Powerdot Turns On Plug & Charge at 7,000 European Charging Points

Drivers pulling up to a Powerdot charger in four European countries can now skip the app entirely. The Portugal-based operator has wired more than 7,000 of its charging points into Hubject’s Plug & Charge ecosystem, covering France, Spain, Belgium and Poland — comfortably over half of its network.

The technology sits on the ISO 15118 standard, which lets a car and a charger identify each other automatically. No RFID card, no phone screen, no login prompt. You plug in, the handshake happens, and electrons start flowing.

What Hubject’s Certificate System Actually Does

The integration relies on Hubject’s public key infrastructure, which handles the secure exchange of digital certificates between the vehicle, the charging station and the mobility service provider. In practice, that backend machinery is what allows the authentication to vanish from the driver’s view.

Powerdot runs roughly 13,000 charge points across 2,400 locations in Europe, and its business is built around destination charging — supermarket car parks, shopping centres, restaurants and other places where a car sits for an hour or more. That dwell time makes simplicity matter more than raw speed.

Worth noting: Powerdot deliberately keeps its network open. It hooks into third-party mobility platforms, e-mobility providers and OEM systems rather than forcing customers onto a proprietary app, so Plug & Charge slots into a structure that was already app-agnostic.

“Every operator that brings Plug & Charge to its network moves the industry closer to mass EV adoption, and Powerdot’s reach across Europe is a meaningful step in that direction.” — Hubject CEO Christian Hahn

Why the Rollout Is Bigger Than It Looks

Plug & Charge has existed for years and Tesla’s Superchargers have normalised the plug-and-go experience since the beginning. The sticking point for everyone else has been fragmentation — each network doing authentication its own way.

• Coverage: Over 7,000 Powerdot points across France, Spain, Belgium and Poland
• Standard: ISO 15118, with Hubject handling certificate validation
• Network size: About 13,000 points at 2,400 European sites
• No app required: Third-party platforms and OEM services remain supported

Getting past half the network is a real milestone but also a reminder of how much work remains. Powerdot still has thousands of points outside the Plug & Charge fold, and the wider European map is a patchwork of operators at different stages.

Powerdot CEO Luís Santiago Pinto framed the goal plainly: arrive, plug in, get on with your day, with the complexity hidden in the background. That is the promise every charging firm makes. The difference here is that on 7,000 of Powerdot’s posts, it is now the default rather than a demo.