Three things the EV charging industry needs to get serious about in 2026 and beyond  

What I’m watching at ICNC 2026 and why it matters beyond the conference floor 

By Eric van Voorden, CEO Last Mile Solutions

Every year, we drive our ID Buzz to the Interchange Network Conference (ICNC). It has become a tradition at Last Mile Solutions and, as I noticed last year, something of a trend. Several other companies showed up in Berlin with their own electric buses.  

I’m not trying to claim credit for a trend in conference transport. I say this because it is a small illustration of something I have been watching for twenty years: in this industry, the people who show up early tend to be right. They just have to wait a while for everyone else to arrive. 

ICNC is, for me, one of the best places to take the temperature of where EV charging in 2026 and beyond actually stands. Not where the press releases say it is, nor where the policy documents say it should be, but where the people building it every day think it is going. I have been coming long enough to remember when the biggest question in the room was whether any of this was going to work at all. 

Luckily, that debate is done. The questions that have replaced it are harder and much more important. The conversations have grown up. What we are talking about now is what it takes to protect, scale, and sustain what we have built. 

Three topics are on my mind going to Berlin this year. While they might not be the flashiest themes on the conference programme, I think they are the ones that will define the next chapter of this industry more than anything else. 

 “What I notice, coming back year after year, is how the conversations have grown up. We used to spend a lot of time convincing each other that electric mobility was real. That debate is done. The questions we’re asking now are harder and more important.” 

On fraud: when the money gets real, so does the risk 

In the early years of EV charging, fraud was not really a topic. The volumes were too small, the networks fragmented, and the ecosystem too niche to attract serious bad actors. If someone found a way to game a charging session, the financial exposure was often minimal. 

That has changed. 

EV charging infrastructure now processes millions of transactions every month, across roaming networks that span dozens of countries and hundreds of operators. A driver from Amsterdam can charge their car in Lisbon, in Oslo, or in Vienna. The session data, authentication, and billing all flow through interconnected systems that were designed to be open and interoperable. It’s what makes the network work. It is also what makes it vulnerable. 

Roaming fraud, in particular, has become a serious and growing problem. The structure of cross-border charging creates accountability gaps: a session is initiated on one network, authenticated through a roaming hub, then billed through another operator’s system. When something goes wrong – or is deliberately made to go wrong – it is not always immediately clear where the responsibility sits. Bad actors have learned to exploit exactly these gaps. 

This is not a sign that the industry has failed, but an expected reaction to a maturing market. Fraud follows money. The fact that EV charging is now worth defrauding is, in a strange way, a measure of how far we have come. 

But the response needs to match the scale of the problem. Individual operators cannot solve this alone. The answer has to be industry-level: shared intelligence on fraud patterns, coordinated watchlists, standardised reporting, and a collective commitment to treating this as infrastructure security rather than a customer service issue. The same way the payments industry built shared fraud detection systems over decades, the EV charging industry needs to build its own. 

At Last Mile Solutions, this is something we are actively working on. I am looking forward to discussing it in Berlin. 

“In the early days, nobody was committing EV charging fraud because nobody was making enough money for it to be worth the effort. The fact that it is now a serious topic is, in a strange way, a measure of how far we have come.” 

On cybersecurity: we should not swap one vulnerability for another 

Europe has spent the last few years weaning itself off a deep dependency on Russian gas and oil – no easy task. It has been painful, expensive, and politically complicated. But the direction is right. Energy independence is a strategic necessity, not a luxury, as the recent years have shown. 

The energy transition offers a real path. Electricity can be generated at home, from wind, sun, or water. It can be stored. It can be distributed through infrastructure we build and govern ourselves. For the first time in a long time, Europe has the opportunity to run on energy that no foreign state can weaponize. 

That opportunity comes with a condition, though. The digital layer that governs the energy transition – the software platforms, the communication protocols, the authentication systems – has to be as independent as the energy itself. If it is not, we will have swapped one vulnerability for another. 

As such, EV charging infrastructure becomes a geopolitical question, not just a technical one. 

Every charging station is a connected device. It communicates over open protocols. It processes payment data. It interacts with the electricity grid. Multiply that by millions of charge points across Europe, and you have a network that, if compromised, could disrupt energy supply, financial systems, and transport infrastructure simultaneously. That is not hypothetical. State-level actors actively look for this kind of attack surface. 

The good news is that Europe has the tools to address this and the regulatory will to use them. Standards like ISO 15118, which governs Plug & Charge and the secure communication between vehicles and charging infrastructure, are designed with cybersecurity at their core. At Last Mile Solutions, we hold multiple cybersecurity certifications and are actively involved in the policy conversations that will shape how this space is governed going forward. 

The less good news is that not everyone in the global charging ecosystem is approaching this with the same seriousness. There are deployments elsewhere in the world where interoperability has been prioritised at the expense of security – where the digital back door is wide open. That is a vulnerability that does not stay contained within borders. 

Europe’s strength in the energy transition is not just our renewable capacity or our vehicle manufacturing. It is our commitment to digital governance: rule of law, data security, regulatory accountability, and the kind of investor certainty that comes from knowing the rules will be enforced. That is worth protecting. 

“If we build the energy transition on digital infrastructure we do not control, we will have swapped one vulnerability for another. ” 

On smart charging and V2G: the holy grail has arrived 

For as long as I can remember, smart charging has been described as the holy grail of the EV industry. The technology and business case were clear. The potential – using electric vehicles as flexible, distributed assets that could absorb surplus renewable energy and feed it back when the grid needed it – was genuinely transformative. 

What was missing was urgency. 

That has changed, in a way nobody quite planned for. Grid congestion, driven not by EV demand, as is often assumed, but by the sheer speed of renewable energy integration, has done what years of industry advocacy could not. It has made smart charging necessary. 

Here is the paradox: in the Netherlands, we currently throw away roughly 4 to 6% of our renewable electricity generation because there is no demand for it at the right moment. Solar panels generate electricity at midday; people charge their cars in the evening. Wind turbines produce at night; factories are closed. The grid, designed for predictable generation from gas and coal, struggles to absorb the variability of renewables at scale. 

Electric vehicles are the answer hiding in plain sight. Every EV battery is a storage device. Every charge point connected to a smart platform is a flexible demand asset that can absorb electricity when supply is high and throttle back when it is not. Managed intelligently, a large enough fleet of EVs does not stress the grid – it stabilises it. 

We have been doing exactly this in Rotterdam, in partnership with Equans, where over 15,000 charge points operate as what is effectively Europe’s largest virtual power plant.  It is not a pilot. It is live infrastructure, delivering grid services today. 

“We talked about smart charging as a holy grail for years. What nobody predicted was that it would take an energy crisis to make it urgent. But here we are. The technology was always ready; the world just had to catch up.” 

The next step is vehicle-to-grid: not just absorbing surplus energy but feeding it back. An EV with a 75 kWh battery can power an average home for two to three days. Across a fleet of millions of vehicles, that represents grid-scale storage capacity that does not require a single new battery facility to be built. We are actively testing this, and the results are encouraging. Look no further than Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where the first V2G ecosystem in Europe is already up and running. I’m glad Last Mile Solutions is part of it. 

What has changed in the last two years is not the technology. What has changed is the context. The energy crisis accelerated renewable investment far beyond what anyone anticipated. The grid is under pressure, and regulators are paying attention. The European Grids Package, published in December 2025, now gives EV charging infrastructure priority grid access and explicitly recognises smart charging and V2G as grid-balancing tools. 

See you in Berlin 

The industry we were building in the early years of e-mobility is now real infrastructure that moves real people, processing real money, and increasingly, balancing real grids. 

EV charging in 2026 is asking harder questions than ever. The conversations we are having now are the ones that matter next. How do we protect the financial integrity of a network that spans a continent? How do we make sure the digital layer of the energy transition stays sovereign and secure? How do we turn the largest fleet of distributed batteries the world has ever seen into a genuine grid asset? 

None of these are easy questions. But they are the right ones. And ICNC is one of the few places where the people who actually have to answer them are all in the same room. 

The ID Buzz will be there, and so will I. Looking forward to the conversations. 

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Eric van Voorden is co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Solutions, where he leads the company’s mission to simplify the energy transition through smart, scalable solutions for EV charging and energy transactions. With more than 20 years of experience spanning automotive electronics, telecommunications, smart EV charging, and energy infrastructure, Eric combines entrepreneurial vision with deep industry expertise to help shape the future of sustainable mobility.