Electric vehicles are not only a joy to drive and a great way to reduce pollution—they are also a boost for our economy. Today, I'm proud to stand with 40 other leaders in Canada's EV ecosystem as we urge the federal government to maintain Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard (EVAS). EVAS provides clarity to investors, startups, and large enterprises alike. The EV industry has already unlocked $50B+ in investment and created more than 130,000 Canadian jobs. And we're just getting started. Given our abundance of clean energy and natural resources, Canada should be a leader in EV adoption. EVAS gives us the framework to get ahead, instead of falling behind. Read the open letter here: supportevas.ca

Next week, I'll be speaking at the Toronto Chapter of SaaSNxt. Our panel will discuss embracing the latest breakthroughs in AI and becoming an AI-native SaaS company. Come check it out on Tuesday, September 9 at 5:00 PM: luma.com/rcxqenjx

Yesterday, our team at @chargelab announced OpenOCPP—an open-source embedded software for EV chargers that has been 3 years in the making. When @ehsan_mok and I set out to build the world's best software for managing EV chargers in 2020, adopting OCPP as a communication protocol was a no-brainer. An open protocol is the foundation of any network technology revolution, from TCP/IP to HTTP, SMTP, and OAuth. In 2020, OCPP 1.6 was already widely adopted. It was clear that the future of EV charging was open and interoperable, and we wanted to be part of that revolution. But OCPP is not a silver bullet. It provides a great guideline for communication, but leaves the majority of implementation decisions to EV charger manufacturers and back-end software developers. This means hundreds of providers, each with their own nuanced interpretation of the protocol. While OCA certification has made a big push for standardization, the reality is that every unique EV charger still needs to be thoroughly tested with each back-end software before being deployed to customers. If this crucial step is skipped, the result is unreliable and frustrating charging experiences we hear about so often. We decided there must be a better path forward. If we use the internet as an example, OCPP is a communication protocol like HTTP. But the modern web didn’t explode on HTTP alone. It needed Chromium, the open-source browser engine that now powers Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave. By rallying around one high-quality, standards-compliant engine, browser vendors stopped re-coding the basics and focused on innovation. At the same time, web developers could build once and trust that their websites would work everywhere. That shared foundation is why the modern web feels seamless, and it’s exactly the kind of lift EV charging needs. We hope that OpenOCPP can be the Chromium of EV charging: Providing hardware manufacturers with a free, open-source OCPP stack, while allowing flexibility for unique hardware features and innovation. Our team has a ton of respect for other open-source trailblazers like @EVerestInCharge. ChargeLab will also continue integrating any OCPP EV charger, regardless of what underlying embedded software stack it's running, because that's what being open and interoperable means. OpenOCPP is the brainchild of ChargeLab's incredible engineering team. We also couldn't have done this without beta adopters FractalEV, who have built hands-down one of the world's best commercial Level 2 chargers. This is just the beginning—if you're building a new EV charger, working on a smart grid research project, or just tinkering in your garage to help make EV charging more reliable, please get in touch with our team. We would love to welcome you as a contributor to OpenOCPP!

I’m heading to CES in Las Vegas next week to check out everything new related to EVs and EV charging. If you are going to CES and want to chat about EV charging hardware or software, please DM me so we can meet up!

This week, Shell Recharge informed US and Canadian customers that it would discontinue CPMS service on April 30, 2025. This follows the closure of Enel X Way and EVBox's North American EV charging businesses. What's going on here? In the case of Shell, it is shutting down software services for third-party site hosts to focus on its Shell-owned charging network. This makes sense—Shell's public network has now passed 70,000 chargers globally. This network is core to the evolution of Shell's retail fuel offering. Providing charger management software is not. It is a similar story for Enel X Way and EVBox. Enel is a global energy company and North American charger sales were a distraction from its core business. Similarly, EVBox was a side quest from the core business of its owner, Engie. But what happens to all the chargers that were managed by these discontinued software services? This is where providers like @chargelab step in. EV charger management *is* our core business. ChargeLab was created specifically to solve charger management for every business, utility, and fleet. If your business is on Enel X Way, Shell Sky, or any other CPMS/CSMS that is being discontinued, reach out to our team today.

For the past year, our project to apply AI to EV charger uptime has been an open secret at @chargelab. Today, I’m thrilled to finally share Spark™ with the world! As EV adoption continues to scale in North America, EV charger reliability has become a critical sore point for the industry. Reliability is tougher to solve than it appears: It involves multiple layers of hardware, vehicle interoperability, IoT connectivity, and cloud-based software. The complexity of EV charger reliability led my co-founder, @ehsan_mok, to ask a question: “What if we apply the most cutting-edge techniques in machine learning, RAG, and generative AI to preventative maintenance of EV chargers?” This is how Spark™ was born. Spark™ is not a single solution, but a suite of tools. The core is an AI that has been fine-tuned to understand EV drivers, EV chargers, and OCPP. The ultimate goal of Spark™ is to be a network operations center (NOC) in a box. Spark™ will proactively identify issues with your charging network and intervene to resolve them before any EV driver gets stuck. In cases where the AI can’t reconfigure your network itself, Spark™ will provide clear, human-readable instructions to network management specialists. We’re moving Spark™ from alpha to beta today. This means we’re ready to welcome dozens of additional early customers to use the tools. It also means we have lots left to build! This is a crucial step towards solving EV charger reliability--not just for ChargeLab customers, but for the whole industry. chargelab.co/blog/spark-ai-l…

55 days ago, Enel X Way shocked the North American EV charging industry by announcing an abrupt shutdown of its EV charging business. As part of the closure, Enel X Way planned to turn off its charging station management system (CSMS), a software used to monitor EV chargers, collect revenue from drivers, and manage energy output. Thousands of EV chargers were left stranded with minimal time to migrate to a new SaaS provider. What's worse? The vast majority of JuiceBox chargers were using a proprietary communication protocol, not OCPP. As many of you know, this is when @chargelab jumped in. Despite numerous technical hurdles, we rapidly engineered a path to migrate JuiceBox Pro chargers to the ChargeLab CSMS. I'm very proud to share that our team has helped rescue over 1,400 commercial Enel X Way chargers as of today. Given that JuiceBox chargers were not communicating using OCPP, there is a lot of confusion about how ChargeLab pulled off this migration. Today, we're publishing a blog post to share more details. You can read it here: chargelab.co/blog/migration-… If you manage commercial JuiceBox Pro chargers that have not been migrated yet, please get in touch with our team today. Enel X Way servers are only scheduled to stay online for another month. We can keep your chargers functioning, independent of what happens to the legacy Enel X Way servers.

I'm incredibly proud of our work at @chargelab to help commercial @enelxwayna customers salvage their chargers. By migrating to ChargeLab, site hosts can continue billing EV drivers, monitoring their JuiceBox Pro chargers, and managing on-site energy usage. The team has worked hard to make the migration path simple, safe, and reliable. There is still time to migrate your chargers before the October 11 deadline. Please reach out to our team to sign a ChargeLab service agreement and get started: chargelab.co/contact

I have a big announcement today: @chargelab is looking for a Vice President of Engineering in Toronto. We're now over 70+ team members strong, with engineering being our largest department. We're looking for an experienced, people-focused VP to lead our engineering team as we reach new heights over the next few years. To learn more about the role, check out the job description in the comments.

This week was our latest ChargeFest on-site. My co-founder @ehsan_mok and I have been working on ChargeLab together since early 2020, over 4 years now. Yesterday was one of the highest highs yet. It felt like lightning in a bottle. In the morning, our guest speaker Ian Black set the tone by reminding us that what we’re doing may be the hardest but most rewarding work of our lives. While it’s easy to take for granted while you’re in the middle of it, re-inventing how people refuel between point A and point B is the kind of work you’re lucky to do even once in a career. The rest of the day was filled with cross-pollination between product, engineering, sales, marketing, support, and all of the other functions at ChargeLab. We’ve done these activities before, but the energy yesterday was electric. In previous years, a few people participated, and others mainly listened. This time, everyone participated actively, jumping in, building on what their coworkers said, etc. Folks were more comfortable talking openly and sharing their point of view. I’m excited to look back on this week in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years to see where it led us. For now, back to building.

Yesterday, we kicked off @chargelab's full team on-site! We're growing our team in Toronto, so there were more familiar faces from regular days at the office. But we also welcomed 20+ remote team members, including many new folks who joined in the past few months. ChargeFest is a key time for our team to gel, align across functions, and plan for the next 6 months. This is our fourth edition of the event. It's incredible to see how the calibre of our team has leveled up in the past 18 months and how much faster we are moving in every area—product, engineering, sales, support, and more. I'm incredibly proud of our whole team and how they showed up for Day 1 yesterday. Can't wait for the rest of the week!