294 The Raw Charging Episode

Hi, I'm Gary and this is Evie Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things

that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

On the show today, we'll be chatting with ChargePoint operator Raw Charging.

Over the many seasons of this podcast, I've spoken with quite a few of the major ChargePoint

operators across the country, Osprey Charging, SmartCharge, InstaVolt, GridServe, FastNed,

PodPoint, ChargeY, GeniePoint and Ionity to name a few.

Whenever possible, I like to try and bring a new ChargePoint operator on every season or so.

And this season is the turn of Raw Charging, the Evie Musings podcast is sponsored by Zatmap,

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

Now, in this conversation, I'll be asking key questions about things like pricing and why

Raw Charging can cut prices at some locations, but not others, accessibility, canopies,

why they might be thinking about creating their own app, and regular listeners will have heard

Victoria, Hutton and I talk about this on the recent mid-season roundtable episode and a big

favourite of mine, Plug and Charge.

Hi, Gary. My name's Neil Broadbank. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of Raw Charging.

We're a CPO based in the UK and focus specifically on destination charging.

Good. We're going to talk a little bit about the destination charging and because I've got some

specific questions that a few listeners have sent in about that.

And I also want to talk about some of your rapid charging as well.

But can you just give us an idea in terms of the size of the network and kind of the split

between destination and rapid slash ultra rapid please?

Yeah, sure. So we have currently two and a half thousand charging points in the ground today,

as you can imagine still growing at a great pace.

More recently, whilst we started out and took a very deliberate position in the early days,

they're building out AC charging infrastructure and destinations, primarily built on long

dwell time. Over time, we've seen different usage profiles where ultra rapid charging works for a

lot of destinations as well. So we currently have an ultra rapid charging network that's grown

to 500 sockets in quite a short period of time and they're increasingly popping up alongside our AC

charges. Are you able to share any statistics about utilisation on your network over the last

one, three months, whatever? Yeah, utilisation is a very interesting

topic for us being owned by a very sophisticated institutional private equity infrastructure

investor, where we're always kept very honest with performance of locations as soon as they're

energised. And one of the things that comes through with destination charging in particular

is seasonality for one case, whether it be peak times throughout the year or the month

or actually the week. So a shopping centre on a Monday morning has a very different profile

to a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, as you might imagine, which with it comes different

sort of pros and cons actually from how you operate that charging solution from a pricing

perspective as well as performance. So we have a real range of utilisations across our network,

specific to the different types of destinations that we have our charges at from one end of the

spectrum. We've got, you know, the archetypal national trust beach location in Cornwall,

where I'm from, for example, where in the summer you see fantastic usage that is really strong

and that's largely due to perhaps holidaymakers travelling down in EVs from perhaps regions

sort of south of London and so on. Consequently, we're also seeing different profiles with our

growing real ultra rapid charging networks, such as in the centre of London, there's high

utilisation all the time. So you might be seeing sort of five, six, seven hours of constant usage

from such as some ride sharing, ride hailing drive platform such as Uber, other delivery

van services using our charges. So a real range of utilisations, Gary. Can we tell us specifically

about the locations? Did you mention the national trust as a site that you work with?

What is your actual process for looking at the portfolio and saying, well, this is where

we're going to put some charges versus no, this is probably not a good site? What goes on in the

planning process before you actually commit to putting money out onto a given location?

Absolutely. And I think the answer is grounded partly in our heritage as well. So early on,

we took a very deliberate position around destination charging, where rather than building

standalone EV charging hubs, we partnered with some of the UK's leading leisure retail hospitality

destination brands to install charges in the places where people are already spending time,

which we've always been quite clear on. It gives us two clear pillars for the success of our network.

First, you just got built in demand. So we're not just relying on passing traffic,

which is opportunistic. People are already going to these locations for some other reason

than to fuel their car. And then secondly, it gives us a unique brand association as well.

Being a fast and dynamic organisation that has a growing brand, we can't necessarily hope to

have the prestigious level of sort of customer profile that the national trust or the RHS might

have from years of loyalty. So we really like to align with our host partners there. And

you must treat that with respect in answer to your question around the process for

integrating charging into those locations. Being a destination location based charging

provider, the first thing we've always done is align the charging strategy in terms of the primary

use case of a site. And often there are secondary and tertiary use cases at destination, where

ultimately different charger types and speeds come into play. So AC charges, I've heard you talk

about it before, they're perfect for the hotel use case or anything over a two hour plus stay

really. So leisure sites such as Wisley at the RHS, which we've just launched over Easter and seen

some fantastic utilisation are perfect because you might not know how long you're going to be at

that location, but you will happily charge up your car where you can. Consequently, that same

Wisley location could also be suitable for a medium DC rapid speed because you might be there for

lunch an hour and an hour and a half where actually that medium rapid option works perfectly well

or the gym, for example. And then of course, you've got that DC ultra rapid approach where

you layer in other elements of data such as traffic flow, certain conurbations, whether there

are different arterial routes around you, which might incentivise a driver either through an app

like Zatmap or a roaming facility whereby they see your ultra fast charger on their dashboard

and they can get on and off the charger within 20 minutes and carry on their journey. So we've

always taken a very holistic use case approach to the location and then layered on the use cases is

the answer to the question. So the first site I ever came across that was run by your site was the

the charge yard in Slough, which visited there a number of times. Those people who haven't been

fairly centered in the in the middle of Slough, it seems to be attached to a almost like an office

block. There are a number of, I think 350 kilowatt alpatronics there and 304 AC units.

That's right. It's, I wouldn't necessarily say it's close to the M4, although you can obviously

get to it from the M4. It's not a destination because there's not necessarily any parking nearby

or anything to do if you're not sort of visiting that particular office block.

What was the rationale for putting that site in at that location?

That's a great question and that can be described as our first hub. I think with one of the things

being want to be earlier charging operators in the UK that has perhaps matured, perhaps only in the

last few years into a much larger network. In the earlier days, we innovated with different

locational types through our host partner who owned that location. We both collaborated. It was

Aberdeen, the investment firm Aberdeen. We collaborated with them to build out a flagship hub

where that piece of land was effectively disused and nothing else could be done with it. You're

absolutely right. Is that the archetypal raw charging destination? No. Having said that,

it does serve a charging use case that we've grown to know and love those types of locations.

I think that's also spurred. That's the story really around our evolving ultra rapid network

growth where we've had other landlord partners that we've decided to work on similar locations.

You're absolutely right. It's not a destination location compared to some of the beautiful places

such as National Trust Stourhead, but it's very much part of the charging mix. We like operating

highly profitable locations like that because it helps the profitability of our entire network

manage the earlier phases of EV adoption across the UK, as you can imagine.

Now, just before we started recording, you and I were talking about the fact that we have

somebody we know in common, Charlie Gilbert from Field Dynamics. Field Dynamics themselves

is a company who provide a product and a dataset that allows companies such as yourself

to analyze given locations with traffic flows, nearby conveniences, and off-street parking,

and any number of different parameters. How much of that data analysis goes on

when you're looking at a potential site? You say you've got Aberdeen, for example,

company that you worked with there for the Charger Yard in Slout. Presumably,

they may have a couple of other locations that may be potentially suitable.

Would you be using something like the dataset from Field Dynamics to compare and contrast

one site versus another? Yes. It's another really interesting space that I'm personally passionate

about, and it's something that's evolved over the time that I've been working in the industry,

which is coming up to nine years now. I know Charlie very well, and we worked on

quite an extensive project a few years ago. I think the first thing to say is there is an

increasing amount of data, and every organization, including ourselves, including our investors,

love to get more of it. We definitely caveat everything with something being interesting

or something being useful, and we're quite disciplined in that approach. For example,

you can put a point in a map for a potential charging location and learn 100 things about it

from the number of cars passing, the population density, how many people in the local area do

or don't have EVs or have off-street parking, on-street parking. All of these different elements

will indicate to some or greater extent charging might be a good option in this location,

and you might want to be able to indicate speed that you install. We've always taken a very

holistic approach to increasingly apply data analysis with our site selection strategy

and also our site charger configuration strategy. I go back to where I started a second ago in

terms of we always ground our assumption of a site based on the primary, secondary, tertiary

use cases where something is happening on this location today, come what may, with or without

charging. Then we start to consider different data points such as traffic flows, such as population

density, which are some of the biggest drivers today, certainly for ultra rapid charging.

Destination AC charging, for example, it is perhaps more driven by distance traveled to site

and the activity occurring at the site. You do layer these pieces of data on top of each other

and take everything into account. A platform that field dynamics have developed is a really

impressive way of looking at that in a consolidated view in one screen, which is incredibly helpful

when it comes to investor discussions, looking at a portfolio really quickly to make an assessment

as to whether you can commit to investment over a period of time, also trying to understand how

the profile of a site might change over time, because obviously investing and selecting a

site with one view today will change, as we're seeing from most operators who are expanding

sites that are successful, or perhaps some locations have been stored ahead of EV uptake

and utilization is lower. Data does really help provide greater clarity on where you make these

decisions in a very rapidly growing industry full stop. We naturally are also very interested in

how something like AI could accelerate this, but again, I'll take Charlie's words and coin it for

him, try never to be more than one step away from the fact of data in front of you, because you don't

ball thing to balance. Bottom line is that data is this incredible tool that enables us to make

good decisions in the context of real world analysis and experience. I think we're a tight

team over here where experience and reviewing what we're seeing on our network today does

feed back into our decisions. Let me put myself in the position of a potential viewer or listener

of the podcast. They may be aware of raw charging, they may have been out to a national trust site,

they may have seen some of the charge in there. If I look at not necessarily your competitors,

but other CPOs who work in a similar space, we look at the grid serves of this world. They tend

to be located for the most part in motorway service areas. If I look at InstaVault, they tend to be

located around, say, McDonald's sites. Osprey charging tend to be located around Mustins,

pubs, et cetera, because these are the kind of organizations that they've partnered with.

Now, all of those also have other sites that are not located in the places I've talked about.

Other than the national trust, where would you say a typical EV driver would look to find a raw

charging site, primarily a rapid charger rather than say a 22 kilowatt or seven kilowatt AC charge?

Yeah, no, and I think your summary is spot on, Gary. Where you would find a raw charger outside

of our traditional AC destination archetype locations that we touched on would be increasingly

in the retail and hospitality space. We do have a partnership with Green King, where we're rolling

out DC charges alongside a community AC network that works well. And then more increasingly,

we have a number of retail park rapid charging, ultra rapid charging hubs with a lot of the

institutional landlords, whereby we install a substation with over typically eight ultra

rapid charging bays. Increasingly, we have installed ultra rapid charging hubs upwards of 12.

We're kind of, as an industry, I think we're stepping into this sort of super hub territory.

So we're very early on in our journey in that, but we do have some strategic locations that we've

focused on, because we know there's an established footfall there today and a high traffic flow

kind of in the adjacent area. So one of the main partnerships we're really proud of having

launched recently is the Lansik retail portfolio. So we have partnered with them in quite a short

period of time. We've formed a great partnership with Lansik, who are this fantastic, well known

real estate organization known across the UK, known globally, and we're investing around 24,

24 and a half million pounds across their estate of retail locations. A lot of those are arterially

linked. So Escape York, for example, is just off the M62 outside of Leeds. That is ultimately a

leisure destination, but it's also just off of an arterial motorway whereby people can stop for

20 minutes. With our destination hat on, we've been able to lend a shoulder to the wheel of

enroute charging, which is a fantastic thing to be able to do. So that's just one type of

location that you might see more raw charges at. Over a thousand, in fact, we'll be installing

across that portfolio. I released an episode last week about the strategic road network,

and specifically I talked about M1, because that's a favorite of mine. I looked down the

at the bottom of it, my parents have up at the top of it. As part of that, I received some data

from ZAPMAP, and we looked at all the charging hubs, six or more ultra-rapids that are either on the

motorway or within a short distance from one of the junctions on the motorway. We are charging,

I believe, have two hubs along that route, neither of which are actually particularly close to the

M1. Given that that is the most trafficked road in the UK outside the M25 with around 200,000

vehicles a day, is it an oversight that you're not actually located there? Is it on your plan to

actually have charges somewhere up along that route? Talk to me a little bit about the M1, please.

Yes, so I think with our strategy, it's often been grounded by the landlord partnerships that we

forge. So going back to our original approach of being location-based through destinations that

exist, there is a certain element of discipline that we approach ourselves. Rather than the

point-and-shoot type site-finding acquisition approach, having said that, we are still actively

looking at acquiring more sites, working with more landlords, and installing hubs where drivers need

the most. So as you say, it sounds like a very attractive region, and we've been aware of it for

a while. Obviously, you can appreciate getting stars to align in terms of the right location

with the right landlord, with the right grid connection to develop out the site. But no,

certainly in our plans, and very important to highlight, that other regions as well, such as

the Southwest being Cornish Bourne and Bred, I'm very passionate about how we can

kind of increase the connectivity. I think give them their credit. GridServe and of course,

Tesla have done a fantastic job at X, so I was just using it the other day. Again, we're lending

a shoulder to the wheel down there. We've got rapid charging hub in at National Trust Stourhead,

just off the A3A3. So that's kind of got this perfect destination and ultra rapid hub blend,

so you can catch up on your pride and prejudice views whilst charging your car quick enough to

get back on the road. I think that between them, Tesla and GridServe have kind of cornered most

of the grid capacity down in the Southwest there, and quite a lot of charging in a very

small space there. Can we move on a little bit to a topic which I know is very of great interest to

a lot of listeners, which is pricing and charging tariffs. More charging, I think that the pricing,

I mean, obviously for the AC, it's a little bit lower. But if we look at DC and DC rapid,

we're talking, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, between about 76 to 79 pence per kilowatt hour

site dependent, which is a reasonable drop below what I would call the big four or big five. We

were now heading towards 89 pence per kilowatt hour for the most part. Talk to me a little bit

about your pricing model and how you're able to actually price at that level.

Yeah, it's a good question, and I think pricing by its nature is a dynamic beast and different

organizations, P&L approach. But intentionally, we take a very simplistic approach to it.

Ultimately, we're kept honest by being owned by a sophisticated infrastructure investor where

the long-term profitability is the fundamental core tenet of our network,

alongside ensuring that our drivers are getting the most convenient seamless charge, etc.

So our pricing model is, yeah, as we say, very, very simple. Pay as you go,

contactless. Hopefully, we'll be implementing a plug and charge solution in the future,

because we know our hardware is sort of capable across Europe, because we use Alpetronic as

you've identified. Pricing is, as you say, mid-range intentionally, because it's that

destination element for the ultra rapids. But there is that convenience. We do see increasing

utilization in areas that are really busy, and you want to ensure over the long term that drivers

can get a fair amount of charge whilst also cycling through other drivers who want to be there. So

that's certainly something to manage over time in terms of time of use-based incentives to ensure

that if a hub is full, the next queue of drivers can come in, which can happen in sort of congested

areas such as London. But as I said, a very simple approach to pricing. We do have a burgeoning

loyalty scheme whereby drivers may be able to capture specific promotional-based benefits from

every time we launch a site, we actually do a week of free charging, because we like to create

awareness within the local area of a charging site. And also having a customer that comes back

time and time again is very valuable to us, because it enables us to decide whether we want to expand

a site or decide whether, actually, there are different times a day that people might be able

to leverage this, such as critical fleet vehicles and so on. Now, slightly controversial question.

If I look, for example, at a company which I would probably say would be one of your competitors,

which is the Manchester-based EV who've actually been on the show for a season's back.

They've recently taken over Mer, as you know. They've got some quite phenomenal pricing strategies

with subscriptions and time of day tariffs that knock them down to 39 pence a kilowatt hour.

And given that you're cheaper than a lot of the big five, big six, as we've already said,

but you're not down where the EV are. So is there room for movement? Do you think that they've got

a strategy which is good for the driver but bad for them as an organisation? Talk to me a little

bit about your thoughts about the PV strategy and how you may or may not be able to

to work towards that or whether you would want to? Sure. Well, firstly, it's a great strategy and

I really like PV as a charging network. I think we see a lot of ourselves in them in terms of,

I guess, being part of a new generation of CPOs that are taking the UK market very seriously.

Because I think it does create healthy competition and ensures that every operator out there has

sort of the full integrity of their product, which is something I very aligned to very closely.

It's a great model and there is obviously a strong strategic partnership there with Octopus,

which enables them to sort of leverage that ecosystem of energy and driver pricing. So

for us, we would definitely be open to exploring those different commercial opportunities. I think

it does come back to us being quite simple. We know that over a period of time, we have

certain levels of profitability hurdles that ensure the long term sustainability of our

network is underpinned by our current pricing model and on our medium to long term pricing

model, which is the one you've described. And at the same time, if you consider the destinations

that we're increasingly installing in such as within the Lancet portfolio, for example,

there's Bluewater Shopping Centre, where this is a parking space number of 13,000 and 20 million

visitors attend this site and I think north of 8 million vehicles go to this site every year. So

there is a defined customer base that go to that location come what may and, you know, let's assume

4% of that number is EV today. I think we know reality is slightly distorted when you get down

to the micro level, but let's assume a good proportion of that number is going to increasingly

become EV. We may be able to leverage better pricing optionality for those customers who

say go to Bluewater once a week and that comes into our raw rewards loyalty scheme over time. So

we definitely are proactive with that. We have a pricing strategy board where we assess the market

as well because pricing at one destination may be different for another, but again, yeah,

very simple. I think the other thing is the magic word at the moment, so we try and say it too much,

but AI definitely does have a factor to play here, I think, in terms of how we could actually give

more benefit to the customers in terms of if we get a dynamic energy tariff over a period of time,

why could we not pass that on? Or equally, could we capture some more short term profitability

if a site has been underperforming in the earlier days and has now balanced out? So I think across

a portfolio, you do take a measured view and of course, we ultimately rely on customer loyalty,

so making pricing unpalatable doesn't work. Am I right in thinking or did I read somewhere that

you also have time of day tariffs? So if somebody charges overnight, they can get a reduction in

the basic rate. Am I right about that or have I misread that?

Yes, so that will be on some select locations within the portfolio. So we, I touched on,

we have a partnership with Green King, so they have an estate of pubs and restaurants that sort of

very familiar within the kind of local community sphere, I suppose. So we see opportunity for

people who don't have off street parking at home and therefore don't have the ability to install

a home charger, but do or are increasingly driving electric cars, electric vans and

they can be incentivised to use our asset that may actually otherwise be slightly dormant overnight

in some cases and for an improvement on price, they could be incentivised to use it. So that's

a very active strategy we take and I think it's par and parcel of running a mature charging network.

Now the devil's advocate would be saying, well, if you can do that for certain charges overnight,

you can do that for all your charges all the time, but you're not doing that. So

talk to me about why that's the case, please.

Yeah, no, I think, I think there's potentially something in that, but actually I would say

again, it comes back to the heritage of our investors, you do require certainty to make

day-to-day annual business decisions around how you fund the continued rollout of your network.

So I think it happens in the round. I don't think we approach things in kind of a myopic way,

where you change the price today to make a buck for the next two days, if that makes sense. So

I think we're very conscious about where we do make a change and that kind of goes through the

pricing strategy borders as a touched upon and we do think about, I think there are unintended

consequences as well, of course, because if you do make a pricing change and perhaps competition

opens up in the local area, once you lose a customer, you have to work quite hard to get them

back. So I think a lot of it has to be grounded in logic and sort of your causal approach.

The thing that I've heard a lot of Chargepoint operators say is that if we can increase the

utilization, we can drop the price. And if you go back and do the figures, then I've done them at

a fairly high level. That's absolutely the case because you've got a large fixed cost base

that you have to pay regardless of how many charging sessions. So obviously,

if you've got more charging sessions, you can portion that out over more charging sessions

and the price per kilowatt hour drops. So there is a case to say that if you drop your price,

you will encourage a higher utilization. So rather than saying, let's increase the utilization that

will allow us to drop the price, there is a case to say, well, let's drop the price and see whether

that will increase the utilization. And I think you've kind of talked about that a little bit,

but is that something that your pricing strategy team have looked at and said,

well, no, we can't guarantee the increase in utilization just because we dropped the price.

We're going to have to wait for the utilization to increase before we drop the price. Has that

conversation taken place? Did that make sense? No, it makes sense. I wouldn't say that specific

conversations happened partly because it's almost there. There are multiple conversations in one

go in many ways. I think it comes back to that certainty. So arguably, there is a leap of faith

around price being the ultimate deciding factor. So again, going back to our destination heritage

within our mindset and within our kind of thinking process, if you go to Bluewater Shopping Center,

we always use that as the best example. You aren't necessarily being driven by price because it's

a premium retail location. So perhaps your decision as to whether you do or don't charge there

would be based on how close the charging is to the shop that you want to go to or

how fast is the charging relative to the time that you're going to spend there. So

we do take a case by case or archetype by archetype approach to our pricing across our

network. So there are the more community local charging solutions. They are more driven perhaps

by price, whereas in some locations, drivers are much more about the experience. And actually,

on experience, we're in the process with land sec of essentially enhancing the driver experience

through things like reservable bays. So drivers are very much happy to pay for the ability to have

that more premium charge experience. It's the first and last thing they do when they get to these

locations and to our host partners, whose business model of ultimately underpinned by people turning

up and spending money, it's really important to increase the loyalty on that basis. So I think

what I'm saying is pricing is one part of a factor for why people will charge. And I think you'll

be aware there's that McKinsey study. It's stacked in a bit of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And

I believe it's related to ultra rapid charging where the things that come into factor are pricing,

reliability, availability, speed, amenities. So I think if you tick all of those boxes,

price probably then becomes a factor. So it really does depend.

Can we move on and talk about roaming operators? Who are you connected with at the moment from

a Roman point of view? So this is a nice and straightforward answer. We are connected with

most thanks to our partnership with ChargePoint, the well known Silicon Valley based US charging

network who we've been partnered with from a very early age of the business, whereby we've been able

to piggyback on all of the hard work they've done really over the last 20 years, building out

sophisticated charging infrastructure and technology, working with all the other networks and EMSPs.

So we're actively, and it's within my role, we're actively looking at how we can increase

roaming presence, but we're very confident we're where we need to be in terms of vehicle

dashboards and so on. And of course, alongside ZAP map, which is still my go to tool, whatever

the weather. I like that. You've kind of conveniently brought us on to the whole topic of apps. Now I

had the mid-season round table a couple of weeks ago and we talked about apps as a concept. And

you know, if every ChargePoint operator had their own app, you had all those apps on your phone,

you would have somewhere in the region of 150 apps. Now, am I right in thinking there is not

a specific raw charging app? But as you say, you use the ChargePoint app instead. Is that right?

You can use the ChargePoint app to use the raw network as it stands today. We do have app development

ambitions in place, but you're absolutely right. We all have to download a lot of apps. So you need

a really good reason to decide why you want to download that and use that and use that repeatedly.

But again, I think I've been a Tesla driver for four years and the most seamless charging experience

certainly is still the thing to be strived for and contactless, of course, is an absolute

must. And I think we've always been clear about whether it be AC or DC, you need contactless

functionality on your charges. Again, put my devil's advocate out. As a ChargePoint operator,

why are you developing an app? You're not an app development company. You've said yourself,

you're looking at bringing that in. There are hundreds and thousands of companies that will

develop an app. ZapMap is wonderful. Why look to develop your own app and have to build that

competency in-house? Why not sort of go to someone like ZapMap and say, can you add this

functionality to your app on our behalf so that we can leverage that ourselves?

No, and I'm happy to be asked that question, really. I think that's an interesting discussion

for us to have with ZapMap to see how two industry minds can get in the room to see

whether there's some value that can be brought to us as a CPO that wants to do specific things

with the drivers on their network and the drivers that go to their specific locations.

So no, I'm happy to take that one. We do see value in working with our host partners really

closely. So LandSec, for example, we work very closely not only with their asset management

team to roll out the charges, which is often very complex and legal and involves liaising with

multiple parties and stakeholders to roll out these charges. We're also working with their

consumer team where they're very data-driven. They know their customers inside and out,

and they know what they do and don't like. And actually, we're at a stage where

layering and charging infrastructure into that profile and persona is part of their customer

journey, whether it be planned or unplanned. And an app or at least a digital customer journey

may come part of the charging journey.

I'll say, go back to the mid-season episode and you'll know my attitude and apps on that.

Before we move on, I did... Because I've obviously got the ChargePoint app on my

phone, which, incidentally, I downloaded because when I first went to the charge yard in Slough,

that was what it said, download the app. So I did. So it's been on there ever since.

There is a 22-kilowatt charge about two miles from where I'm standing at the moment. I went

into the ChargePoint app and I wanted to find out how much it was going to cost me to charge

at that particular location. And for some reason, it couldn't display the price. It kept saying

the price varies over time. Is that not against the public ChargePoint regulations 2023,

where you should be able to know what price you're going to be charged before you actually

start the charge? I suspect that's more of a software issue because as far as we're aware

and in our close relationship with ChargePoint, we are up to the relevant levels of compliance

across the UK. Let's talk accessibility. PAS 1899, it's a standard recommendation,

but it's not necessarily being enforced, particularly with Landsat, for example, and the

expansion that you're putting in there. Are you going to be complying with PAS 1899 regulations?

Yes. I think the first thing to say is we're charge safe accredited and we know Kate and the

gang. And then we formed a working group and a working paper following that accreditation to

kind of continually improve how we approach accessibility because, as you're right, with

an increasing EV population, inevitably we'll have a more diverse EV park and driver set.

So as sort of standard, every new site has accessible charging provisions.

And actually, we're also approaching it with other innovative approaches. So one way of

looking at it is sort of the physical approach in terms of spacing, how do you position charges.

There's that element to it. The other side of it is how could perhaps a software-based solution

enable that further. So I touched on reservable bays earlier, but we see that actually is an

innovative way to give people who might have some accessibility issues peace of mind that they

could secure a charger themselves with the usage of a digital journey to reserve a charger. So

it would be accessible for them at a particular time as well. So it's not just a physical thing.

So we've taken a really holistic approach to that. It's in sort of a development stage,

but you can understand what I'm getting at. The other side of accessibility, I think, is just kind

of accessibility with a capital A. So we're due to a quite exciting launch. Another retail portfolio

where we've had to intentionally oversize most of the spaces to cater for larger commercial vehicles.

So actually, everyone benefits from that portfolio, as you can imagine. And then I think the other

things were sort of getting into amenities, but launching cubicles and toilets on other hubs in

destinations where the destination car parks themselves are actually quite big. So whether

you are or not going to that location or whether you are or not going to that destination for its

primary purpose, and actually you are just topping up because you want to get back on the road,

we're looking at launching cubicles and kind of toilet-based blocks for additional hub-based

accessibility and comfort. Always a big fan of amenities at charging stations.

But I'm also a big fan of these canopies. Now, if we look at, I don't like doing comparisons

between CPO, but if we look at someone like MFG, with very, very few exceptions, it doesn't matter

where they put charges. They'll always put a canopy over it. And yeah, we know Fastead do that as

well. There are very, very few others that will do that at all locations. What's the

raw charging attitude or approach to canopies at chose?

This is the famous question, isn't it? And being a fan of EV Musings, I know it is a

topic that's of a great passion to you, Gary. So canopies, I like them. And you've already

mentioned our raw slough charge yard where we have a canopy. So we've done them. We

know what they're about. We know the design. We know the planning considerations. We are doing

more as part of a new super hub line within the Royal portfolio, where they're larger

ultra rapid charging hubs, where you come for an additional canopy standalone EV charging

canopies are required. So kind of touching on the point I was saying a second ago,

I think our fundamental approach is again, grounded in our destinations where

once you've plugged in, you're going into the destination that you've gone to. So whether

the coffee shop on the location or whether that be one of the destinations, whether it be one

of the garden centers, you're going inside. So that's always been our approach. And it may

change and it may evolve. I think in the retail space in particular, the retail park space,

it can be challenging to install canopies due to other retailers branding rights, advertising

rights with their big box retail advertising hoarding and so on. It's rarely just a simple

shall we do it, shall we not discussion as you can imagine in locations that are obviously

often quite prestigious or have flagship tenants higher up in the pecking order.

I am going to have to stand up and give a voice to somebody who I know will be listening, who is

Ian Trott, who is a full-time wheelchair user. And he will, I think quite rightly pull you up and

say, yes, once you're charging, you're probably going to be in the location and it doesn't matter

whether it's wet. But if you're in a wheelchair, you are going to be exposed to the elements for a

lot longer than somebody who is able-bodied. As you try and negotiate your way around the vehicle,

potentially with a heavy cable on your lap and trying to get all that plugged in. So whereas

you and I who are both able-bodied may be able to plug in and get it started on a contactless

within 15 or 20 seconds, somebody who is in a full-time, who is a full-time wheelchair user may

be out there for several minutes and they will definitely appreciate a canopy. Having said that,

I would like to point you to, and I'm sure you're aware of this, but just for the listeners,

two other CPOs who I think are doing good work in this area, MotoCharge. They've now started

putting charges in a couple of MSAs and I've been to one, there's one redding near me.

They've got individual canopies over each charger as opposed to a big canopy with a number of

chargers underneath. Probably worth having a look at that. And you were talking earlier on about

charge booking. Arnold Clark have got that nailed. I tried that about 18 months ago.

They've got the process in place. Rather than reinvent the wheel, you might want to go out,

have a word with them, see what they're doing, see whether you can use a couple of Bos words,

leverage the synergies there. I don't know. No, I think the industry is there for people to

partner to make the whole driving journey more straightforward, right? Absolutely. Now, by three,

other than canopies, my three other favorite Bos words, plug and charge. Now, you mentioned earlier

that because you're on the electronic unit, they enable plug and charge. Do you have a timeline

for doing that? Are you working with companies like Hubjects to get that put in? Again, it comes

back to our partnership with ChargePoint effectively. As a Tesla driver of four years and say I'm a

massive advocate for the plug and charge or at least with Tesla, the concept of plug and charge,

I think you rightly pointed out in your other podcast that auto charge is a feature for other

networks, but actually it's not that true integrated end-to-end multi-network vision that

everyone should be striving towards. For raw, PNC is a matter of when the implementation happens and

as a result of that, what collaboration needs to occur between effectively our relevant third party

providers because I think earlier you rightly touched on why be a developer, why be a stack

developer, tech developer. We're focused on building out the charging network and we know our

technology is functional and capable of it. So it's a matter of when and timing. So no specific

timing on it, but it's something that could come together quite quickly based on what we're seeing

with Hubject across Europe based on we know it's physically capable already. It's very possible

that our first charging super hub at Blue Water Shopping Centre with LandSec, where we'll be having

the Alpetronic HYC1000 system being installed, that has it from day one. And ultimately,

are you intending plug and charge beyond all capable units that you've got, i.e. the AC units as well,

or do you think it will only be confined to the Alpetronic rapid ultra-rapids?

Again, as I say, as a massive fan of it, it'd be lovely to think that we can get there with that

and we're confident with ChargePoint's Silicon Valley heritage and their software capability,

that that's something that is possible because the AC charging has had that ability for some time

and it's how you marry that relationship with the OEMs and the vehicles themselves. So

it's definitely an aspiration. Is it going to happen today? No, but yeah, as you can appreciate,

we do have quite a sophisticated roadmap for how we keep improving our network and as more and more

drivers are starting to use it on a daily basis or on an ad hoc basis as they're bumping into our

charges, how do we make them keep coming back? Now, when I knew you were coming on, I asked my

network if there were any specific questions that they wanted me to ask you. And two came up,

ironically, about the Breckenbeekens. Now, the first was from Sarah Sloman from

Haythroop and she said, you've had success implementing AC long-state destination charging

in rural locations such as Breckenbeekens National Park, obviously in partnership with the National

Trust. Her question was, how did you stack up the projected utilization and decide to bid first on that?

Or was it the fact that you were with National Trust, they were there,

you were going to go there regardless? Yeah, the second point there hits the nail on the head.

Having said that, what a fantastic location. So often, being that destination-based provider,

you take the portfolio approach with your partners because they're often looking for a

single integrated solution. The National Trust have evolved from being early movers in the EV

space but themselves confessing to having a bit of a patchwork quilt of generation one legacy

charging infrastructure. As part of their relationship with us, an agreement on day one

was how do we modernize the entire estate as well as expanding across most of the portfolio.

The Breckenbeekens was the coming together of an amazing project where they were upgrading the

car park itself due to increasing visits in numbers and how popular the location is,

whatever the weather, pardon the pun. AC charging is the perfect use case there because you are

climbing up a hill for quite a period of time. Sarah said she wanted me to thank you personally

for putting the chargers in there because she does exactly that. Anyway, there should go a

park up there and go for two, three hours hiking up in the... The second question I got was from

six-time Guinness World Record-holding efficiency driver Kevin Booker, who actually works in the

Breckenbeekens National Park. He said, how did you secure grid connectivity for that side? Because

he's up the road trying to put chargers in at a different location and he's struggling to get

connectivity now. I think he's talking about the Ponta d'Arc site that's between Brecken and

Merthyr Tidwell, isn't he? Do you have any insights for him about how you were able to get the

connectivity for that site? Yes, two words, collaboration and perseverance. Collaboration

in the sense that we operate a charging solution there in partnership with the National Trust.

Is their location or the National Trust are certainly custodians of their locations? We had

to work with them, with the local distribution network operator, with our grid connection

specialists and lining up all of our processes together is one thing, but actually as your

contact rightly points out, there is a lot of constrained grid there, so we actually had to

wait a number of years actually to get that site to fruition as part of a wider project where

some major reinforcements were done in the local network. They'd been scheduled for years ahead

of our project, so there was a bit of the third word would be luck there. Secondly, the perseverance

is there are a number of different processes you need to go through and move them concurrently and

make sure everyone's on the same page, so collaboration, perseverance. I would say and

particularly with the increasing levels of technology out there, grid is slightly overblown

in our experience in terms of being a real barrier to a charging installation being installed.

There's a couple of things at play there. We are often, you know, installing National Trust

properties, they are often in rural locations at the end of low voltage networks, but we've

been able to one, install AC charging, which isn't very power hungry, so you can get a charging

solution installed come what may and there are increasingly affordable battery solutions out

in the market that are able to buffer the grid or actually also serve as their own dedicated

connection off grid entirely and that's actually relevant to both the rural setting where there

isn't grid or in say the centre of an urban location where grid is maxed out or you've got a

charging hub that's so busy, which we have in East London for example, a charging hub that is so busy

we are able to create additional grid connection that we didn't think was possible. So there's a

spectrum there as to how challenging grid is, but collaboration is one of the most important

words for unlocking the UK's grid. I've got to say this, the sister podcast to this, the

social music podcast has just this week released an episode with Valor Power, who are one of the

companies that you talked about there who can provide a best battery electric storage system

with attached chargers and they do favour Alpetronic as well, so check that out if you want more

information. It's their fault station product, I think you ship it in on the back of a truck,

plug it in, put a standard grid connection in there, doesn't have to be high voltage or anything

and it will charge a battery and then straight out to the charger, so hopefully anybody who

is in your situation who wants to do that can never word with Valor Power about that.

Worth a conversation. Last season we had Craig Marsden on the show and Craig runs EVCI Global

who do accuracy checking for EV charges, so do they dispense the amount of energy that you're

paying for. Now in the work that he's done across any number of charge point operators,

he's found discrepancies as much as 30% over and under dispensing and this in certain cases was

from CPOs who were asked in advance, are your charges accurate? Yes, we're confident that they're

accurate, he did the test, 30%, are they over reporting? So people were getting a lot more

energy than they were actually paying for. Over dispensing costs CPOs money, under dispensing

leads users to be under charged and it creates mistrust between charge point operators in the

EV community, not to mention any potential legal risk. So how confident are you that your charges

dispense to within plus or minus 2% accuracy, which is the MID threshold for certification?

Yes, so it's a good question and we met with the team there because it's a topic we're very

interested in, so we're going through that exploration process but we're ultimately very

confident being supported by Alpetronic, which I think now is actually the world's leading

DC hardware in terms of sales and they're a fantastic engineering based business out of

Italy where engineering is at the core of their heritage, so they're proper product focused

individuals where ultimately the highest level of electrical engineering quality and therefore

energy output and accuracy comes part and parcel of their product. So again, I think it

comes down to us relying on tier one partners to be able to provide a reliable charging solutions.

Yeah, we're very confident and actively exploring how to say that with even more certainty.

Do you have, as we come to the end of our time together,

do you have any final words you'd like to say to the watchers and listeners of the podcast?

So I think with each day, drivers are more likely to come across a raw charger at either one of their

favorite destinations or increasingly relying on their local retail location or their local

health hospitality location to rely on our fairly priced ultra rapid charging network to get them

from A to B. Neil, thanks a lot for your time. It's been a great conversation. I much appreciate it.

Thanks, Gary. A couple of takeaways from this discussion. Firstly, raw charging are predominantly

an AC destination charging operator who have over time crept into the rapid and ultra rapid

charging space. They've linked up with partner organizations to install large hubs at several

key locations and Neil mentioned blue water in Essex specifically. Now from a pricing point of

view, they're not at the stratospheric level of some of the larger CPOs and they're looking

at the ability to use AI to help link energy pricing to charging tariffs, which I think is an

interesting approach. And I don't think it's one I've heard mentioned before. Now, if you were

watching the video rather than listening to the audio, you'll have seen a big smile come over my

face when Neil mentioned that they're giving a serious consideration to implementing plug and

charge for their arpetronic units. Now, as a big fan of plug and charge, it's interesting to note

that if they do bring it on board soon, they'll be one of a very select few who've implemented

this tech in the UK. And once customers see how easy it is to set up and use, I can see this being

the tip of the iceberg for plug and charge in the UK, as are the charge point operators taken

on boards the fingers crossed. So any thoughts on this? Do you use raw charging size at all?

What's your experience been like with them? If you have, let me know info at evmusing.com.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together this week with the help

of Neil Broadbank from Raw Charging. Many thanks for his time.

The Evmusing 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

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and discounted charging across thousands of charge points.

And on the socials, I'm on Blue Sky at evmusing.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram

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Go to coffee.com slash evmusing and you can do just that.

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Now I know you're probably driving or walking or jogging or in the shower or washing the car

but if you can remember and you enjoyed this episode, proper review in iTunes please.

Really helps me out. I did go out and go in and have a look recently as some of the

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not raw but very well done hashtag if you know you know nothing else. And thanks as always to my

co-founder Simon. You know he's always looking for new places to take his electric unicycle.

Somewhere different, modern, maybe even a little unusual. I asked him whether he'd ever

wanted to be able to cycle across the dome of the O2 arena. What was the the old millennium dome?

And he told me yes and it's another really interesting space that I'm personally passionate

about. Thanks for listening. Bye bye now.

294 The Raw Charging Episode

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alpatronics

national trust site

Osprey charging

destination archetype locations

Southwest being Cornish Bourne and Bred

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AC

Manchester-based EV

Mer

Lancet portfolio

vehicle dashboards

Royal portfolio

Hubjects

Ponta d'Arc site

arpetronic units

O2 arena

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