i-Charging: From Fixed Hardware to Adaptive Infrastructure

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Field Frequency, Jason Cortes sits down with Jeff Cohen, CEO of i-charging USA. For most of the last decade, EV charging ran on one question: how many chargers did you deploy? That era is over. The questions now are harder — is the site profitable, is the infrastructure scalable, and when something breaks, how fast is it back online? Jeff brings fourteen years in this industry — GE, ChargePoint, Tritium, and now a Portuguese DC charging manufacturer building out of Atlanta's Curiosity Lab. His read on the market comes down to three shifts. Profitability: the industry moved from land grab to site-by-site business case, and ROI now decides whether a site gets built at all. Serviceability: the old OEM question of "is it in warranty or out of warranty" was always the wrong question — the right one is whether the charger is operational and serviced on time. And scalability: fixed-output hardware forces operators to make kilowatts fit, while adaptive architecture sizes power to the site and grows with it. The conversation gets specific fast. Jason shares a unit that sat dead for nine months — abandoned by its manufacturer, costing the operator $300–400 a month in a single parking space — and took a day and a half to fix once someone actually showed up. Jeff walks through what i-charging does at the site design stage, including an RFP where reading the e-sheets first saved a fleet depot roughly a million dollars in DC cable runs. In this conversation: Land grab to site business case — why ROI, not availability, now decides where chargers go Why "in warranty or out of warranty" was always the wrong question Fixed-output hardware vs. architecture that scales from 50 kW to 1.6 MW Dynamic power allocation: moving power between vehicles in real time instead of stranding it 20–25% more power in 60–65% of the footprint — and why space is the real site constraint The nine-month outage that took 36 hours to fix Substituting AC runs for DC runs at the design stage to cut CapEx before a charger is ever ordered Availability, uptime, and charge session success — what to actually measure, and why 40% of service issues are comms Charging education as the industry's unfinished work — even a fourteen-year veteran had to call support eVTOL charging with Embraer's Eve Air Mobility, and one site serving cars, trucks, and aircraft Why the next five years bring convergence, not more segment-by-segment funding silos CONNECT WITH JEFF LinkedIn: Jeff Cohen Web: https://i-charging.tech