Podcast highlights

Smart charging can cut charging costs by up to 50% | Podcast#59 Highlight

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October 21, 2026 charging network, smart charging, the charge point podcast

Up to 50% lower charging costs: that's what smart charging achieved in some of the cases Prof. Cédric De Cauwer has studied. Speaking as an EV driver and a VUB researcher, his advice to CPOs starts with reliability. Watch the full conversation for the flexibility revenues he would add next.

The full episode is a tour of where EV flexibility pays today. Cédric explains why FCR is losing value in Belgium, why aFRR pays well but is hard to deliver with EVs, and how charging against imbalance prices brought costs below zero in his simulations. He also shares his view on value stacking with co-located batteries and where vehicle-to-grid stands.

Get his full roadmap from smart charging to flexibility revenues in Episode 59.

The one as an EV driver, I would say reliability. I would say make your network reliable, make sure that it works all the time, decent, good, etc. And that is what will make you stand out as a CPO and bring that quality and that reliability throughout the innovations. And then as a researcher, I would say first step into that obvious, let's say, low-hanging fruit of doing smart charging, doing the arbitrage, doing the peak saving, doing the self-consumption, because there is a huge potential. It's not yet the default installation that does this. It's a big cost driver. We have done cases where it can reduce the charging cost by 50%. So it's really relevant. And if you can offer that as your standard offering and do that in a reliable way, that's the next step. And then I would say keep on innovating and look at these different use cases and these different services and whether you can deploy additional flexibility services for the future. Thank you.