Gary C: Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode 199 of EV musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today we'll be looking at pavement and on street charging.
This season of the podcast is sponsored by Zapmap the free to download app that helps EV drivers search plan and pay for their charging. This particular episode is in partnership with EVAEngland, the body representing electric vehicle owners in England. See the show notes for membership details and links to their website. Before we start, I want you to thank you all for listening so far this season. Statistics show that this has been the most successful season of the podcast yet. And as I speak we are nationally ranked in the UK in the mid-20s for automotive podcasts, which is fantastic. We've got a great roundtable for you next week. It'll be a bit of a twist on the usual roundtables but hopefully you'll enjoy just as much.
Our main topic of discussion today is pavement charging, or on street charging, or whatever you want to call the charging where units are installed at the side of the road so people who don't have off street parking still get an overnight charge. Last season I did an episode which discussed destination charging, putting in slower, lower powered chargers maxing out at 7, 11, or 22 kilowatts at places where people stop regularly, or car parks, hotels, airports, Park Ride locations wherever we leave a car for a couple of hours. But I deliberately didn't look at home charging for people who don't have off street parking. And we've done episodes in the past about companies such as Co-charger, and just park who provide opportunities to use someone else's charger. These are successful businesses that operate all around the country. But the one thing we didn't discuss was how good people living in an area where there isn't good off street parking. There's low coverage for companies like Coke charger, and the number of electric cars is quite large. London is an example as is Oxford. I have a lot of people who listen to this show who can't charge at home. Podcast co founder Simon lived for a long while in a third floor apartment and can't charge. Former guest and friend of the podcast Maz Shar is another former guest and upcoming roundtable member. Ooh, Sara Sloman is a third. In fact, I listened to about a webinar recently where half the guests on the panel had no off street parking. And there are many people in society in similar situations. But anecdotal data is one thing. In reality, what percentage of people can't charge their car at home?
Shayne: So think the national average, you know, a good rule of thumb figure to work to is about 40%
Gary C: That's Shane Reese, head of Marketing at AC charging company Char.gy, who provide both lamppost and pavement chargers. Chris Payment-Jones from Connected Kerb, another AC charging provider, has slightly different numbers
Chris PJ: We tend to work with the English Housing Survey data, which talks about 34% of the population not having a driveway and then a further 28% of the population not being able to instal a charging point. So maybe they have a place where they can park their car, but it's away from their home. Or maybe they live in a flat where there's dedicated party space, but they don't control the land and they can't put the charging point in there.
Gary C: Data from the RAC indicate that 28% of car owners don't have off street parking. This is different to the 40% of dwellings without off street parking because it only takes into account households that actually own a car, rather than any dwelling regardless of whether they have a car or not. The key point here is that there is a segment of the population who might have a driveway but can't have off street parking. It could be due to issues with installing the charger. I mean, some landlords haven't yet seen the light when it comes to EVs. Or it might be that they have a fleet van which comes home with them every night, and they just can't be seen to be parking it on the driveway for whatever reason. In my help to understand the profile of someone who can't charge your home. Here's Shayne Reese from charging again,
Shayne: Really, really wide ranging. We have some of our best customers, our fleet drivers, you know, these these people drive for a living they do lots of mileage, and they charge regularly and and in large amounts. So yeah, people who move people and boxes around or to end tools around. Those are kind of our best customers in terms of their average spend value.
Gary C: That seems to be pretty similar around just about the whole country but there is a wrinkle in this income levels. Ironically areas where people have lower incomes will tend to use charges Some more than areas with a higher income, but not for the reasons you think, Here' Chris Pateman-Jones again.
Chris PJ: So what we see across our network now is that we have a number of technically, I, these are technical terms. So when areas are classified, we have some technically deprived areas, these are some of the highest performing charging points on our network. And that's because when you're looking at the sites, there are certain characteristics of them. So if you were to have a five year contract, you might think well, I'm going to go to High Street, Kensington today, because the people who live there tend to have enough money they can afford to switch and buy an EV. Today, if you're looking at over a longer term basis, actually, I should Kensington might be still interesting, but it's not going to be as high priority as you might think if it's short term contract. Reason for that is transport links are really, really good. People are often doing what you and I are doing today working from home, and therefore they might be not commuting quite as much as as people in other areas when you tend to go to poorer areas, you will often find poorer transport links, therefore greater car journeys, people having to commute greater distances for their work because they may not be as fortunate to live and work in the same location. Or they may have the type of job where they're actually having to drive for work. And therefore actually when you look at asset utilisation, you can try and bust some of those myths.
Gary C: There are of course, a lot of people who live in apartment blocks or flats. A lot of these people might have off street parking, such as Simon, that the parking area has no charging capability. Of course the other side of that discussion is those who have a house - possibly a terrace and park on the road outside their house. Former podcast guest and chair of the VA England James court is in that situation. He lives out in South London in an area with terraced housing and no off street parking and he makes do with lamppost charging. Now on the subject of lamppost charging one of the key differences between Connected Curb and char.gy, is that charging have actually installed connectors in lampposts. This means attaching a sturdy aluminium device to the lamppost, and ensuring it can work with the charging app amongst other things. Of course, this has implications from a power point of view, you're probably never gonna get seven kilowatts on a lamppost charger, and depending on the power rating, you can get a lot less.
Shayne: There's two types of electricity networks in the UK the the metered network and the unmetered network. lampposts are on the unmetered network, because you wouldn't just be far too expensive to put a an electricity meter for every every lamppost in the country. So they're all always run that way. And they have certain amount of power capacity, which is made available to them, which is far higher than then you need to run a streetlight, so around 25 amps, but how how much power capacity is, is dedicated to each individual lamppost really, really varies according to the distribution area that you're in. So in some places, we have to like dial them down to as low as three, three and a half kilowatt hours, kilowatts. And in others, we can run them at sort of five, five and a half kilowatts, it depends on the network operator that you're dealing with, and the, their view of the cables in that street. So, you know, being being able to flex the power, er the power rating of the individual charge points to match the local circumstances is really important.
Gary C: But from a dwell time point of view, that's not an issue.
Shayne: An ever charging session for us is around about nine hours. So people are plugged in for about nine hours. And most of our charging events happen overnight. So we've really tried to replicate that convenience of home charging overnight, your car, your car's fully charged when you need to set off in the morning.
Gary C: So let's talk pricing. Char.gy have a dual rate tariff, which charges a lower rate of 39 pence a kilowatt hour overnight, and a higher rate during the day.
Shayne: Last year was a crazy time for the energy market. This still is a crazy time for the energy market, but it was particularly particularly bad last year. And to try and keep charging affordable we we changed toa dual rate tariff. So cheaper overnight and more expensive during the day. Because that fits around the way that most of our customers use our use our charging network,
Gary C: How can they do that?
Shayne: So it's cost reflective. So we've we've changed our energy purchasing with, with our energy supplier to be able to unlock that. So it means that we pay less overnight and we pay more during the day so it is a cost reflective tariff. If you switch to an EV tariff at home very often the same thing happens to you so you'll get a cheaper overnight rate and a more expensive day rate. That's changing all the time as the energy companies come back into into competition
Gary C: Connected Kerb have a different philosophy when it coems to pricing
Chris PJ: But but in terms of the pricing model we are trying to I think this is where we are pretty well aligned to the regulations that have come out, we want to our pricing to be as transparent as possible. And so we don't do subscriptions, we don't have hidden costs, we have a simple, you pay for the kilowatts that you're using. So at the moment, our price is 50p, to use the charging points, we increased our price early this year, after holding our price, well below the market for I think, nine to twelve months after the energy prices skyrocketed. Over the over a pretty long period, we've been cheaper the rest of the market, I think we vary. And I think this is one of the reasons why the regulations are so important. We tried to benchmark against the rest of the industry. It's very, very difficult to do that. Because there are so many different pricing models out there. And there's so much confusion. And it's very, very difficult to work out what other people are charging. And whether they're doing it at a nationwide level or whether they're doing it on a charge point basis.
Gary C: As with most CPOs, this doesn't mean they're actually making any money.
Chris PJ: Yeah, we we're not a profitable business, we're a growth business. We're a scale up organisation. So I think that's expected, our investors are comfortable with that they see a very clear route to profitability for us, which is positive.
Gary C: I think it's important also to look at this in the context of Episode 186, where I talked about how tariffs are calculated for charging, Chris told me that they've made some good deals when it comes to advanced purchase agreements for energy. And this has helped him with their prices. But he was also keen to ensure we were comparing apples and apples when it comes to home charging versus public AC charging.
Chris PJ: The difference I think that people forget is and not everyone will charge with a proper charging point at home, some will just use a three pin socket, but they won't be getting the cheaper rates, if they're doing that or they're unlikely to be. If they're using a charging point at home, they'd had to pay for that charging point to be installed. And I think there's a slightly skewed market because an awful lot of people who've had charging points installed have had that subsidised by central government. But now when you're looking to have a charging point installed at home, you're talking minimum 500 quid and probably up to 2000 pounds to have a charging point installed at your home. People aren't amortising that across the kilowatts that they use when they're comparing a nine p rate to a public charging rate.
Gary C: As with all charges, the one big issue once we have price out of the ways where are they located. This something of an art as well as science to this. Shayne Rees from Char.gy.
Shayne: So that is the practice of working out where you need to instal charges. And then you have some commercial aspects to look at. So where's the where's the physical demand? or physical need? In total, and then working out where it's going to emerge first? And to what degree.
Gary C: Char.gy have a large presence in London, obviously. But where would they like to be?
Shayne: Everywhere. But mostly mostly urban areas. So when you look at - so today, almost all of our charge points, about two and a half thousand of the 3000 that we have installed are in London. And that's really for two reasons. One is there's a huge need in in London, and the other is that the London councils have been well supported by TFL, the GO Ultra Low City scheme, and an organisation called London cancels itself in procuring or setting up contracts with with ChargePoint operators.
Gary C: Does this mean you will be putting charges in other places in the country. I mean, it is a choice between serving say Manchester, a big city or Crewe, a town where you go for?
Shayne: we think we have a really viable service, obviously, for big, big cities like Manchester and London and Birmingham, but also works really well on street charging also really works well for smaller towns like Crewe. And we only need a few people around the around one of our charge points for that to be financially viable.
Gary C: Connected Kerb are another company that understands the concept of geospatial planning. They've gone a little bit further.
Chris PJ: What's really positive is our site selection capability, which is an AI platform that we built. It is quite phenomenal what my digital team have done. I'm incredibly proud of what they've achieved. And I think when you hear our clients, the geospatial commissioner and others talking about what we've built as being incredibly impressive and market leading, combining both physical and human data together to be able to bust some of the myths in EV around where you should deploy charging points. I'm really really, really proud of that. But what it's already showing to us is that it's getting better at selecting sites than humans are. So he's getting better at forecast and utilisation.
Gary C: This AI platform is an interesting development. Chris is of the opinion that it's much better and fairer than a human will be in the same situation. Plus, it can work quicker than a human. I can see other companies glomming on to that in the future. I also see a potential future episode there. Maybe next season. Anyway, given the locations that have been chosen and the tariffs that have been used, what sort of utilisation are we looking at? And that's an interesting question. Nobody's really comfortable giving out their utilisation figures for charging although Zapmap and the green Finance Institute recently did some analysis on Zapmap data and produce figures saying that slow charges, three kilowatts and lower and fast charges 72 kilowatts, had utilizations of 13.7% and 15.7% respectively from a time point of view. From an energy point of view I what percentage of total available energies dispense per day, it's 10.3% and 9.2%, respectively. Obviously, this is impacted by the usage method. As Shane said, most of their uses plugged in overnight. This means from a time based perspective, they would show a higher utilisation rate - as you plug your car in and leave it for 7, 8, 9, 10 hours - but a lower energy utilisation because your car might be completely full after four hours. The charge stops, but the charge is still connected, meaning nobody else can use it. This isn't necessarily an issue, as Chris told me.
Chris PJ: So if I'm a rapid charging provider, at the moment, when someone plugs in In fact, if I if I'm any charging provider bar Connected Kerbm I would argue, when you plug in at the moment, the charging point pumps electricity into your car as quickly as possible. In a rapid charging setting that's extremely fast. But even in a 7kW setting you are maxing out as fast as you can possibly do.
Unless of course you'd load managed it, or you're restricted by power, but nothing to do with the user experience drives that that flow of power in a home charging setting that's totally different to in a home jaunty setting, you'll probabl be plugging in and you'll be taken advantage of better power prices.
Gary C: So it's all about doing the smartest charge rather than the quickest charge.
Chris PJ: Across the Connected Kerb charging network in q1 of next year, we're launching our smart charging capability, which is built on the Agile streets project that we did last year, at our streets project was lauded across the industry, I think for what it achieved, we demonstrated huge cost savings to the user by essentially shifting the time when they charged and not changing the user behaviour at all. That's the beauty of this.
Gary C: I was parked up on a seven kilowatt charger at one of the parking rides in Oxford recently, because I knew I was going to be in Oxford for the whole day, I knew that my car will be charged within about three or four hours. And it will be parked there for seven or eight or nine hours. So I physically went into the app that came with the car. And I derated the current come into the vehicle so that I wouldn't be pulling the full 11 kilowatts or whatever, so that the - I was able to extend the time at which the car was physically charging. And I think what you're basically saying is you've got the same sort of processes in place that were more or less manage that on behalf of the user.
Chris PJ: Yeah, and just doing it incredibly simply. So instead of you having to go in and do that we just asked you when you come in to collect it. And then and then our system can kick in and do the same. The other value on it is when you're doing it across a network of 5000 assets or 10,000 assets or how or hundreds of 1000s of assets that has a huge benefit to the grid.
Gary C: Still, I'd be interested to know how many charges each of our guests are dispensing each month Here'ss Shane from Char.gy
Shayne: Those sorts of figures? I'd say in our in our space, you know, once he reached like 10% utilisation for on average, you should be, you should be about just about covering your costs.
Gary C: So what's that in terms of charge sessions?
Shayne: I probably can't share our utilisation, I think I'd be killed. If I did that. Maybe I can tell you that we are doing about 1000 Charging sessions a day, right now. And that is rising all the time, as we instal more charge points. And as the people around the charge points that we have installed, start to switch to electric cars or notice that there's a charge point in their street and find that more convenient and more affordable than the other options that they're relying on in the past. So it's a really fast moving, it's a really fast moving picture.
Gary C: Chris Pateman-Jones told me:
Chris PJ: So utilisation across a network suddenly is when you're at the size that we're at, certainly, there is such variability from site to site. And that variability is driven by lots of different things, the type of location it is, the access to the charging points, and the age of the charging points. So across our network, we've added circa 2000 charging points in less than the last 12 months. And so you have an awful lot of quite young charging points on the network. So that is going to depress utilisation, because inevitably we're the type of charging we do when we go and deploy on the street. If people don't have an EV they don't just snap their fingers and EV arrives on their drive or rather not drive on the street outside their home. And that just doesn't happen. So there is always a lag from when we put charging points in another
Gary C: Another aspect to bear in mind when talking about lamppost and curbside charging is the councils, and we talked about councils back in episode one 138. And in that episode, I found that many of them were not actually receptive to electric vehicles, with only about one in three taking up any form of the onroad charging scheme funding provided by the government. So how do our guests handle conversation with the council's Chris Pateman-Jones from Connected Kerb.
Chris PJ: We're a small organisation, so we have to prioritise and focus on where we're going to have success. So in all honesty, we haven't spent a huge amount of time with councils who don't think that EVs are particularly important. We have worked with the many out there who do think it's extremely important. What I think is really positive is the work that OZEV has been doing. to basically make it really clear that thinking really isn't going to happen isn't a viable position to take, and so really spending time to share knowledge with the other councils to try and help them get across it. I think it is also fair to say that, in our space, in our industry, you and I, we live this on a daily basis. And so it seems really obvious to ask, but when you're a local councillor, and you're wanting to get reelected, and this is one of 100 different things that you're thinking about. It's whether it's right at the top of your priority list, it's it's almost, I think there's an element that we have to go about and educate. We have to give them all of the tools to be able to push back on some of the negativity and we have to really help try and get others to almost educate on our behalf. So one of the things that we've been doing, as an organisation is running roundtable events. It'll support some of the larger roundtable events that are out there, but really importantly, getting our clients to talk about the challenges of some of the projects that we've done with them.
Gary C: What are some of the issues Shane finds working with councils?
Shayne: Mostly getting permission from the council. So this is a this is a wholly new thing for councils to get involved in. They've never had to provide refuelling a refuelling service for their residents in the past. Perhaps that's one of the reasons we're in the in the mess that we're in at the moment. But yeah, it's it's mostly getting the permission from the council to instal the charge points. You know, when the conditions are good, we can, we can do everything. Find the charge points without any local subsidies provide the full the full service from planning where they need to go, installing the charge for is taking care of all the maintenance, the customer service payments, energy supply, everything, we just need to get the council's on board.
Gary C: It is fair to say that not all councils are the same. When it comes to evey adoption.
Chris PJ: You are right there is a difference across councils, they're all now required to have a strategy on EV. And that's a real positive. But you can have a strategy for deployment of 10 charging points, or you can have a strategy for the deployment of 100,000 charging points. They're both strategies, but one is a lot more ambitious than the other. So I think again, not naming and shaming but I'd like to see a little bit more holding up of the huge success stories that are out there. So the saris the West Sussex is the Cambridge is the Coventry and in Coventry is an incredible story we're going to have I think we're going to have 1600 charging points in there by March. It's the poorest major city in the UK, and outside of London. There's nowhere else that's got more charging points. There's some phenomenal things that are taking place out there. But yeah, there are some laggards. But I think most of them are being brought to the table now, which is really positive.
Gary C: This year saw the adoption of the public charge point regulations 2023 Which mandate amongst other things, contactless charges on any unit with a higher than eight kilowatt output. I was curious what effect that would have.
Chris PJ: I mean, I always want to see greater understanding of the nuance in our industry. So an 11 kilowatt charging point now that is on a residential street will require contactless payment technology in it. I don't think in honestly that that makes sense. Because the people on that residential street are going to be using the charging point regularly, habitually. And based on all of the data we see on RFID at the moment, and the vast, vast, vast majority will be using the app for it. So it's almost a cost that you add into the charging point that doesn't necessarily deliver a huge amount. In carpark settings, though, I think you can almost argue the opposite. You're going to have high visitor numbers. You might get some habitual behaviours, but you will get higher visitor numbers. And so actually, contactless probably makes sense in an awful lot of the charging types regardless of their speed. So I think it varies. So I'd love to see that nuance, but I recognise that it is highly complex for the government to sort of enforce. So I think it's probably a pragmatic position where it is at the moment. We are working on our contactless solutions at the moment. There's lots out there. So we're testing and trialling a number. We expect to have that that I think we've got it now. But, we expect to be starting to deploy those in very small numbers in Q2, probably of next year, so well ahead of the requirements in terms of the regulations. Obviously, across our rapids there's contactless in place already. So I think it's, it's not a bad situation, the way it's the way where it's come out to, I think it would have been the wrong position if it had stayed as it was of seven kilowatts, and upwards. And so I think the move that they've made to move it to buy kilowatts is probably sensible. Was there
Gary C: ever a discussion to say, well, we'll direct all our charges down to seven kilowatts rather than have to go through the expense of, adding contactless to eight kilowatt and higher?
Chris PJ: I think we had, we had some pretty robust discussions, but we never got into a threatening position. I don't think that's ever helpful. I think what we tried to do instead was to recognise why the government was doing it. And that was because essentially, I think the industry had taken advantage to a degree of just having apps all over the place with that didn't really deliver a huge amount of value to customers, but rather just took advantage of you get the customer on your app, it's, there was a proliferation of them. And they weren't really delivering a huge amount of value. I think, as you can see from what we're trying to do with our smart charging tariffs and everything else, that we're trying to really take advantage of what a digital connection with a customer gives you and gives them. And if you do that, I don't think the government can have any problems with trying to encourage people to use apps. But I think so we tried to spend most of our time not threatening, but explaining why it was just adding costs with no benefit. It's not that you it's not the I mean, hopefully, you will see in the people listening to this and the government has seen we're an innovative organisation, we want to try and drive innovation and new technology into the system. It's not about us not wanting to do that. It's about you're trying to do that at the same time it deploying a long life infrastructure, which is as affordable as possible for anyone at that point when they connect into it. So trying to remove things that are superfluous and don't add value is a key part
Gary C: of that. So where does that leave us? I think there's no doubt that while we have a large proportion of EV drivers and potential Evie Drivers without the ability to charge from home, we need some innovative solutions. Lamppost chargers are a specific solution that worked very well in certain circumstances. Shayne talked about the fact they have a lot of excess capacity in each one allowing them to work well in places where the power running around that particular ring is good. So cities and suburbs. When you get out to some of the more rural places, our solution isn't ideal. The destination charging episode from last season talked about solutions for people who want to charge while they park: at work at the cinema or shopping while on holiday. But there's this last tranche of people who will need charging available at or near their houses. They might not need to charge all night every night. But there will need to charge some of the time on some of the nights. With companies like Connected Kerb installing 2000 charge points in the last 12 months alone. And both charging and connected curb using some innovative geospatial planning, with AI and connected curbs case to identify the optimal place to put charges, things are looking up. But the fact is that councils in certain instances will be a bit of a bottleneck. As we've said many times before on this podcast, a ChargePoint operator can't just throw a charger in wherever they want. They need a landlord willing to work with them and planning permission to do so. Pavement charging: A lot of that comes from the local councils. Chris Pateman-Jones discussed the fact that while all councils have an Eevee strategy, there are those who are effectively paying lip service to the strategy and those like Oxford, Nottingham, Dundee and Coventry who are going for this in a big way. And it's things like that that will affect how many charges you get on your street. My thanks to Chris Pateman-Jones from Connected Kerb and Shayne Reese from Char.gy for coming on and answering my questions. Next season we'll look at options that allow you to use your own power supply to charge at the pavement level. Even if you don't have off street parking.
It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing for you listeners. A little left field this one but one of the fastest growing jobs in the US pays up to $103,000 a year without a college degree. If you've just left school and don't fancy waiting tables, delivering Amazon parcels, or doing any of the myriad other jobs. Why not try something a little different: wind turbine service technician roles. They're well paid, need minimal education and in demand, with employment in the sector expected to almost double over the next decade. Of course, there's a downside - candidates must be willing to endure extreme weather and lug 50 pounds of gear up long ladders to confined spaces. You'll get paid to travel across the continent. Not a job for everyone. But it's great to see renewable energy jobs on the US list of America's fastest growing jobs ahead of nurse practitioner, data scientists, and statisticians.
That's our show for today, hope you enjoyed listening to it. If you want to contact me, I can be emailed at info at ev musings.com. I'm also on Twitter at music TV. If you want to support the podcast and newsletter, please consider contributing to becoming an EV meetings patron. The link is in the show notes. Don't want to sign up for something on a monthly basis. If you enjoyed this episode, why don't buy me a coffee, go to ko-fi.com/EVmusings and you could do just that Kayo dash fyi.com/evie musings takes Apple pay to have a couple of ebooks out there she wants me to read on your Kindle. 'So you've gone electric' is available on Amazon worldwide for the measly sum of down tip or equivalent and it's a great little introduction to living within the electric car. So you've gone renewable is also available on Amazon for the same 99p and it covers installing solar panels, a storage battery, and a heat pump. Why not check them out. Links for everything we've talked about in the podcast today are in the description. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe. It's available on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave a review, it helps raise visibility and extend our reach and search engines. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not? Let me know you got to this point by tweeting me @MusingsEV with the words standing by the lamppost. Hashtag if you know, you know, nothing else. Thanks. As always my co founder Simon, you know his latest YouTube stats for the year just come through, and I think he's doing very well with these unicycle videos. However, his year on year growth hasn't been as good as he expected though. His exact phrase was below average. I wasn't sure what the average was in his niche. So I asked.
Shayne: So I think the national average you know, a good rule of thumb figure to work to is about 40%
Gary C: Thanks for listening. Bye