2025 EV Charging Software Year in Review: Open Standards, Scale & What’s Next
As we reflect on 2025, we’re taking a moment to look back on a year defined by momentum, collaboration, and meaningful progress across the global EV charging ecosystem. At S44 Energy, the year reinforced our belief that open standards, open-source foundations, and deep domain expertise are essential to building charging networks that truly scale.
CitrineOS: From Open Source to Global Momentum
In 2025, CitrineOS continued its rapid growth as a global, community-driven CSMS foundation and Open Charge Alliance (OCA) certified product. Now hosted as a Linux Foundation Energy project, CitrineOS has matured into a truly collaborative, vendor-neutral platform supported by a growing global community. While stewardship has expanded, the S44 Energy team continues to play a leading role in shaping its architecture, roadmap, and real-world implementation alongside contributors from across the ecosystem.
Over the course of the year, the CitrineOS Discord community grew to nearly 600 members, representing developers, operators, and innovators across continents.
More than 200 CitrineOS instances are running globally across diverse environments, validating real-world EV charging operations and emerging protocol implementations. The open-source community functions as a distributed R&D platform where standards are tested against real hardware and operational conditions, accelerating standardization and reducing implementation risk across the industry.
The CitrineOS community has become a proving ground for interoperability, extensibility, and practical adoption of open standards.
Supporting Enterprise-Scale EV Charging Strategy
One of the most impactful milestones of the year was supporting large, enterprise-scale organizations as they shaped and evolved their EV charging strategies. Our team worked closely with internal stakeholders to design and build software supporting public charging pilots, while laying scalable foundations that enable future expansion into additional charging use cases.
This work reflects our ability to pair strategic clarity with hands-on engineering to support complex, multi-phase charging initiatives at scale.
Supporting Large-Scale Charging Network Evolution
Throughout 2025, we continued supporting large and mature charging networks as they expanded network footprints, hardware diversity, and operational complexity. This included applying open, standards-based foundations alongside existing platforms to support continued evolution without disruption.
These efforts demonstrate how open foundations can coexist with established systems, enabling interoperability and flexibility while accelerating long-term network growth.
Global Deployments and European Partnerships
Our work in 2025 was truly global. We partnered with European charging networks to support deployments of CitrineOS as part of their CSMS foundations, while also developing proprietary, client-specific modules on top of the open-source core.
This approach allows operators to retain ownership of what differentiates them, avoid vendor lock-in, and reduce future re-platforming costs as their networks evolve.
Launching TopazEV: Open Foundations, Commercial Simplicity
2025 also marked the launch of TopazEV, our commercial CSMS built on CitrineOS. TopazEV was designed for small to mid-sized charging networks seeking to scale without being constrained by high transaction fees, per-session pricing models, or escalating costs that outpace revenue growth.
It combines the flexibility of an open foundation with the operational simplicity required to run a production-ready charging network.
Advancing Open Standards Together
Open ecosystems thrive through collaboration. Throughout the year, we continued working closely with the EVRoaming Foundation on the evolution of the OCPI protocol and with the Open Charge Alliance on OCPP 2.0.1.
These efforts help ensure that the software powering charging networks today remains interoperable, future-proof, and aligned with the direction of the industry.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we look toward 2026, our focus remains clear: expanding global adoption of CitrineOS by advancing support for OCPP 2.1 and offering a public demo environment that allows operators to explore the platform before migrating from existing solutions.
We will continue supporting new and existing clients in implementing open standards across their charging networks, while building proprietary, ownable modules that enable differentiated charging experiences and business models worldwide.
Overall, 2025 was a year defined by strong partnerships, technical progress, and continued growth. We are deeply grateful to our clients, collaborators, and the global open-source community shaping the future of EV charging alongside us.
Happy New Year — onward to 2026.
