Supermarket charging means you can plug in your electric car to get power while you shop at a supermarket. It's like filling up your gas car at a petrol station, but for electric cars.
The Dodge Charger is a big car that looks sporty and can go really fast because of its strong engine. People like it because it’s fun to drive and has a cool design. It uses regular gas, so it doesn’t need special charging like electric cars.
A 50 kilowatt charger is a device that can fill up an electric car's battery faster than a normal plug at home, but it's not the fastest kind available.
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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
or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmuseans.com.
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About this episode
Exploring the evolution of supermarket EV charging, this episode dives into how supermarkets have transitioned from minimal, low-power chargers to widespread rapid and ultra-rapid charging hubs. It covers key players like Morrison's, Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Lidl, highlighting their different strategies, pricing, and charger types. The discussion also touches on the pros and cons of supermarket charging, including convenience, loyalty rewards, pricing, dwell time challenges, and issues with charger abuse. Insights into recent investments and future plans for expanding ultra-rapid charging infrastructure at supermarkets provide a comprehensive look at this growing sector.
Exploring the evolution of supermarket charging stations for electric vehicles, their strategic deployment, pricing models, and user experience insights.
Key topics
History and evolution of supermarket EV charging stations
Different supermarket charging strategies and hardware
The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence. Zapmap is free to download and use, with subscription plans for enhanced features such as using Zapmap in-car on CarPlay or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge points.
Download the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store or find out more at www.zapmap.com.
