In this 1 hour panel session, a group of experts debate the challenges in deploying and managing electric vehicle chargepoints at sufficient scale and quality, how the grid and EV charging might interact, and how consumers might be engaged in this journey.
Transcript
Mike:
Welcome everyone to this round table on the Future of EV charging. I'm Mike Scott, I'm a freelance journalist writing on energy in the environment and we have a very distinguished panel here today so I will quickly run through the introductions.
Pilgrim Beart is the CEO and co-founder of DevicePilot the world's leading IoT Service Monitoring platform which works with companies including Pod Point to drive sustainability by delivering better service at a lower cost. He has more than 30 years' experience in the tech industry in the UK and Silicon Valley and is a serial entrepreneur having founded several successful businesses.
Venus Jenkins is the co-founder and VP Operations at Chargenet, a US-based EV charging provider previously worked at Southern California Edison bringing clean energy to Southern California with projects including water power generation and deploying the largest fibre infrastructure in a project in Orange County.
Julia o'Doherty is a Senior Product Manager in the Smart Energy team at [UK utility] Bulb, helping customers access products to lower bills and CO2. Before joining Bulb she worked for Omnicom Media group and retail innovation consultancy GDR.
Ryan Fisher is senior associate at the analyst house Bloomberg New Energy Finance, specializing in electric vehicles and charging infrastructure and contributing to projects including Electric Vehicle Outlook 2021, and before he worked at Jaguar Land Rover.
Professor Goran Strbac is Professor of Energy Systems at Imperial College, London and he has extensive experience in advanced modeling and analysis of operations, planning, security and economics of Energy Systems. His recent research projects include peer-to-peer energy trading integration of power, gas and low carbon road transport and microgrids.
And finally Ethan Lipman describes himself as an extroverted BSc. ME from UC Davis. He grew up in Silicon Valley and built a career focused on sustainability, working to mitigate the environmental impacts of food, shelter, water and energy to people across the globe.
Pilgrim is going to start with a quick introduction on the key topics that we're going to talk about this afternoon.
Pilgrim:
Thanks Mike, it's an honour to welcome so many experts to this panel today. I'll first make quite clear that I'm the least expert person about EV charging on the panel today, but I'm looking forward to learning a lot from you all. I suppose just to make a few naive observations to set the ball rolling… I think we're going to be deploying millions of charge points aren't we? As part of a broader energy transition where we move from centralized control of energy supply to decentralized control of energy consumption at the edge. So what kind of issues might we see?
In the UK our electricity grid produces between about 30 and 50 GW and we've got about 31 million cars on the road today. So if we naively say that we plug all those cars into our home chargers - just 7kW home chargers - that's 200 GW which obviously isn't going to work! Now I don't believe that there'll be national blackouts everywhere, I'm sure we'll find a way through, but I don't know whether that's down to statistics, consumer behaviour, technology, pricing… there's lots of possible ways that we might find our way through that, and I'm sure we'll talk a bit about that today.
And of course it's not just the whole grid, it's also the edge. So we're already seeing that in places that have a lot of PV when the sun's shining the grid voltage is going out of tolerance above it's normal voltage. And in areas where there's a lot of EV, the grid edge is falling below. So grid edge reinforcement and managing that is as much an issue I think as the central grid.
The first part of what Mike's going to lead us through is about what the grid needs, and the second part is to focus a bit more on consumers - what do we need, how to incentivize us to play along, is pricing enough, standards, questions like that. So it's a privilege, and take it away Mike.
Mike:
So we're going to look at this in two parts, first looking at the impact of EV charging on the grid and then looking at the practicalities of EV charging itself. So I'll come to Ryan first. We expect to see a huge influx of electric vehicles onto the market in the UK in the next few years - how much more charging infrastructure do we need to enable those EVs to to work properly?
Ryan:
We do a forecast, which was talked about at the start, and within that the team of people here basically tries to join together everything, from how many vehicles are we going to have, to different types of transport, to the impacts of those types of transport. Going into oil, but also electricity demand and charging infrastructure which is where I come in. So in the UK today we're somewhere around half a million EVs and then by 2030 we're around 9 million in our forecast, moving on to 2040 to a fleet of around 28 million. To support them, like you say, we're going to need a lot of chargers and some of those will be at home and in workplaces, and some will be in public.
There's a few things to point out: There's going to be a lot of chargers at home to support people if you can charge there it seems to be one of the cheapest methods to do so and also quite convenient. But not everybody can charge at home and there is in some ways a capital cost to do so, and people might be put off by that. So what we see is a lot of people will have home chargers and they will dominate the total number of chargers needed.
However there'll be a lot of energy demand delivered by some of these public chargers, particularly the faster ones which have much higher powers, but they also are utilized more heavily. So we look at the actual numbers for those 9 million vehicles in 2030 we're seeing somewhere around 4.4m private chargers in homes and workplaces. And in public we're seeing from today somewhere around 30-37k public connectors to around 350k in 2030 and then growing in 2040 to around 650k in public and around 11-12m in in kind of private location. So a lot of chargers required in that period of time, and certainly moving on the scaling of this industry and the annual numbers needed.
Mike:
You mentioned the various different types of chargers and locations - do you think any one of these will be a particular pinch point, or will the rollout be fairly uniform for each different type?
Ryan:
So we actually release a model. The one that does the model we release with the main results, but we also give clients the ability to change it. We're not able to look 20 years in the future and know exactly how this is going to be, and certainly this industry has a lot of sensitivities and one of the key ones or two of the key ones: One is how many people are going to choose to charge at home or in public? And the second one is if in public are you going to use these 7kW chargers that take multiple hours, or are you going to use the faster chargers that take minutes?
So we have a more heavy weighting towards the faster chargers. When we think about mass adoption, you've got to put a lot of these vehicles on the road very quickly and provide charging conveniently. Now that means 1) you want to be able to install these chargers quickly, and if you had only fast chargers you need somewhere around 10 times less of them to serve the same amount of vehicles. And that gets into the kind of 100,000 chargers difference. And you're talking the planning permission, the civil works to do that - and sometimes it's can be a bit political as well. On the street just outside me it's a battle to park outside my house and if you think about everybody having a slow charger you've got the cables draping around, you've got periods of time in the next 10 years where 50 percent of the people on the street are driving ICE vehicles, 50 percent of people on the street are driving EVs and how do they play out? So whilst we see somewhere around 85 percent of the chargers in public being slow, actually the 15% of fast chargers deliver a large amount of the energy - much larger proportions anyway. So it's it's important that whilst you might see less of the fast chargers they are actually making a big dent in the amount of electricity demand in what they're serving.
Mike:
Okay, Julia if I can turn to you. Where are we at the moment? How much of an impact do you think charging infrastructure is having on the grid at present, and is the grid well prepared to be able to service this surge in demand from charging infrastructure that we're likely to see over the next few years?
Julia:
I certainly hope so! I think as an energy supplier, two of the things that are top of mind for us are:
- How do we incentivize people to charge when demand is lower, to help balance the grid?
- Secondly how our members can interact with their local Distribution Network Operators to get a home charger at home, simply and safely.
On the first point we can incentivize people to charge their vehicles during times of low demand by offering cheaper charging at night, and giving them tools to schedule and manage their charging from the bulb App. As we get closer to 2030 and the uptake of EVs increases, we're going to see increased demand for energy, and to balance that the UK needs more installed renewable capacity and also grid scale storage solutions. We also need to see better infrastructure - Ryan touched on this - we need to see more of it around the entire country. Our own research found that there are 65% fewer public chargers per 100,000 people in the North than in the South of England, and if we want households to switch to EVs then we have to make it as simple as possible, leveling up so that everyone has that fair access to public chargers. Faster charging speeds is a great place to start.
When it comes to installing a home charger, we hear from drivers they find it quite complex. We expect about one in ten households, likely rising to about one in five in the future, we'll need to have potentially three appointments to get their EV charger installed. They might need their energy supply to send out a meter engineer to upgrade the wires that go into their meter. Then they need to get in touch with their local Distribution Network Operator to get their mains views upgraded. And only then could they safely have a fast charger installed at home.
And we also need to make sure that this process remains quick and simple for consumers looking to get a home charger, and that DNOs have the abilities to schedule these small jobs that many people will want and need.
Mike:
Do you envisage that process being able to be streamlined, so that essentially someone else is doing all that work for the consumer, and they can get a charger installed with a minimum of fuss?
Julia:
That's a great question and I'd hope that it can be simplified over time. I think there's opportunities for greater collaboration, and there's different potentials for who's installing it, and what skills they themselves have, and how we work with the DNOs. UK Power Network has been doing some interesting work in this space, with their new Smart Connect portal, where they're trying to streamline the application processes for connecting different smart technology to the grid. And also thinking about how you connect, if you're having your own generation exporting to the grid. So there's lots of exciting possibilities for how we can make consumers lives even easier.
Mike:
Great, look forward to that! Goran, we see lots of overheated headlines about the disaster scenarios that EVs might, cause such as blackouts or consumers having to choose between charging their car or heating their homes. Is this likely, or do you think that we are going to be able to easily integrate this growth in EVs into the system?
Goren:
Well definitely, if we do this in a smart way there would be no compromise between service quality delivered to the users. But you would have a very significant contribution on the system side. Well there are two aspects which I'd like to mention here. We mentioned smart charging and so forth which is very critical. But also there is a very big development now in what's called vehicle-to-grid concept, where the vehicles could potentially inject power to the grid. There are innovation projects which are demonstrating this, and just to give an extreme example, we demonstrate the overall costs for charging a vehicle in 2030 is say £800 a year. If you go to smart charging, because the vehicles on average - given our work with the Department of Transport showed that vehicles are stationary 90% of the time - which means you've got a major opportunity to charge them when it's good for the grid. Now when you plug it in when you come back home at 7 pm, but it can be charged at 1am. That would reduce the overall bills to about 10 percent.
But the third one is this vehicle to grid concept. It's a bit technical, but we are moving into the low carbon world and there would be significant contribution penetration of renewables, and managing renewables is a very big challenge, because there is a bit of inertia which is not a rotating conventional generator. If for example if there is a loss of a big generator (say nuclear power station) then we would need to have significant amount of power to be injected to avoid the collapse of the system, but this would require say 10 minutes injection from the vehicle. We demonstrated that if we make this happen in 2030 that the EV drivers should get paid about £800 a year for charging the vehicles!
That is that is that is now getting on the agenda, because the combination of nuclear and renewables is a very big challenge. Given that this is particularly big value overnight, when lots of vehicles are in there and 10 minutes injection would not make a big difference to them, we could potentially support cost effective transition to low carbon system by having the vehicles provide this critically-important balancing frequency regulation. When we lose a big generator and if the market was correct, we said that drivers should get paid for charging the vehicles, because the contribution to the system is very significant. It's definitely on the agenda and the question is how the marketing policy framework should evolve to make that happen.
Mike:
I was just going to ask you: is this something that technologically could happen now, and it's just a question of scale? Or do there need to be changes to either the vehicles or the charging infrastructure or the network to accommodate this?
Goran:
This is now being, according to (and I'm not a technologist) but according to these demonstration products with Innovate UK it is technology that can be done. We just need a bit of a standard so that the developers of these of these chargers would know what to do. But it is very cost effective given the numbers which we will provide. The cost is a magnitude smaller than the benefits are. So we should try to make that work.
Ryan:
Can I just ask a question around the frequency response? Because we've done some research on vehicle to grid, I think it's a really interesting area and if you look at v2g - they say you can make a lot of money on it, but a big proportion is related to this frequency response market. But the frequency response market is quite small, and if even the vehicle fleet today could do it, you'd probably saturate the market. There's so many vehicles, they're all available for v2g, there's so much supply that the price plummets? Then actually the reasons you do it might fall. I just wanted within that explanation around nuclear and the inertia in the system - is it that you're expecting the frequency response market to be a lot bigger in the next decade and therefore it won't become saturated and they'll still be valued too?
Goran:
Absolutely, we have carried out some work with the Committee of Climate Change, showing that in 2030 for example the volume of auxiliary services market in the conventional way, would increase 15x, while the cost of energy production would half if we go to renewables. And for example also in the last year, in May, June and July (given COVID), the balancing services - because demand reduced - the balance services cost increased three times! So it is a very, very big challenge. And I agree with you, because when you calculate - if we electrify all buses, taxis in line so far - there will be will be tens of gigawatts of batteries - we would not need all of those, but still given the data it's a very big and important benefit, and if this can be done cost effectively, there will be that drivers should get paid £800 pounds a year for charging their vehicles.
Mike:
I'll move on to Ethan now, and ask you partly to give a US perspective on vehicle to grid, but also the total amount of power generated isn't the only limit. What are the changes that we need to see at the grid edge, to facilitate the scale of EV charging that we're going to see over the coming years?
Ethan:
That is a very good question, and it is a very big question, because the answer is we need to see a big amount of change at the grid edge. I've been working on deploying infrastructure in the United States for the better part of three years now, which amazingly makes me an expert and a veteran in a new industry! Just by way of background, I don't think I wrote my blurb all that expertly, but I should note that I started in the solar power industry in 2006, experienced that going from very small niche market in California to a massive scale, and in 2017 when I joined the ranks of folks around the world working on and deploying and modernizing infrastructure to support electric vehicles, it felt like I went back to 2006 in the solar power industry, and that's what a lot of my colleagues say.
So we're at the beginning of this thing, and we're going to have to get from early adopters to mass market and the way we're we have to do that is leading with the infrastructure. If you can't charge an electric car, it's just like a phone that doesn't have any batteries and you'll see me log off real quick if this phone runs out of batteries right? It's a brick! So when I think about the infrastructure in your question, the ease and the speed with which we can deploy this infrastructure is predicated on doing the right things in policy - whether it's policy with authorities having jurisdiction making a well-designed process for permitting things, or whether it's a very tight process with the utilities where private companies and utilities are working well together - but that grid edge component of just the enormous amount of work that has to be done there. I've been deploying transformers in the United States, mostly in California but in other states as well I mean the companies I used to work for from EVgo and Chargepoint - they're deploying equipment across the country and it's a large country and the grid gets very, very small - the pipe gets very, very small towards the edges there. And if you get toward the edge and you don't have the capacity to get the power over there, then you're not going to have fast charging there unless you deploy battery and solar and wind at the edge of the grid.
And the value here is - we still need the transmission, there's a lot that was learned in the United States about the value of lots of transmission. Like in Texas, where we have enormous amounts of wind resources that have enabled a lot. If you look at the renewable portfolio standards there's not a lot of people outside the United States that would have said Texas is leading the way in renewable energy – yes, they are! There is a lot of sun coming down, but they harnessed a lot of wind and a lot of that came from transmission. It is very expensive to reconductor and build new transmission in trench transformers and conduit underground. I've been doing that work and I've been deploying chargers in the ground at the grid edge, and I can tell you the utilities cannot service the load that we are going to put on the grid unless we unless we deploy a lot of battery, a lot of energy storage, a lot of solar and a lot of wind in concert with these new loads.
Mike:
You talked about the role of policy here, so who has to do the heavy lifting here? Is this a federal thing, a state thing or even coming down to the utilities themselves?
Ryan: That is a terrific question. And the first thing I'll say is it's extremely important that everybody be rowing the boat in the same direction. There are so many times in my life where I've seen Apple do this and Microsoft do that, and we all know what the results of that are. You end up with a document that you open on one computer and it doesn't open very well on the next. The degree to which we succeed and speed things up in this transition is all related to collaboration. Over the last four years in this country we had an administration that was pointing in the direction of coal, and we had an industry that was pointing in the direction of electrification. Now we have both the politics and the business pointing in the direction of electrification, and there's a lot of money being proposed to solve these problems and deploy this expensive infrastructure. Trenching is not cheap, this is labor costs, and I'll tell you from living in California, labor costs do not care - they will keep going up! So this stuff is expensive and on the policy piece of that, we don't want to waste money running around in circles chasing our tails around policy problems. I'm speaking maybe a little bit off the cuff here, but it's coming from a place of experience seeing things go slowly and seeing things go fastly when I worked in the solar power industry for 15 years.
When we had everybody rowing the boat in the same direction we deployed a lot of PV very quickly and when somebody like a utility wants to obstruct that, like they did in Arizona a number of years ago (you can look up Arizona solar finito) and if the utility chooses a different approach, if they decide for some reason - if the politics go in a different direction - we are dependent on the utilities to be great actors and enthusiastic advocates of this industry. And while it is true that you would think they're going to be 100% on board because this is a new load - these are customers for them! In many places in the United States we have what's called a semi-regulated - it's a different regulatory regime, depending on where you go in the United States we have some discontinuities here, some market fragmentation that might not be the same in other countries in the world.
In the United States our freedom provides us the ability sometimes to be shackled by a certain amount of - it does this way over here and does it this way over there - it's hard for a company like Chargepoint or EVgo or Tesla or anybody to work one way across the board. So rowing the boat in the same direction is super important - the utilities absolutely have the ability to pass rate tariffs and they can be market makers, or they can be market killers. It's also true that the individual permitting authorities, whether it's the city of X or the county of Y, they can also slow a project down or speed it up - and that's not to say that safety should be ignored, if there's ASA accessibility laws, they need to be followed, you need to make the equipment accessible for people - there's other codes and standards that I could get into later that are extraordinarily important in the United States. But I'll mention one of them by name right now which is ISO 15118.
Mike:
Pilgrim, I'll move on to you now. Ethan's talked about some of the barriers that the policy can present. What do you see as the key challenges to bringing about the improvements that we need to get this EV charging infrastructure into place?
Pilgrim:
Like Ethan I make analogies with things I've done before, and the thing I did before was to build one of the UK's first smart home platforms which is now called Hive - we deployed millions of connected devices. And we discovered that building it is hard, but running it is even harder! Right now I think a lot of EV people are focusing on the building part - can we get the permits, can we get the electricians, get the stuff in the ground? But I know that the next bit that happens is actually running this estate. Today's EV drivers are 'early adopters', and early adopters are pretty tolerant of things not working because they like the whizzy new stuff and they're prepared to suffer occasionally for that.
But we're now moving into the mainstream, and mainstream consumers are not like that. They expect stuff to 'just work', to be boringly reliable. When you go to fill up your your ICE car in a petrol/gas station today it works every time - completely reliably and dependably. And the same is definitely NOT true of EV charging anywhere at the moment yet. And that's quite a problem. So I think we're going to hear a lot about customer experience, about reliability, about quality.
And from a vendor point of view, that becomes relevant as competition happens. If you've only got one choice of supplier, if they're not very good it doesn't matter, but we're seeing so many players pushing into this market now, competition is going to very rapidly be an important topic, and quality of experience is probably the determinant about who you choose as a consumer, once you have a choice.
Mike:
You talk about all these new competitors coming into the market - does that mean interoperability is going to be a key factor? Customers are going to want to go to whoever's charge point they use, and plug in and not go "Oh, I've got the equivalent of a Samsung and this is an Apple charger" or vice versa?
Pilgrim:
Yes, I think you see that to a degree at the moment in in public charging for sure. In the UK if you've got a Tesla and you plug into a supercharger it is completely slick, and you don't have to do anything, you don't have to think about anything, it just works - it's even more convenient than a petrol pump. But for most other people that's not true. The electrical standards are there - the plug fits - but the whole thing of billing and everything else is still a bit of a mess. Again, when we talk about mainstream consumers, do not underestimate the importance of convenience. People will pay a lot of money, and go to a lot of lengths, just for convenience. They don't live to charge their cars, they live to go shopping and have a good time and all those sorts of things, and they just expect stuff to just work and that's not really the case at the moment.
Mike:
Venus, do these issues that Pilgrim is talking about ring a bell with you? Do they chime with the experience that you're seeing in the US, that the customers are facing, or are things working better over there?
Venus:
No, they're not working better! I think this is a nascent market for sure, and universally we're all facing similar challenges. I'd like to touch upon what Ethan said and what Pilgrim said, regarding just tying the customer experience with how we make it possible. We have to have proper utility incentives in place. In the US we have a lot of challenges connecting to the grid. I'm coming from the private industry perspective. In order for me to get the interconnection connected to the utility side it takes 9-12 months now. I'm looking at DC fast chargers. Even after they have streamlined the process, I don't know if they have enough urgency, or proper incentives aligned with deploying this infrastructure. The grid is aging, especially in California it's over 100 years old, so expect to put a local hotspot of half a megawatt to a megawatt by deploying 6-10 DC fast chargers, that requires an upgrade of infrastructure. That causes 9-12 month delays, sometimes even 18 months delay. Those are real challenges so there needs to be proper utility incentives to make this a priority.
Then to Pilgrim's point of customer experience. I want to emphasize this because that's why I left the utility and joined the private side of the house, a new company. The customer experience - I'm just going to be very blunt, it's terrible, it's terrible, it's terrible! I have had an EV for five years, I have talked to a lot of folks who have had EVs. My first 'kumbaya' moment with my team was "let's talk about our experience with EV charging infrastructure" and the customer experience - even last night I was looking when I was doing some research into UK charging infrastructure there were a few videos and it was a to a T a similar experience. Half of the chargers don't work. There isn't proper lighting. All these different market players are coming in, and they expect the customer to sign up on their app and takes like 15-20 minutes, and asking all sorts of questions, and if this has to become mainstream they don't understand, it's a 7kW or 50kW charger, they don't understand what that means. I actually made a pretty long list of all the things that that resulted very poor customer experience. I'm gonna emphasize one more point that Pilgrim said: the customer does not care about charging! They want to go from point A to point B and in between charging is just similar to going to a gas station, getting your gas and moving on to do the thing you really want to do. When you make it complex, when you make it unpleasant, when you just add all these layers this is not going to go mainstream, this is actually going to deter people from getting an EV and actually become blockers. So those challenges exist in the US, those challenges exist in the UK, and from our perspective who are passionate about building this infrastructure you have to have the customer frame of mind when you're executing. I'm going to bring it home: that has to work ubiquitously with utilities, understanding customer experience as well.
Mike:
Goran did you want to come in here?
Goran:
Similar to the case regarding this availability of charging point, it was three and a half years ago I think that in London if you now want to open up new taxi business it cannot be on petrol vehicles, you have to have an electric taxi. I just happened to be in in the first four years ago and then I said "Wow, electric taxi, wonderful!" and the driver said "Absolute disaster, there are no charging points in the right places!". So there is an issue that because some of the charging points you would need to reinforce local networks, which means in London you will need to dig the roads to put the cables in. There is a quite a concern "about are we going to build the chargers in the right place?".
There was a policy of "don't do the chargers before we know where the vehicles are", but lots of people would not buy the vehicles if they have no charging points. And that is that is now getting big on the agenda, and I think that in the UK they seem to be now strong thinking that we need to have a strategic approach to deployment of the charging points, and hopefully that would happen and that would then roll out because also as you mentioned there was also internal discussion a few months ago and lots of colleagues who were thinking about buying electric vehicle decided not to buy, because of this absence of the charging points. And if you travel, you cannot do it. So I think this is now firmly on the agenda, I hope we're going to move forward in a more strategic way, because London wants to have all buses and taxis electrified by in the less than 10 years. So to make the charging contracts would be critically important to make that work, and I hope this is now strongly on the agenda.
Mike:
It's great point that you make, and it does actually bring us nicely on to the second part of the discussion, which is about the practicalities of EV charging. Julia, if I can come to you: we talked a little bit about the importance of getting people to charge at the "right time", so how do you incentivize people to do that, how important will agile tariffs be in that whole process?
Julia:
Venus made this point beautifully, that we really need to start with the consumer's needs and what they want, which is a simple and affordable way to charge wherever they are. We know that about 80% of charging happens at home at the moment - where it's possible it's more convenient for people as they don't have to travel anywhere to do their charging, and they can choose a tariff like our EV tariff that means that they're getting a good price for conveniently charging overnight and where they can manage their own home energy usage as well. At Bulb we're building EV products that let customers take control of their charging and manage and schedule it in the app, so that there's less thought that goes into "when is my car charging and am I making the most out of those off-peak rates?".
We also know that about a third of the country won't be able to have a charger at home, so that's where having that fully integrated and reliable public charging network is really important. We touched on how people can pay and if we think about paying for fuel or train tickets wouldn't it be great if I could just play with my contactless card on any charger wherever I am and I don't have to think about it beyond that? Thinking more specifically about those real-time tariffs, when we speak to our members what we hear is that they want to feel confident about how much their energy bill will cost them and they want us as an energy supply to help them manage and minimise that cost. With real-time tariffs, you have to be really engaged with and aware of your consumption patterns, you have to know that you could shift it out of those peak usage hours in order to kind of benefit from the lower costs - and there'll be people that can't do that.
If we think about families for example, I think about my sister who recently got a Renault Zoe and has two young children, she's picking up the kids from school, she's coming home, she's getting dinner on the table - it won't be possible for her to kind of move their consumption out of those peak hours. Residential storage and things like vehicle to home in the future will introduce more options more kind of flexibility for people but those have really high upfront costs at the moment, and so that's also not an option for most people. In the current climate of rising wholesale prices those real-time tariffs introduce even more uncertainty that won't be palatable for many people that are trying to manage their energy costs.
Mike:
Do you think that we'll get to a situation again where a lot of this management - of when you're charging and therefore of the costs - will be automated through AI and machine learning and just general digital wizardry?
Julia:
I can see that happening in some ways, but I think people always want to feel that they have an element of control. It's their car, they want to be able to use it when they need it, and so I think it's about how do we make things simpler for people, take that load off for them, so they're not having to actively think about what's happening when. We're helping them manage those costs and charge at times that are better for the grid, and for them to save money. But also people want to know that they have an element of control, that they understand what's going on, that they know that their car is ready to use when they need it. So I think there'll be a need to find that balance, to help them have the benefits but also that sense of control that they need.
Mike:
A question now for Pilgrim – and I suspect that there's some deep personal experience coming to play here - what has your experience been of making EV charging work in the context of your own home and how it interacts with other energy devices?
Pilgrim:
To echo some of the things that that Julia's said, for sure. I've had an EV for two years, I've been on an agile tariff for a year. Just to explain what a UK agile tariff looks like you - you basically get charged half hourly increments, so the price can vary a lot half hour by half hour, and the price gets set on rolling 24 hours in advance. So you can look at an app and see - it can change enormously - my price can be as expensive as 35 pence per unit kilowatt hour (it's capped at that) or it can even go negative. So if the wind's blowing a lot at night then the price may go negative like minus 5p a unit. So when I got my agile tariff I was like "oh, excellent! My EV massive load is going to be able to make fantastic use of all this flexibility and charge it sometimes at negative rates, wow fantastic!". And to some extent that's true, but what I quickly found is that my car doesn't really understand my agile tariff, my agile tariff utility can't really manage my car properly. I tried plugging a 3rd-party service in - a little mom-and-pop piece of software - which can talk to both the apis and it kind of tries to juggle, and it sort of worked but it wasn't very reliable and so sometimes I found that my car didn't have a charged battery in the morning, which is not good.
I think the smart meter is really interesting because I kind of feel like the first wave of smart meters - there's a lot of smart meters in the UK now, but in their first 10 years they've only really been used for billing, to save people from having to read the meter. There's a lot they can do, so I wonder to what extent they can be an enabler at the core of all of this - and people are even talking about "behind the meter" metering so if you can meet a fiscally meter the consumption of a car you could then put that on a tariff that's entirely separate from the rest of your household.
As Julia says, I absolutely echo that experience of living on an Agile tariff - you discover that there are things you can shift, and things you can't: your washing and drying absolutely you can shift that somewhere else, but if it's time to cook the children tea then that's just gotta happen, it's not shiftable.
Even though I'm an early adopter, even though I'm a geek, I'm getting a bit bored of having to look at what the price is going to be and trying to juggle everything. I think I would be quite interested in working at one remove from that actually: so if I had a choice of solutions for "juggling" - trying to match my EV charging to my agile tariff - I'd quite like to play those a little bit. Like buying unit trusts as an investor rather than investing in individual shares. So I'd still like to perhaps have some control and choice, but the really hands-on stuff is a bit geeky.
So I'm ready for somebody to take this problem away from me!
Ethan:
You really showed yourself an early adopter there and I think it's worth a little bit of conversation around what that is, and what we see going forward? Can we have a little conversation around this early adoption? We just heard from somebody that knows this sector and admits how painful it is to be an early adopter right? Car not charged when you wake up. Because these are things that mainstream users - after you've crossed the chasm it'll turn them off. The story that he just said, we can all be dorky about it and go in and it didn't ruin our day, but the person that's late for work and had a bad experience with their EV because they didn't have a charge when they woke up - they're not going to recommend that to their neighbor! And that slows vehicle adoption.
Mike:
So is there some way then of getting the benefits of these agile tariffs, and the reasons that they are there - which is to shift the load - without having to think about it? We're automating and digitizing everything, can this be done with this time of use charging?
Ethan:
There's gonna be problems, we all know there's gonna be problems and mitigating those problems. There's gonna be bad software, there's gonna be mistakes and somebody's gonna push a software update and it's gonna fix it - or make it worse! We'll find out, right? We don't do anybody any favors by being dishonest about what's coming - this is a massive undertaking like I've already been involved in. A massive undertaking, but it's just gonna get bigger. We're changing - what the age of the existing infrastructure? - whether it's a 100 year old piece of gear, this is a massive change and this is the software that needs to get written, the standards that need to get finalized.
Earlier there was discussion about having a great customer experience or a not great customer experience and us early adopters, we can accept the pain of dealing with that. But one of my former colleagues from Chargepoint recently bought a Mach-E from Ford, and went to a charger - it was dark, there was no light, she got stranded, she ran out of juice, the charger didn't work – so she's in the dark at night with a beautiful new car and it doesn't work - it's a brick, right! So these are the stories of the early adopters - and it's not just electric vehicles, it's possible - it's 99.99 not the case - but I have gone to a gas pump that was out of order and they were all shut down and I didn't have any gas and the consequences for that are I could just have I could run across the street and get a gallon of petrol and put it in my tank, right? And there's companies that are going to rise to solve these problems. And yes, I do want the vehicle, to have a flexible - you want to push people in the right direction, the right incentives matter, and if you make it easy for people to do the right thing. Let me let me really say what's true for me: I drove a Chevy Volt, which I was embarrassed to not be able to charge on my DC fast charging network. I drove that gasoline and electric car to my projects all around the country because I didn't have that the chargers weren't on, I didn't have utility power yet. So I wouldn't have been able to drive an EV back there was no charger, it was a brick.
I want to say to the answer of like OK, if the utility signals saying that the price is this - the human is never going to change their behavior unless it's easy and if you have to fiddle with some apps… I remember years ago GE was working on whether it was the Nucleus product, the idea of the smart grid where you have devices directly responding to a signal like a pricing signal that tells the dishwasher to turn on. Maybe this is pie in the sky stuff - maybe it's exactly what Pilgrim's working on - but these are these are… I mean, I want that future and I know we're not there yet but I do want to really push on. If the incentives are pointed in the right direction, if you make it easy people will do the right thing. I mentioned a number: ISO15118 earlier, if we don't get that right - where we have authentication in the cloud. Any car in the business in the entire industry I don't care if it's from VW in Germany or Toyota in Japan or Ford in the United States or Hyundai, I don't care all of them have a VIN number, and whether it's that or a MAC address or something else that's an identifier. ISO 15118 is pointing the direction of making it easy for the customer. I've seen problems in the United States where existing incumbent players are making a moat and saying "we don't want ISO 15118, we want to protect our existing interests and we got to generate shareholder value". Now the public needs easy charging all the way across the board, and if you can't get to a database where you can authenticate to a car, plug it in and walk away without tapping a card or fiddling with your phone… your batteries could run out on your phone, it's not a payment device, it's a backup.
Ryan:
I'll respond to the bit that Pilgrim was on about. We tracked some of these tariffs and how they work with consumers, and one of the simplest ways that I can see at the moment - one of the companies is saying it's 6p per kWh whenever, so they're undercutting the general rate - but to get that rate you have to sign up to flexibly using your car. And as we've already heard from Goran, the car is already sat there for 90% of the time, so the consumer - they don't have to look around at "When am I using my kettle? When am I using that?" - they're always getting 6p. And then it's on the utility to be able to use the asset more flexibly in the markets, they're taking the risk on that. So just in response to that question I think that might be the way - it becomes easier for consumers, the price comes down and then it's on the utilities and the grid operators to make the most of that flexibility.
From an EV charging behavior perspective, today we're at maybe "Tech 2.0" - we've gone from the early days of the Nissan Leaf, we're now getting to the 100kW vehicles - a lot of vehicles are actually going to have 800 volts, you see more platforms coming out. We think to 2030 you get to that stage and that means you're going to see more more cars that can charge over 200 kW, and that becomes more, quickly.
About the business model, one we've talked a lot about is the actually plugging in the chargers to the grid and the difficulties, but these chargers cost a lot today, but we're seeing those costs drop really quickly and if the costs drop then the price per kWh you pay is going to be much less. And therefore people will be incentivized to use some of these faster charging technologies.
Then there's the location of them, so we talk about going to gas stations and EV charging isn't the gas station – well, I would agree it's not the gas station, but it's kind of a level on from that, so what I see is a lot of retailers announcing and installing fast chargers on their premises. If you look at gas stations today at supermarkets they deliver about twice the amount of fuel than an independent site, and by that I mean the BP on the road or whatever. And it's because 1) they're convenient – "I'm going to the supermarket anyway" and also 2) because it's subsidised.
I think this kind of model is going to come in and change behaviors and push people because 30% of people (was the number we heard nobody exactly knows how many) can't install a home charger. some people will opt not to because it's difficult and it's capital intensive and therefore you need somewhere for those people to charge
Then I had two points: If you look out into the future you get to 2050. 70% of this energy demand is not from your private passenger car - when you talk about electric vehicles it's from trucks, it's from buses, it's from vans, it's from shared vehicles. And therefore you're going to need multi-megawatt charging solutions.
Then the final point I make from about 2030 to 2035: we see autonomous vehicles kicking off, and as autonomous vehicles come in they change what you need in the charging network. So you're going to start to see some chargers become more highly-utilized, and some probably become redundant, which is probably not great from some business perspective. Just as that's been set in 2030, and this will probably push a change in the types of hardware needed, so your robotic chargers, your wireless chargers will just be needed. Because who actually wants to say "Well let's add a person to the plugging in process of this car that we've already got" - doesn't make any sense. So perhaps even before autonomous vehicles come, robotic chargers wireless chargers will become part of the solution, because people can see that in five years' time they don't want to be spending a load of money on something that's not necessarily going to fit those vehicles.
So although today I think the big question is "When a car manufacturer stops selling ICE vehicles?" there's probably going to be a big question in the next 20 years of "When are they stopping selling vehicles you can drive all together, and how do we charge those ones as well?"
Goran:
Just to highlight, one of the important gaps currently is to align the objectives of decarbonization of the energy system with electrification of the transport sector. If we make this alignment, there will be actually benefits of having vehicles in there and charging in the right place and so forth. Actually to make best use of these renewable resources properly.
We're also moving into this digitalized world, where this smart control is now getting into place, and if we link that with this EV charging that's going to be massively supporting the cost of the transition to a low carbon system. There is interest in building lots of batteries to support wind and so forth - but there will be more than (in the UK) more than 100 GW of batteries in the cars! Why we don't start aligning though and making use of those as well, to align it with energy system decarbonization. If we get this properly aligned this is going to be really important and beneficial - it would also sort out the consumer issues
Mike:
In terms of using these batteries in cars, how much of a barrier is the ownership model of cars that we have at the moment? Ryan talked about how we're going to have autonomous vehicles in 10, 15, 20 years, which presumably will be less owned by individuals than cars currently are. Is it a barrier if it's your vehicle, and you have this vehicle to grid model, you lose control don't you, to a certain extent? Do you think that that is a cultural barrier to expanding the use of vehicle to grid?
Goran:
At the fundamental level it's the alignment - which requires (I'm not an expert in social aspects) but if we had a proper market regulatory framework, then whatever you make a decision it's up to you to make a decision, no problem! But there will be such a massive opportunity to have your charging done, and also to get paid for charging, while not compromising the service quality which you need. We just need to somehow try to align it, and let consumers to decide when what they want to do. We need alignment with the low carbon agenda is one of the core aspects which needs to be sorted out.
Ryan:
One of the hardest bits of that though is the middle of the day. So if you model it, and you say "everybody charges when it's cheap", what you end up with is everybody charges in the middle of the day, because there's a lot of solar. Not everybody, but there's a portion that goes to the edges of the night and another goes to the middle of the day. There's a lot of solar, but what you can do is create another peak in demand in the center of the day - it's already quite peaky in the middle of the day anyway in quite a lot of countries - you then create a bigger peak and then you have to build infrastructure to suit the other peaks. So it's quite a difficult problem.
Goran:
If the pricing was cost reflective, that would be sorted out.
Ryan:
But reflecting the cost of the upgrade is difficult
Goran:
I think it's all to do with whether you make a decision you want to do it, you decide and you're going to pay. There is a massive opportunity to actually align those those objectives in terms of the energy infrastructure about what the users need, if this was aligned we could get to decarbonize this much more cost effectively.
Ethan:
Goran, I wanted to ask you a quick question: did you Professor Andrew Frank, he was one of the original V2G guys in California?
Goran: Yes
Ethan:
He was one of my professors at UC Davis, he was way-ahead of his time, he's fantastic. The question I was thinking of as you talked about the pricing signals and the change in behavior and in generating revenue or not… I have an analogy that comes to mind in the United States: If you if you make something go from private ownership to the commons. There was a company called Comcast, internet providers, they were trying to shave a chunk of bandwidth off and just make that be a public asset, and everybody freaked out that that they were losing a little bit of their bandwidth. It was an analogy I just thought of. There's this conversation around what if you just shave a little battery off their range and use that to buffer the peaks and valleys of the grid. How do you think about that psychology, if you align everybody and point them in the right direction, can you get the public to say " yeah, you use use my car as a little buffer for the grid, why not?"
Goran:
The core is align the objectives of the investors and users with the objectives of the country and decarbonization. This is where the big gap is. And if we don't have this aligned, then if the users decide we want to do the wrong thing, that's fine - you're going to pay, that it's okay. But let's have the proper arrangement so that that we can make the right decisions, and that is where the big gap is.
Mike:
Thank you guys, it's fascinating discussion. I'm going to round it up now with a final question that I think goes to the heart of where we are at the moment. We are in this chicken and egg scenario when it comes to EV charging infrastructure. Bearing in mind all the things we've talked about, is it up to the companies that manage the grid and EV charging companies to make the first move and get this infrastructure in there? Or does it have to be led by consumer demand for EVs - and this is a question for for all of you.
Julia:
I think it needs both. If we think about public chargers, they're expensive to install you, you need to know that there's going to be people using them to recoup that investment. I think a lot of this will come down to how do consumers want to live, and what kind of needs are driving these kind of forces? We know that cost is a major barrier to EV adoption, so one of the things that we'd really love to see is them becoming more affordable for people. Bulb and a number of other leading companies wrote to the prime minister and the chancellor asking for them to cut VAT on green products like EVs, because we see that as a way that would help people make this transition to EVs. So it's a bit of both, but there are probably things that could be done to help us on our way.
Ryan:
I think it's a mixture of all - you're going to see loads of different types of companies going in, we've already seen a lot of SPACs and IPOs and acquisitions and everybody playing their cards either because they want to go pure play or they want to support their core business. And this is going to be a competition from all types of charging hardware and companies as they go forward, whether that be the home charging and workplace, or public slow and public fast, and we'll see what the consumer likes and how that plays out from a business model perspective as well.
Ethan:
I've probably said everything I should have said and more but yeah, it is it is both. I've worked for the companies, I've seen the business models from the inside and I've driven most electric cars and seen it from the outside. I heard words like "alignment", I said the word "incentives" a lot. You really need to have the politics and the technology now all pointing in the right direction. Folks are going to have different approaches, there's going to be good products and bad products and the bad ones will fall apart and fall away and get acquired or fail. So it's great to see just so much activity in the space.
Goran:
We probably need both, but on this side as I mentioned I think we also need a bit of strategic thinking. You need to be having the chargers in place earlier - and some of those may not be may turn out not to be in the right place. But currently this chicken egg is a pretty big issue, as people are not buying vehicles because there are no charging points in the right places. So to have strategic thinking, the regulators can provide a bit of guidance in there and obviously that would cost us money, but on the other side it would accelerate potentially uptake of vehicles and move us into the right direction sooner rather later.
Ethan:
There's a reason it's both. If I work for one of the private charging companies, we cannot justify putting a charger in somewhere where the utilization is going to be below some number - let's say 0% would not be good for their margins, right?! If a company is in the business of buying electrons and dispensing them, and doing O&M on their equipment to make sure that that hardware is available and accessible when somebody wants to pull electrons from it, they can they can only make that business work if they have north of 20% utilization. So it's very important that there be public leadership in this, that we take the public tax dollars and we build that infrastructure, otherwise that infrastructure doesn't get built in places where there aren't electric cars. The companies that are privately doing this are looking at where the cars are sold and making sure they put infrastructure where there's a market for them to sell electrons, so it needs the government to do it too so you pave the way for the equipment to be where somebody is going.
Goran:
We have done some analysis - one of the core aspects was "what is the cost of the pain of not having charging points?" If even if it's pretty small, you would still do a strategic approach and build the charging points more, to make sure we move forward in the right direction.
Mike:
Venus, in the light of what you were saying before about the terrible customer experience that people have at the moment, what's your perspective on this chicken and egg scenario?
Venus:
Interestingly, after listening to this panel discussion I actually had an epiphany! Hearing all different perspectives, the conclusion I reached - which I felt at the core of me for a while now - the charging infrastructure has to come first. I don't think it's a chicken and egg thing anymore. Because there is a mass adoption on the OEM side - all car manufacturers have had some commitments in place and some aggressive targets. Now it's the charging infrastructure that has to catch up. And yes, utilization rate is going to matter because nobody is going to put in dollars where no cars are going to charge. But you have to look at it as a portfolio approach: a single site approach may not make the business model but you have to look at it portfolio. If you analyze it from portfolio perspective business model will work so my answer is it's not chicken and egg. At this point we're at that juncture where charging infrastructure is going to be ahead of car manufacturers for this to become a mass adoption.
Mike:
Do you think there needs to be some kind of public support to get charge points into places where where they won't be widely used, but where not having them will cause a real problem for people?
Venus:
I absolutely believe that. It has to be "not on your mind", when you are going to a grocery store, when you're going from say LA to San Francisco, you don't want to plan out your route, you just want to - even if it's a low utilization place - I will have a charger available. Yes, so it has to become ubiquitous with your day-to-day routine.
Mile:
OK, I think we exceeded our targets with one epiphany, so I'll leave it to Pilgrim to finish off and round up the discussion.
Pilgrim:
I know we're already over time - I wrote a very long list of all the amazing points you've all made, I so appreciate everyone's contributions, I don't have time to read that list out I'm afraid because we're running over time, but so many interesting points and it's wonderful that we've had an epiphany!
Particularly appreciative of our West Coast panellists who've got up to start at 6am I'm really very thankful to you, but to everyone - it's been a fascinating event and I think we could probably have ten more panel sessions about the topics we've raised today - so thank you all very much indeed.
