When the Utility Becomes the CPO
A charge point operator (CPO) is the company that owns and runs public charging stations and sells the charging session to drivers. For most of the last decade that was a distinct business from running an electricity grid. That line is dissolving. Across Europe, some of the most active charge point operators are utilities, and the CPOs competing alongside them are discovering they now need the kind of grid-grade software utilities have always run. The two businesses are converging, and in a thin-margin market the software decision behind that convergence — build, buy, or partner — is the strategic fork that decides who earns from it.
Why Utilities Are Moving Into Charging
For a utility, a charging network is two assets in one. It is a new retail revenue line at a moment when traditional energy margins are under pressure, and it is a large, controllable, grid-connected load that the utility has a structural interest in managing rather than ceding to a third party. Owning the charging layer means owning the demand it creates.
The pattern is clearest in Europe, where utility-origin operators such as EnBW, Fortum, and ESB now sit among the leading public charge point operators, and energy-services groups like EQUANS run charging as a core line of business. The signal is consistent in the field as well: across our European utility and CPO segment, a striking share of the most engaged operators are utility-backed. For these organizations, charging is not a side venture. It is the demand-side complement to the grid they already operate, and the software that controls it is becoming as strategic as the substation.
Why CPOs Now Need Grid-Grade Software
The convergence runs in both directions. As pure-play CPOs reach for the flexibility revenue that a saturated charging market increasingly depends on, they find they need exactly the software competency utilities have always had: dispatchable, standards-compliant control that can answer a grid signal and participate in energy markets. Earning from demand response or vehicle-to-grid is not a feature a charging platform bolts on later. It requires the protocol depth — OpenADR, IEEE 2030.5, ISO 15118 — that lets a network behave like a grid asset rather than a row of vending machines.
Meanwhile, utilities entering charging need the competency running the other way: the driver-grade experience, roaming, and multi-vendor station management that define a good CPO platform. Each side is acquiring the other’s stack. The thinking many European CPOs have already done about why scaling a network means looking past the hardware to the software layer is now the same question utilities face from the opposite direction. In a market where margins are thin and the flexibility window is opening, neither side can afford to acquire that competency slowly.
The Make-vs-Buy Decision in a Thin-Margin Market
That urgency makes the software-sourcing decision consequential. There are three paths, and each carries a different cost against a low-single-digit operating margin.
| Dimension | Build in-house | Buy off-the-shelf SaaS | Partner (accelerator + custom) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first revenue session | 12–18 months | Weeks, but on the vendor’s terms | Weeks, on a foundation you own |
| Grid-grade & roaming compliance | Built from scratch; scarce protocol talent | Whatever the vendor supports | Certification-ready protocol codebases included |
| Ownership & differentiation | Full, but slow to reach | Locked inside the vendor’s roadmap | Source code owned; free to modify |
| Cost as the network scales | High fixed engineering cost | Per-charger / per-transaction fees compound | One-time license; no scaling penalty |
| Best fit | Operators with deep in-house protocol teams | Small or pilot deployments | Operators needing grid-grade capability fast, kept |
Building in-house offers full control but costs 12 to 18 months and a team of scarce, expensive protocol engineers before the first revenue session, a timeline that a utility’s board and a CPO’s investors rarely have patience for. Buying an off-the-shelf platform is fast, but per-charger and per-transaction pricing compounds against a thin margin precisely as the network scales, and it puts a vendor’s roadmap in charge of the operator’s differentiation. The third path, partnering on a pre-built accelerator with custom development on top, aims to collapse the time-to-market of buying while keeping the ownership and control of building.
Where a Software Partner Fits
The partner model works when the foundation is genuinely pre-built and genuinely owned. Codibly’s approach pairs certification-ready protocol codebases — the OCPP, OCPI, and grid-facing standards that take the longest to build correctly — with custom services that tailor them to the operator’s market. The CPMS Engine accelerator gives a CPO or utility a station-management foundation to build on rather than from, and custom EV charging software extends it to the grid-grade and flexibility capabilities the convergence now demands.
The proof that this is fast as well as ownable already exists. For the retail energy provider APG&E, our team built a custom, standards-ready DERMS platform in 12 weeks — the exact grid-grade software an energy company needs to orchestrate flexible load, delivered in a fraction of an in-house timeline.
For operators that want to run the platform themselves in time, the build-operate-transfer model hands over the running system and the team’s capability with it. And where an operator’s need is closer to a productized platform, that sits on the same spectrum as a white-label CPO platform, with the partner model occupying the ground between off-the-shelf and fully bespoke.
The Software Decision Is the Strategy
When utilities and CPOs become each other, the differentiator is no longer who owns the most chargers or the most grid. It is who has the software to make a charging network behave as both a retail business and a grid asset at once — the central argument of a software strategy for a saturated charging market. For a utility executive, that means treating the charging platform as a strategic system rather than a procurement line. For a CPO’s technical leadership, it means acquiring grid-grade capability before the flexibility market makes it table stakes. The build-buy-partner decision is where that strategy is set, and in a thin-margin market the operators who choose deliberately — fast to market, but owning what differentiates them — are the ones positioned to earn from the convergence rather than be consolidated by it.
Frequently Asked Questions
A charging network gives a utility two things at once: a new retail revenue stream as conventional energy margins tighten, and direct control over a large, grid-connected load it would otherwise have to manage at arm’s length. Across Europe, utility-origin operators such as EnBW, Fortum, and ESB are now among the leading public charge point operators for exactly this reason. Owning the charging layer lets a utility capture both the demand and the flexibility value that demand represents.
It is rarely a clean binary. Building in-house gives full control but typically costs 12 to 18 months and a scarce team of protocol engineers before any revenue. Buying an off-the-shelf platform is fast but introduces per-charger pricing that compounds against thin margins and ties differentiation to a vendor’s roadmap. A third path — partnering on a pre-built, certification-ready accelerator with custom development on top — aims to deliver the speed of buying with the ownership of building, which is why it suits operators that need grid-grade capability quickly without a long-term licensing penalty.
A charge point operator owns and operates public EV charging stations and is responsible for their availability, pricing, and connection to the wider charging ecosystem through roaming and energy markets. Historically CPOs were standalone e-mobility businesses, but the role is increasingly held by utilities and energy-services companies, and the software a CPO runs now reaches from driver-facing apps all the way to grid-facing flexibility participation.