287 - The Supermarket Charging Episode

Hi, I'm Gary, and this is 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 charging

while you shop.

The EV Musings podcast is sponsored by Zatmap, the go-to app for EV drivers,

helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Now our main topic of discussion today is supermarket charging.

Supermarkets have been selling petrol to the public for many years.

They tend to use their own brand outlets rather than invite companies like Shell, BP, SO, or

Texaco on site. And as a generalisation, they sell petrol at a price which tends to be lower

than the average high street price. For example, at the time of writing,

Shell in my local area is selling petrol at 133.9 pence per litre. My local Morrison's is selling

at 128.9, a saver of 4 pence a litre, or 18 pence a gallon. At the next town over, Shell are priced

at 137.9 a litre, with the nearest Morrison selling at 128.7, a difference of over 9 pence a litre,

or 41 pence a gallon. It's generally thought that supermarkets do this as a loss leader by

selling petrol at below cost. But in recent interview I did with Saint-Peters, they assure me

they don't sell it at a loss. Now this means they're using various pricing strategies

to reduce the price per gallon to the absolute lowest it can be and still make a profit per litre,

even if that's a penny or even a half penny a litre. The idea is to bring you into the store

where you'll buy more stuff. So on the face of it, charging your car at a supermarket is something

that should be quite normal. After all, as I've just said, we've been filling our cars with petrol

at supermarkets for many, many years. Why would charging be different? It's quite surprising

to learn therefore that supermarket charging as a concept wasn't something that was embraced by the

industry in a big way until relatively recently, but it has actually been around in smaller versions

for a long time. Way back in time, GeniePoint struck a deal with Morrison's to add a single 50

kilowatt charger at most of their stores. I spoke with D. Humphries, who was at the time the CEO of

GeniePoint, about this in one of my earlier roundtable episodes. Number 141 I had her,

Tom Hurst from Fastnet, and James Bikimi, who was with Podpoint at the time, to talk about

their respective companies. And one of the things that came out of that discussion was that a single

low-power charger at a supermarket probably wasn't going to be the sort of thing that would be the

long-term solution. You coupled that with poor hardware choice and a high charging cost at

GeniePoint, and it's no surprise that these were very poorly received and I would imagine

had very low utilization. And we'll come back to Morrison's a little later on.

Next up were Tesco, who employed Pod, formerly Podpoint, to install a couple of chargers in

each of their larger stores. They were free to charge to start with, but after the Russian invasion

of Ukraine, the rising fuel prices meant they added a tariff to chargers at their sites. Now,

this had the dual effect of decreasing utilization, but also freeing up chargers for people with a

genuine need, rather than people who found it cheaper to leave their car on a Tesco Pod charging

overnight to charge for free, rather than using their home electricity, which would cost them

Then in a move which surprised a lot of people, supermarket chain Sainsbury's made a big play

in the supermarket charging field by installing a lot of high-power chem-power chargers at a

large number of their stores in a rather short time. At the time of writing, they've gone from

zero to 81 hubs at their stores, providing fast, reliable charging at a cost that's high, but

not as high as many others in the market. In fact, the head of Sainsbury's smart charge,

Patrick Dunn, told me that when he surveyed customers, or when they surveyed customers,

price did not come out as the highest priority, but it was down around two or three.

Now, not to be outdone in the supermarket charging stakes, little got into the game.

They had seven kilowatt chargers at a number of their stores, usually branded as Podpoint,

but they then created their own charge point operator and installed usually a single 50 kilowatt,

three-headed charger capable of CCS, Chatham-O, and AC charging in one place. They now have hundreds

across the country, with a large number of them within the M25. There are also chargers at pretty

much every major supermarket brand, although not at all stores, as to have them, waitrose have them,

Marks and Spencer have them, different CPOs, different prices, different charge speed,

and we'll cover charge speed in a moment. Now, I want to look back to Morrison's for a second or

two. I mentioned that GeniePoint worked with Morrison's and installed a single 50 kilowatt unit

at almost every suitable store. Well, a couple of years back, MFG Motor Fuel Group and Morrison's

came to an agreement where Motor Fuel Group purchased 337 of the Morrison's petrol four courts

and 40 associated sites and will be using them for ultra rapid EV charging development.

What this meant was that GeniePoint were out, generally speaking, and MFG were in.

At the very least, the old GeniePoint units were ripped out and replaced with

rather neat looking MFG dual head 50 kilowatt chargers. At best, it meant that complete

new hubs were installed with dual headed, alpatronic units, canopies, and other facilities.

They were targeting the installation of 800 ultra rapid 150 kilowatt EV chargers in hubs

within the first five years alone. Pretty impressive, all at around 79 pence per kilowatt

time of writing. Not the cheapest, but most certainly not the most expensive.

So summarizing the move, we've gone from not having any charging at any supermarkets 10 years back,

to having slow charging at some supermarkets, to having rapid or ultra rapid at a lot of supermarkets

all within a relatively short period of time. Now, of course, nobody's releasing utilisation

figures yet, but a cursory glance at that map at random times of the day indicates that a lot of

larger, more powerful hubs tend to get good occupancy and utilisation.

For example, I checked a random sample of smart charge sites in London,

and it wasn't unusual to find over half the units in use, and in some cases,

only two out of seven units available for use, with the rest being occupied.

Now, this is obviously great news for companies like Sainsbury's, and if you want to hear more

about the Sainsbury's story, I did a complete episode with Patrick Dunn from Smart Charge,

episode 227, link in the show notes.

So let's have a look at the pros and cons of supermarket charging.

Well, from a pro point of view, you're already there, so why not? I mean, you go to the supermarket

on a regular basis, and if you're like me, you have to drive there. If you're in the middle

of London, probably less so. So while you're there, why not instead of parking and having the car do

nothing, just hook onto a charger and pump some electrons into the car while you're doing nothing.

It's the old adage of, I don't stop to charge, I charge where I stop.

Now, the next thing to look at from a pro point of view is loyalty cards.

Supermarkets were always good at allowing you to use your club cards and loyalty cards when buying

petrol. It's a great way of rewarding you for doing something you'd need to do anyway.

Our Sainsbury's have done this with their smart charge offering, where you can earn

nectar points. And at the time of writing, it's one point per one pound of charging.

Now, as they've got those nice fast ultra rapid chem power charges, if you're doing the big shop,

you might be able to put £40 or £50 worth of energy into your car while there. That's

40 or 50 nectar points. Not nothing, but nothing to be sneezed at.

Supermarket charging can actually be cheap. One little known fact with supermarket charging,

especially if it's seven kilowatt rather than the high powered stuff that companies like smart

charge provide, is it can actually be quite cheap to use the charging facilities. At a

local Aldi near my parents, pod formerly podpoint are providing seven kilowatt charging at 25

pence a kilowatt hour. Now, just to put that in context, that's cheaper than a charge at my house

if I'm not using the overnight rate because I'm about 29 pence a kilowatt hour.

Checking that map though, it does seem that that's restricted to Aldi supermarkets in Yorkshire,

but it doesn't mean that there aren't others with tariff such as 30 pence a kilowatt hour

elsewhere in the country. So let's have a quick look at the cons then. And this is where we come

into the concept of dwell time. Now, dwell time was always going to be an issue with supermarket

charging. Ideally, you need to charge it in there that will allow you to take the maximum amount

of energy with a variable dwell time. Now, dwell time is the amount of time the customer will spend

at a particular location while charging. As an example, if you're at a hotel staying overnight,

your dwell time can be eight, 10, 12 hours. A relatively slow speed charger is more than enough

with that sort of dwell time. But something like McDonald's, for example, has a relatively short

dwell time. If you've got a park, a plug and go for your food, wait for the order, eat the food,

and then leave, you're probably going to be there for a maximum of 30 minutes, unless if it's me by

myself, for example. So a seven kilowatt charger is going to give you about three kilowatt hours in

that length of time. On an efficient EV, that will get you 12 miles of range. It's not nothing,

but it's not going to make a drastic difference unless you're 15 miles from your destination

with just five miles left on the gomp. This means that the ideal chargers need to be in place to

deal with the appropriate dwell time. If we look at a supermarket, I reckon the average dwell time

is about 30, 45 minutes. Some people such as me, I like to be in and out quickly, no messing,

one basket, self-checkout. Some people do the big shop for the month, take an hour to do that and

have to wait even longer for the queue at the checkout. So I'm going with 30, 45 minutes is an

average. Now, the other problem with and we've mentioned it earlier with supermarket charging is

it can be abused. And we've already talked about people who decided, particularly back when the

prices were cheap, to plug in at a supermarket charger all night rather than pay for their home

charging. There's all sorts of abuses related to that. And of course, the color to that or the

opposite to that is that it can be expensive, as we've already said. Genie Point at the Morrison's

are priced up around 90 pence a kilowatt hour, which is extortionate. And when we spoke to

a smart charger back in season 12, they told us that they thought the power they were supplying

for charging, which is 350 kilowatts, was enough for their dwell time. A smart charger certainly

seemed to capture the EV driver's imagination with their instantly recognizable charges at the

major sites, some of which are actually co-located with their on-site fuel stations. So there's

one not far from me at Brackville, for example, that has that. We also mentioned Morrison's earlier

on. They had agreements with Genie Point for charging, but at the start of 2024, MFG bought

337 Morrison's four-course and the associated sites in order to use them for charging. Now,

this $2.5 billion deal meant that Genie Point were out, MFG were in. Now, interestingly, MFG

have done a multi-pronged strategy when it comes to replacing the chargers. In places where the

grid power was low, they've removed the old, ugly, nasty, three-headed, ugly Genie Point chargers

and replaced them with some similar low-power, fairly slimline MFG 50 kilowatt units.

In places where the power is higher, they've installed the standard MFG EV hub with the canopy,

the blue and white colouring, tyre pumps, air hoses, water, things like that. There are two

Morrison's near me. One has the simple 50 kilowatt unit and the other has the whole canopy,

alpatronic chargers, etc., so it's quite a tale of two halves. So, that's supermarket charging.

It is, as I said, a tale of two halves. Some have gone for charging in a big way

and installed ultra-rapid hubs and lots of units. The price themselves is a little higher than others,

but customers seem to be, I'll say, happy. Let's say going along with it, showing. Others have

stuck with longer, dual-time AC charging, often, but not always, at cheaper rates. Now, for many

people, it's the look of the draw. If you're in some place, you can get AC charging for 25

kWh, which is phenomenally cheap for public charging. In others, it might be 75 kWh for

ultra-rapid DC charging. So, what's your experience of charging at supermarkets?

Let me know info at evmuseans.com. The Evmuseans podcast is sponsored by Zatmap,

the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Zatmap is free to download and use with subscription plans for enhanced features such as

using Zatmap in car, on carplay or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge

points. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms

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know you know nothing else. Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. You know he rarely shops at

supermarkets, as everything delivered. Thanks for listening, bye bye now.

287 - The Supermarket Charging Episode

About this episode

supermarket charging

loss leader

pricing strategies

50 kilowatt charger

GeniePoint

electric vehicle charging

Podpoint

Dodge Charger

low-power charger

charging cost

charger utilization

Tesco

charging tariff

Sainsbury's

high-power charger

charging hub

AC charging

CCS charging

CPOs

charge speed

MFG Motor Fuel Group

ultra rapid EV charging

loyalty cards

kilowatt hour

dwell time

range

charging abuse

smart charger

50 kilowatt unit

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