As the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) charging network becomes more established, the window of opportunity has begun to open for manufacturers and providers to begin exploring the technology’s potential.
The UK’s EV charging infrastructure grew by 33% between April 2022 and May 2023, according to the UK Government’s latest chargepoint statistics, in response to the nation’s growing uptake of EVs.
Multiple schemes have also been launched in order to widen the outreach of EV charging infrastructure such as a £15 million EV charging boost from the Welsh Government and a £7 million fund from the UK Government to bolster EV charging infrastructure in rural areas.
The growing maturity of the charging network in the UK has allowed chargepoint manufacturers such as Easee, to begin exploring how to widen its customer offering and tap into the potential of EV charging through services such as smart charging and vehicle-to-home.
Following the launch of its Equalizer, which allows EV drivers to charge their cars using clean energy from their installed renewable technologies (e.g. solar panels), Current± caught up with Charlie O’Donoghue, head of product UK at Easee to discuss the integrated future of EV charging.
The ‘unsung benefit’ of electrification
The consumer-energy relationship is changing drastically from its unidirectional structure. With the increased implementation of smart renewable technologies consumers can engage in a more pro-active relationship with the grid, adjusting their energy consumption, storing their energy or even selling energy back to the grid.
Discussing encouraging consumer awareness of the benefits of smart energy usage, O’Donoghue says: “Usually these things start with incentives like cheaper energy but I think that also contributes to an understanding of the future. For example, when converting from a boiler to a heat pump, lots of people wonder whether a heat pump is as good and we have the same questions with EVs. Being able to empower people to control their energy sources and generation and what they can do with it, giving them that agency, I find that really exciting.”
“You’re allowing people to take agency; you don’t actually have to wait for the grid to tell you how much your energy is going to cost, you can [use renewable technologies] to reduce your costs. And I think that for me is the unsung benefit of the whole decarbonisation movement.”
Technologies like Easee’s Equalizer help to promote consumer agency in relation to energy usage.
“What’s cool about the Equalizer is that it enables people to understand the benefits of decentralising the energy system; it allows people to understand how to use less carbon to do things – it comes down to the messaging concept.”
Using the behaviours of Easee’s own customers, O’Donogue highlights a number of different profiles highlighting a bell curve in behind-the-meter engagement.
The most engaged are the ‘early adopters’ who are usually extremely passionate about pro-active energy usage and bringing these habits into their everyday lives using multiple renewable technologies such as EVs, solar panels and energy storage.
“These people will be having things in their homes already that are massively clever,” says O’Donoghue.
“They’ll be using our API’s [Application Programming Interface] for example, to programmatically consume. They’ll create a schedule for themselves and they might even have a little app on their phone. So there’s an engagement from that sense, which goes very deep.”
However O’Donoghue notes that this group can sometimes be “overperceived” as it is quite small in number and the complexity is quite deep.
Moving towards the middle of the engagement bell curve leads to consumers looking for energy-handling technologies that enable them to carry on with their lives.
In this group O’Donoughue says you can see an “immediate shift” in intention, where for example the consumers main priority is to reach their destination which is however many miles away and so they schedule their EV to charge the appropriate amount through the app and allow the app to take over.
“You might get an eclipse where you’ve got some other people who search for a good tariff, and they also have an intention of when the car should be ready and try to cross those two requirements over,” continues O’Donogue.
“But as we’re heading that way [in the engagement meter] we do get people who use the schedules purely for the operational functions side of EVs.
“Because people in that [engagement] zone are also people who’ve possibly come from a range anxiety, slightly more sceptical pool of people, so we see a lot of schedules being set in the app as people make sure [the EV] does what they want.”
After this zone, engagement “tails off”, notes O’Donoghue, where the only real planning comes into play ahead of a long-distance journey, producing less engagement in the app.
As a final note on the engagement curve, O’Donogue notes: “it is amazing how close it is between the kinds of people within that overall curve and how they interact with the [smart energy usage technologies].”
The dangers of an ‘industry-should-lead’ mentality
When asked how the UK compares to other European countries for facilitating the integration of EVs with other renewable technologies, O’Donoghue notes that the UK has enjoyed some significant successes but the lack of supportive mandates has led to the nation having “some ways to go versus other countries.”
O’Donoghue highlights tariff’s such as Octopus’ EV tariff, which charges EVs when it is best for the energy system whilst also including a low-cost window of six hours between 23:30-05:30 and OVO’s smart charging tariff with charging rates of 10p/kWh – three times cheaper the 34p/kWh UK average – as “really innovative” in comparison to “some really arcane tariffs in Europe.”
However, the length of time it has taken for the UK to mandate EV roaming and public charging, which promotes trust in drivers looking to charging publicly has been a setback, continues O’Donoghue.
“The UK did actually want to mandate contactless charging a couple of years ago, which is coming in now with consumer rates,” says O’Donoghue.
“And I think that that part of the country is kind of like a catch 22. They almost should have done that earlier because their intentions were to accelerate the transformation, but they were being very tentative and felt like the industry should lead.”
The UK Government’s ‘industry should lead’ mentality towards EV/renewable technology integration was tangible in the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
Speaking in a separate interview with Current±, Claire Miller, former director of technology and innovation at Octopus Electric Vehicles pointed out:
“At the moment that ZEV mandate mentions vehicle to grid, as something that’s maybe going to happen and we think it’s a good thing. But it doesn’t go as far as adding any incentive for manufacturers to bring it faster.
“They [the UK Government] won’t give any additional credit to manufacturers to bring it; they will monitor and come back to it if they think that there is a ‘market failure’. This is very harsh language.”
Although acknowledging that the EV industry has independently produced innovations, O’Donoghue, in agreement with Miller, says that maintaing an ‘industry should lead’ mentality can cause the nation’s EV infrastructures and networks becoming “stuck in the mud.”
“The curate’s egg refers to a material that has got really, really good solid part within it like gold but mixed into it there are low value materials like gold,” says O’Donoghue in summary.
“I would say that the [EV charging] market is like curates egg: there are some really interesting parts and stuff and some parts that are still needing to be improved.”