How EV Charging Actually Works

The book

In 1900, around a third of the cars on America’s roads were electric. Cheap Texas crude, the electric starter motor and Henry Ford’s assembly line sent the electric car into a century-long hibernation. Now it’s back, and this time it has brought an entire ecosystem with it.

This book is about that ecosystem: the software, the protocols, the business models, the actors and the technology that connect a driver plugging in a cable to electrons flowing from the grid. Not the vehicles, and not the electrical installation. Everything in between.

One charging session runs through the whole book. Sarah taps her card on a 150 kW charger and drives off 25 minutes later with a £19.25 bill. Between the tap and the bill the session crosses eleven hops: her app, her eMSP, a roaming hub, the operator’s backend, the mobile network, the charger, the cable, the car, the site, the grid and the record that turns energy into money. Each hop gets a chapter.

Who it’s for

Anyone in or joining EV charging in the UK and EU: a Charge Point Operator, an eMSP, a charging station management system vendor, or an energy company moving into charging. And the curious: anyone in energy, transport, telecoms or technology who wants to know why everyone is suddenly talking about OCPP, ISO 15118 and vehicle-to-grid. No prior EV knowledge needed.

What’s inside

Part 1: The EV landscape. Where we’ve come from, and who the players are.

Electric Vehicles: A Second Dawn
The EV Market Landscape
The EV Charging Network
CPO and eMSP: The Two Roles That Run Everything
The Site Host: Whose Land Is It Anyway?
Data Types and Relationships

Part 2: Charging operations. The technical backbone, and the material hardest to find anywhere else.

Charging Fundamentals
The IoT Backbone
The EV Protocol Zoo
The Charging Station Management System
Roaming & Interoperability
A Multi-Faceted Computer System
Billing for the EV Space
Problem Solving

Part 3: The new frontier. Where the industry is heading.

Smart Charging & Energy Management
V2G / V2X: Charging in Reverse
Plug & Charge: Just Plug In
Cybersecurity in EV Charging
Regulation & Compliance
Where This Book Ends

Six appendices: a glossary, the industry actors, a protocols and standards reference, useful links, the references, and a regulation reference.

Checked, and footnoted

Every factual claim carries a footnote to a source: 676 footnotes drawing on 455 sources, with the full reference for each in the back. Where the text and a source disagreed, the text changed. There are 68 diagrams, all in one drawing system I designed for teaching: boxes are things, wires are what flows, and a wire’s colour tells you whether it carries energy, information or money.

A look inside

Two of the 68 diagrams: the map the whole book follows, and one of the close-ups it stops for along the way.

One session, eleven hops: what each one speaks and the chapter that teaches it. From the preface.

The Type 2 connector, the standard AC plug across Europe and the UK, and what each of its seven pins is for. From chapter 7.

An AI-forward book

It grew out of a training course and my years in the industry since 2017, and was written in the margins of a full-time job and being a dad. The knowledge is mine, learned the slow way. AI drafted and tightened many of the sentences and did most of the source reading; I checked it, argued with it and made every call on what stayed. The preface says which part is which.

Buy it once

The industry moves fast, which is why the book is on Leanpub. Buy it once and every new edition is yours, free. When the industry moves, I update the book, and your copy moves with it.

Get it on Leanpub