger-to-grid side does not.

Mid-tier and regional CPOs face the sharper version. They buy AFIR-capable hardware. They pass compliance. Then, after deployment, they discover that compliance and usefulness are different things. A fleet manager asks: “Can we bid this load into the flexibility market?” The answer is: not yet. Because nobody told them they would need another protocol layer on top of what they already installed.

The surprise was that fleet operators, not CPOs, are the ones furthest along on flexibility. Large depots running 150 kW+ chargers for last-mile delivery, bus operations, and corporate fleets were forced into smart charging and dynamic load balancing years ago. Grid connection constraints and energy costs made it an economic decision, not a regulatory one. They already have the load profiles, the schedules, and the operational discipline. What they need now is the bridge between that existing flexibility and the markets that will pay for it.

The implication for anyone building or deploying charging infrastructure is clear: the total cost of ownership conversation is shifting from hardware and capex to software capabilities, energy strategy, and flexibility revenue. Electric fleet operations already run 40 to 60% cheaper than their ICE equivalents. The next layer of value sits in the grid connection, and most of it remains untapped.

Smart Charging Needs Its TCP/IP Moment

A thread that kept surfacing throughout the panel was the analogy to the early internet. In the 1980s, IBM had SNA, Apple had AppleTalk, Novell had IPX. Each solved a piece of the networking problem. None of them interoperated. Then ARPANET standardized on TCP/IP, and the network effect did the rest.

The European smart charging ecosystem is at a similar inflection point. OCPP, OpenADR, ISO 15118, and OEM APIs each work within their domain. Across domains, every connection is custom. Every aggregator builds bespoke integrations with every charger vendor. One aggregator maintains dedicated integration teams for each hardware partner. That is a staffing problem masquerading as a technical strategy, and it does not scale.

The fix is a translation layer between the protocols that already exist, a middleware that converts a grid flexibility signal into a charger command without forcing every participant onto the same end-to-end stack. Whether that coordination layer comes from regulation or from the market is still open. The panel did not resolve it, and the honest assessment is that it will not resolve without someone going first.

The EU has regulated the endpoints. It has mandated smart chargers, mandated demand response participation, mandated data sharing. What it has not done is mandate how those endpoints coordinate. An audience member drew the comparison to China deploying pragmatically while Europe optimizes for consensus. That tension is real. And at some point, the cost of waiting will exceed the risk of testing.

One participant called it “regulatory courage.” That is exactly what it requires: the willingness to try a coordination approach, gather data, and iterate, rather than debating the perfect architecture indefinitely.

Watch the Full Panel

The full recording covers the EU regulatory landscape (AFIR, EPBD, RED III), the protocol fragmentation, the operator reality, and a Q&A discussion that included a sharp observation on what Europe can learn from China’s approach to charging infrastructure.