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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