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Last Updated on: 2nd April 2025, 08:36 pm
The European Spark Alliance is not coming to the USA. I am sorry for all our readers between the Atlantic and Pacific and between Canada and Mexico. Charging will remain problematic at least until the next administration in Washinton D.C. For all our other readers outside Europe, I hope your local premium CPOs will follow this example and make charging as good as it will get in Europe.
What is happening in Europe is great for European electric drivers. Four of the leading European charge point operators (CPOs) have decided to work together to make charging better and more reliable. These companies are Atlante, Electra, Fastned, and IONITY. They are all pure play CPO companies. That means that they are not a part of a larger consortium, but their sole source of revenue is selling electricity to electric drivers. If their chargers are broken, there are waiting lines, payments are difficult, or there’s one of the thousand other obstacles electric drivers encounter when trying to charge, they have no income. Customer satisfaction is the most important competing KPI (Key Performance Indicator, well known in every company) for these companies.
Each of these companies is currently too small to cover all of Europe with their networks. But together they provide the biggest network in Europe, with 1,700 stations (locations) and over 10,000 chargers (plugs). To make this more understandable, Fastned has nearly 200 stations in the Netherlands. That is nearly enough with current density of EVs on the street for the country. Germany has over 4 times the population, with more cars per capita, and is really a lot bigger. To offer the same ease of charging, Fastned would need over a thousand chargers in Germany alone. Even more would be needed in France — it is a bit bigger. Well over a hundred more would be needed for Belgium, a country that is sparsely populated in the mountainous region of the Ardennes.
The other three companies have the same problems. In some regions they have nearly enough, but in most of the rest of Europe, they have only a fraction of what is needed for a network with enough density to make charging a no-brainer, like getting gas is now a no-brainer.
Together, though, they can offer a network for their customers that is mostly dense enough to make travelling easy. This coalition of charging companies will use the name/brand “Spark Alliance.”
What they offer, besides a high-quality charging experience, is collaboration through their apps. Of course, everybody can charge and pay with just a debit or credit card, or one of many charge or service cards. But what they offer through their apps is seamless integration of charging and invoicing. You need just one app to start a charging session at any of these 1,700 stations, and you will get a monthly invoice from the company whose app you use. In essence, these four companies will operate as an electric Mobility Service Provider (eMSP) for each other.
They are still independent, competing companies. There are no price agreements or other competition-obstructing barriers. Fair competition is sacrosanct in the EU. They will keep opening as many new stations as they can, wherever they can find a location. All they’re doing is working together to be the pre-eminent charging network in Europe, to get their stations in all the apps and route planners/navigation software in every car, to be the first point of contact of all the companies that try to sell their location and mapping apps.
Personally, I think the best offering of this alliance is the simplicity of using all their chargers with a single app. Next week I have to drive 2,000 km to Oslo. Charging and paying in Scandinavia will be better than the last time I drove to Oslo, but I would really like a top Scandinavian CPO to join this alliance.
These four are the gold standard for CPOs in Europe. There are more CPOs that are nearly as good. They are invited to join this alliance. Who are not invited are the oil majors and large utility companies. For them, charging is just a small extra activity, often with, as a consequence, low-quality experiences for electric drivers.
There is so much more to tell about this alliance. That will have to wait for another article, as well as the profiles of all four companies.
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