299 The Sam Clarke Episode

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

that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. And on the show today, we'll be talking with

industry expert, Sam Clarke.

Now way back in one of the early seasons of the show, I did an episode about grid serve

and I spoke to their chief vehicle officer at the time, Sam Clarke. And since then, of course,

lots of things have changed in the EV space. And I thought it might be a good idea to get Sam back

on to chat about some of these things. Now, Sam, he's here today in his capacity as a non-affiliated

individual, a Guinness World Record holder and a Green Fleet 100 nominee. So we may mention

grid serve in the discussion, but he's not here as an official representative grid serve,

and his views don't necessarily represent grid serve at all. So bear that in mind when

we talk. Sam, welcome to the show. Well, thank you again for having me, Gary. It's always a pleasure.

The pleasure is all mine, I can tell you. Can we start by talking about misinformation

in the EV space? Now, I know you and the folks that you work with at the EV cafe, for example,

they do great work trying to make sure that there's some excellent factual data out there

to try and combat some of the misinformation that's coming from. It seems to be an endless stream

of crud that's coming from social and mainstream medias. Talk to me a little bit about that. What's

your view? Are we getting more of it? Are we getting less of it? Where do you think we are

with the misinformation? It's a very good question to start things off with, isn't it?

I think over the last years, I mean, you yourself have fought very hard to try and publicly and

on social media to explain the facts of situations when we are or have had a barrage of misinformation,

things like the Luton airport fire as a classic example of many, many that we've seen in the

marketplace over the last few years. But if I look back a couple of years ago, we had quite a strong

almost attack in our industry in terms of negative misinformation being thrown out there. And I

don't think it's gone away, but I'm personally less bothered about it now because facts are always

going to win in the long term. The headlines are short termists there, the Tamora's chip papers,

as they say. And I just think that over the fullness of time, we will force this out. I'm

reminded of the, I think it's Gandhi quote about, what is it? First they ignore you, then they laugh

at you, then they argue with you, then you win. And I think we're probably at the latter stages

of that now. And it's getting easier and easier in a way to demystify or carify some of the things

that are being accused, which are getting more and more profound or alternative in their views

as time moves on. So personally, it bothers me less than it ever has because I just think that the

market is going in one direction and we are better off just showing the way and showing people what

the true facts are rather than trying to fight against those that wish to come up with creative

headlines. And I think there's always that balance because I look at comments that appear on

social media posts and LinkedIn and things like that. And you're always going to have the same

kind of negative things that come up regardless of what you put on there. But there's then that

balance of, well, do I go in on every comment and say, well, no, this is wrong. These are the facts.

Or do we just kind of go, well, no, we can't fight that at that level of detail. There's

going and reply on every comment that you see or not.

Christ, no, not my own posts either. But no, I do sometimes it really depends. Occasionally,

I get sucked in and rightly or wrongly, I get sucked into a debate on LinkedIn. Quite like it

in a way because we are privileged to be reasonably high-profile individuals in the EV industry and

people do listen to what we say. And sometimes the prompting of the debate enables a conversation

about two different viewpoints of the same argument and then helps other people also

understand from it. So on the one hand, I do quite enjoy it. And I like a good healthy debate. I've

done it with Nick Ferrari and Nigel Farage in the past, you know, and as well as people within the

EV industry. And I think sometimes that it's a healthy debate, but there is simply isn't enough

hours in the day to be able to fight all of the myths. So you got to pick your battles a little

bit, haven't you? And I try not to get sucked into things too much these days. And I would rather

fight a fight fire with fact and just put more proliferation of the things that I'm proud of

doing, whether it be HDV stuff or my old logistics days or grid service infrastructure

deployment, whatever those things are that are making meaningful material difference.

I'd sooner go on the front foot of sharing that information about what we're actually doing

than waste my energies too far in trying to defend aggressive keyboard warriors on social media.

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, you mentioned EHGVs and ZHID, and I know in one of your many roles, you're doing some great

work there on the ZHID project. Now, I'm a big fan of Tobias Wagner, the electric trucker from

Germany. And he did say in one of his recent videos, though, that when he comes to the UK,

he likes to charge up in Calais, and then he'll do as much of the stuff in the UK as he can,

and then you get back on the ferry, go to Calais and charge up there. And the reason is because

public charging rates are too high generally, and specifically for trucks in the UK. Now,

you and I have spoken about this offline about HDV pricing. And for larger organisations who charge

a lot of companies like GridServe, like Mylands, who will offer HDV charging, they can actually

negotiate better terms directly with the charge point operators. But for someone like Tobias,

he's coming over from, is it Nano Janssen, I think, is the company that he works with?

Would they be able to come in and negotiate that kind of agreement, or is that restricted to

UK-based HDV operators? I think there's two answers to that question, Gary, for me. On the

one hand, it could be challenging because one of the methodologies that we adopt at the moment is

a direct relationship with those hauliers in order to give them the best prices. In an ideal

scenario, we have contracted demand relationships with them, which enables us to hedge our energy

and therefore give a greater rate, or a better rate, sorry, of a pence per kilowatt hour as a

result. So the direct relationships are key at this nascent stage in the marketplace, and so

inherently that is performed with local haulage or local, if it's a global company, the local

element of that in the UK that we're able to negotiate those terms with. So someone coming

over as an independent would not have the privilege of being able to do that unless they

are twinned or associated with one of those larger organisations. However, that's perhaps

where the second part of the question or answer rather comes in. I think roaming as an element

is going to be more paramount in this. So you've got the likes of DKV, for example, the green

flux here, which is our back-end SaaS platform, but also have their own network and roaming

platform across Europe that I suspect someone like Tobias will be able to use if he doesn't already,

which should, in theory, enable him to cross borders. Those borders hopefully include the UK

so that he'll be able to charge using those sort of rates with roaming parties in the

future. We're certainly working on direct relationships and roaming relationships

in tandem because they're both important, and I would hope with some of them, there's a European

crossover, there will be a European crossover which hopefully will help people that come over here

who are hopefully seeking to charge EHGVs in the public domain. Now, you know as well as I do,

our proliferation of public charging in this space is very, very limited relative to Europe.

So we've got a lot of catching up to do, and GridServe's absolutely at the forefront of doing

that with the project that I've been running now for three long years. But we're getting there,

right? We're getting there and it's a start, and the Innovate UK GFT funding has helped be a catalyst

for that. And even with substantial amounts of grant funding, it is still incredibly expensive

infrastructure to install in a public setting. And as a wider debate with EV charging, that

inherently means that the prices are higher in those spaces than they would be in others.

We've got lots of economic headwinds there, but we're doing our best.

Yeah, I will come on and cover, as you would imagine, public charging pricing and sort of the

barriers are there. But something is just a coat to be then. If you're talking about

creating a direct relationship with somebody so that you can sort of pre-hedge the energy purchase

and sort of leverage some lower prices, what's to stop an enterprise in group of a large enterprise

in group of high mileage EV drivers getting together and approaching a ChargePoint operator

and say, look, you give these kind of discounts because EHGVs are going to take a large amount

of energy a number of times in a day or a week. We can provide that same amount of

demand, capacity demand by grouping together 10,000, a big fleet of 10,000,

not necessarily a fleet fleet, but maybe individuals who've grouped together.

If somebody did that and came to a ChargePoint operator and said, would you be open to that,

would you be open to that? The answer is yes. The other answer is nothing in regards to the

first part, which was what's stopping someone. Indeed, it's already happening. I can give you

one example straight away, which is Voltloader. Voltloader will always have a place in my heart

as an EV electric heavy goods vehicle only haulier. Now, that's a blinking difficult thing to do

from a standing start. As you know, Gary from my previous work at Newt and my business there

with a fully electric fleet, starting a logistics firm of any kind, only using fully electric from

day one is incredibly difficult, but they've done it. A better than that, they are consolidating with

their own aspirations with their hauliers and their clients. They've got depo charging at their

depots, they've got depo charging at their clients depots, and they are consolidating that opportunity

with their partners to provide their own card, which is linked to us, that enables the exact

thing that you just described. That enables them to, as a collective, almost have their own little

consortium of users, which means as an enterprise, we see one customer that's consuming quite a lot

of energy, but it's lots of consolidated people doing so, and that's fine because that shows

the market's moving, it shows the demand and supply, and hopefully we can build on that both

with them and with ourselves. So there's nothing stopping it happening, and I think it's a yes,

and we should celebrate that. Anything that increases utilisation on a nascent market network like EHGV

is power to the elbow at this point. You know, Gridsur is very fortunate of being the busiest

network in the country, and I know you're going to come to this later, but we are incredibly

lucky to have such a prolific network on the motorway service areas, and we've now got an

underutilised network, knowingly and predictably, that sits right next to it in the same location as

it's not being utilised as heavily as the other one, because EHGVs aren't there yet, but we've

got to create these solutions with our partners and with clients like Vault Lola and like the

Roaming Parties to find ways of increasing our utilisation, because that's the justification

we need to do more of it. And that's given me a nice little segue to move on to the M1. Now,

I did an episode a couple of weeks ago about the Strategic Road Network, and I focused on the

M1, because for all intents and purposes, it's the longest road that I tend to drive on a regular

basis. I'm down here in the south, my parents are up in Yorkshire, so I go up and down there quite a lot.

Talk to me about the power supply up and down the M1. Now, obviously, some sites have more power than

others and have more charges than others. What's the situation as far as you know at the moment in

terms of getting power into some of the motorway service areas, and how do you see that changing?

Well, first and foremost, Kavya, I'm not a grid expert. Notwithstanding, I work for a charge

point operator in the UK, but certainly, it's not necessarily a regional challenge, right? So,

grid capability is largely predicated on where the source of that energy is coming from, and in some

cases, that line of sight to the nearest substation or the nearest main power station is miles and

miles away, and in other times, it's nearby. However, that nearby might be the wrong side of

the motorway, in which case we've got to drill underneath or we've got to go over a bridge,

and that causes all manner of different complexities in its own right. So, the question is nuanced in

as much as I think the sort of example I often give is that if you want to do an extension in

your house, you don't just get a price, right? It depends on what you want to do with your said

house. Are you putting an extension, a garage, a third story? What are you doing? And what quality

of... There's so many different variables that determine how much it costs to put an extension

on your house. And I think in the world of grid and the world of installing across the M1 and

other areas, every site is different. We've particularly seen in the HDB market, we've had to

do a lot of biodiversity net gain, for example, where we've taken away some grasslands in order to

put charging in, and therefore, we've got to put that back somewhere, put more of it back than what

we took away. So, I think every site is different, and some of the costs are astronomical. We know

that, that's commonplace, and it's taking a long time for some of those grid enablements to be

energised as well. And that's a battle that we fight constantly. Through the likes of Charge UK,

we're lobbying government all the time to try and help us accelerate that and break down some of

these barriers so that we can get the grid where we need it to be quicker and preferably more

affordably as well. Yeah, it is one of those things. I did a fairly detailed analysis of all

the M1 charges out there, and our good friends at ZAP Map gave me some utilisation figures.

I kind of want to talk a little bit about utilisation and the first mover advantage. So,

as I say, I got data from ZAP Map that showed me all the CPOs that were present on the M1,

and it indicated that Apple Green, for example, have way more actual charges up the M1 corridor

than, say, GridServe. They're also priced generally cheaper than GridServe, but GridServe has far

higher utilisation, despite that. Is that the first mover advantage? Do you think? Is it because

you're a known entity, and Apple Green are kind of the new ukid on the block? That was going to be

one of my answers to that question. I think we are a known entity. The first mover, of course,

was ecotricity with the electric highway back in the day, to which we acquired the network and

then immediately replaced all of those charges, and those medium-powered charges which sit on

the same locations as the Apple Green ones, because that's a welcome break sites. Welcome

break have their own high-powered charges, but we still have some of our medium-powered ones

on those locations. Sometimes we co-locate as well. Yeah, I think there is a degree of brand

loyalty, perhaps. We're on 80% to 85%, I think, of all the motorway service areas in the UK

have GridServe charges on them. There's a degree of familiarity over and above just the M1,

that people are perhaps more used to. I can't speak to Apple Green's reliability

any more than I can really speak to GridServe on this podcast, but I know we have exceptionally

good figures. Our reliability has improved dramatically. Going up, the dwell time is going

down, there's more and more charges per site, per location. All those things are positives,

and when you see GridServe popping up all over the place, or extensions of the places you're

familiar with, I guess that gives you familiarity and comfort of knowing, well, I'll stick with

the guys that I know. Maybe there is a bit of brand loyalty that's starting to emerge,

which is obviously no bad thing. Our figure suggests that every month's a record month,

so we're not doing too badly. As you say, the price points are similar. The only one,

which is perhaps material or different, is Tesla, but other than that, most of the big

CPOs with high-powered charging in these locations have broadly a similar price per

hour. It's almost like you've got my questions in front of you, because my next question is

talking about public charger pricing. Notwithstanding what you've just said, we've recently seen one

ChargePoint operator quite convincingly break through that 90-pence per kilowatt hour barrier for

ad hoc public charging. There are a number of others that are hovering around the high 80s,

87, 88, 89 pence, and that brings two questions to mind. Where do you see the general direction

going with the price of public charging? Will it continue to increase? Will there be a plateau?

Is it going to swing wildly up and down? Do a bit of crystal ballgasing for me.

Yeah, I wish I knew the answers to that, Gary, as much as you did, really. I think they'll stay

reasonably high, certainly relative to dep or domestic charging. It's always going to be a

higher price. I just think that there are levers that government can obviously help us with. We've

got how many costs would you like me to quote in the things that we have to consider when it

comes to the pricing on the public network? The grid that we talked about, the leases,

the standing charge is going up 1,000% in the last few years, the no-price cap on commercial

energy, the VAT at 5% versus 20%. There are a multitude of different... I could go on, by the

way. I won't. There's a multitude of variables that are keeping that price high, but some of those

could be assisted, perhaps with some government intervention to bring those prices down. That's

just the linear style variable costs that we're aware of, some of which are unavoidable, and some

I think we can definitely help, the net result of which brings the prices down. Then we've got stuff

that is a bit more creative. We've got the premium charging that might be on the motorway, but then

there's membership or subscription models or off-peak incentives or time of day pricing, congestion

pricing, membership, discounts, dynamic pricing. There's a multitude of different ways which we

can probably be creative in the way that we address pricing going forwards that enables an

overall average price drop in the market. That's what I would like to see, but we are going to have

to be more creative and particularly smarter, I think, with and we being the industry in the way

that we can provide those pricing and those incentives to the end user without complicating

matters still further where we are in a world of 150-odd, I think, CPOs in the UK, lots and lots

of different charger types, lots of different types of user experience. It's already inevitably

complex and we've got to try and simplify that whilst also trying to create a pricing mechanism

that hopefully brings some of those smart technologies into play and brings the overall

price down. Again, there's no silver bullet, is there? It's just probably a multitude of little

things which hopefully will help just reduce that disparity a little bit between your seven

pence a kilowatt hour on octopus overnight versus your, I think it's InstaVolt you're

referring to that's now in the mid-90s, which is pretty strong. That is a way too big a gap

and we've got to find a way to bridge it. One of the ways when I speak to charge point operators,

they always talk about the utilization aspect. If we can double the utilization or triple the

utilization, then it will bring the overall price down because a lot of the prices you've said there,

it relates to the fixed base that has to be covered. We are saying whether you sell one kilowatt

hour or one gigawatt hour, you're still paying the same amount of fixed price. At what point do

you see what sort of projections are you looking at where you can say, well, now look, our utilization

is going to get to that point where in 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, 36 months, we're going to see

a point where we're now able to drop the price per kilowatt hour because our fixed base price

is being split amongst enough kilowatt hours to enable us to do that.

I have a feeling I'm going to walk into your next question by answering that. I think not all

TPO's are created equally. We've got regional ones and they've got national ones. We've got those

with low utilization and those with very, very high. I think the economics you just described

for some are incredibly sensitive when it comes to utilization, as you said. For others, it might be

more a case of the investment and the debt that's been raised in order to build the infrastructure

that needs paying back. It might be that the interest in payment on the debt finance is

of greater sensitivity than the utilization figures, for example. I think depending on the

size of the CPO, the levers could be different, but obviously, utilization is key for everyone.

Everyone wants to have their charges being kept busy. But whether or not, and this is me walking

into what I think is going to be something along the lines of your next question, is around the

consolidation of the market and how that might help in this particular area. Am I right? Is

that the next one on the list? I absolutely do have a question on consolidation and I think I

am going to come to it in a second. But before we move off utilization and charger pricing,

I want to get your opinion on the Tesla Supercharger Network. Now, I know you drive a Tesla,

you have done it for several years, as does your partner, Sarah. What's your view on how Tesla can

charge, say, 22 pence a kilowatt hour to drivers charging at seven o'clock at their Winchester

Supercharger? And I'm talking about non-Tesla supercharger, non-Tesla vehicles charging there.

And yet, they drive three or four miles down the road to the Instavolt Super Hub,

and even with the discount they're offering there, it will be twice as much. Why do we think,

I mean, I have my own thoughts on this, but why is there such a discrepancy even between

low prices at off peak rates? I think it's reasonably simple. I could be wrong. I'm a

simple man, Gary. But there is, a few years ago, there was no public charging infrastructure

at all, and so a market needed to be created. In some cases, the likes of GridServe and others,

this is a founding business that's only been around seven or eight years. Its primary focus,

although they had some diversions, has narrowed itself down to this is what we do. We charge,

and that is our only major revenue stream, is public charging revenues. There are many other

players in the market like Tesla that this is an additionality to selling many, many cars for

many, many years. So my simplistic brain just simply says, well, they are the luxury of levering

off another part of their business. Now, they can probably afford to take some of the margin off

their cars in order to subsidize their own network and keep the prices down for their

electricity in their own fantastic network. They've been creating and designing for many,

many years as well. Their infrastructure has been around and it's just grown. They've managed to

tailor it very excellently with their own cars for many years before opening up to the wider

network. Meanwhile, selling or being the Tesla Model Y, being the most popular car in the world

for several years. In many ways, they're in a much stronger position than us, despite the fact

we are operating in a direct competitor market because they've got so many other opportunities

to lean into in terms of their wider business case. Now, maybe that speaks to everybody needing

to have a secondary business case. Maybe that's a different level of consolidation that needs to

happen whereby charge point operation is a subsidiary of something much bigger. I don't know,

but I think that's why, because ultimately, there is no silver bullet to putting charges in the

ground. The grid connections are no cheaper for Tesla than they are for anybody else. Their

infrastructure and hardware is the same. They're putting them in the same places. The amount of

civil's works is the same. I can't imagine they know some magical mystery solution that the

entire rest of the network don't know about. I suspect it's just a subsidy game internally

with wooden dollars that they're entirely entitled to do, of course, that helps them

keep that price far more competitive than some of the others.

Yeah. I think you're right there. I think when I've talked about this on the podcast,

that's kind of been my view on this. Like you say, they've got the same underlying costs as you.

There's obviously some sort of subsidy coming in. The problem is, as you well know,

trying to get somebody on from Tesla to actually give me chapter and verse on this,

they don't like to talk about it for some reason. Never gonna happen.

Now, we're sort of looping back a little bit. We talked about the fact that the government are

going to be doing a public charging pricing review this year, I believe, or working with

companies like Charge UK to try and determine what they can do to reduce the price of public

charging. What are the options that they have? Where can they sort of reach into their or pluck

money from their money tree there and help us get cheaper charging?

I wish I knew the answers to that question. I don't know if I do. I think we touched on

a little bit in the previous questions. We're not going to strike out high costs of public

charging costs to install overnight. But if there's methodologies by which the government can

help create things in a more efficient manner, whereby we can actually be able to deliver

the things at lower costs, that might just mean we've got far less resources required to deliver

the same net result. I think they're the sort of things which the government can help with.

We've obviously got elements of grant funding through, particularly in the commercial sector,

through the depot schemes and the Z-HID trials, the HGV trials of putting vehicles on the ground

and the infrastructure being subsidized to do so. These are all good leavers that the government

can help and hopefully will continue to help, depending on which government we have next,

I dread to think. But let's not go down that road, no pun intended. But I think it's just

more of the same in a way. I think if we can continue to help incentivize with grant funding

to try and be a catalyst for change, then hopefully, and maybe some regulatory intervention to help

grids and things like that be a smoother process, then maybe they're the leavers that

were within the government's power to help us along the way. That's a question that I'm not sure.

I want to do what I'm kind of renowned for, which is play devil's advocate here. I was at the

an Earthset meeting at the octopus hay quarters a couple of weeks ago, and the panel there were

talking about some of the government regulatory things that they can do. And I asked a question,

the question was along the lines of, whenever I speak to somebody selling electric vehicles,

they say, the government can step in and do this to help us sell more electric vehicles.

When I speak to charge point operators, they talk about the things the government can do

to reduce the price of public charging. Some of the things the panel were talking about

were reliant on the government putting policies in place. Now, we know that the government doesn't

really know that there's no joined up thinking there. They give us a plug-in car grant and then

remove it for no reason and then bring it back a few years later. You used to be able to get a grant

to put a charger in at home. Now you can't. Now they've started talking about three pence

a mile VED, and we will come on and talk about that later on. What gives you confidence that

this review will actually produce anything that's worth publicizing or talking about?

It doesn't, I'm afraid. And I think I share your view. And I have complained about this and

even spoke to Kiermaid and myself just a few weeks ago about inconsistency of information

coming from government, which despite the best intentions is not helpful. We had a plug-in

truck grant, the 25K for some time, that then jumped from 120,000, which sounds great,

but only for three months at the beginning of this year without anybody knowing what was

going to happen thereafter. Now they have clarified what the further long term or

longish term is going to be, but that was during the middle of an EHGV consultation,

during the middle of reports being published, during the middle of all these different

government decision-making and law-making processes that none of them were joined up,

which just makes life so much more difficult for UKL PLC to operate, and that's of great

frustrations. The only thing I can hope might happen is a bit more joined up thinking like,

please, could they just do that? I can change nothing else but just join things up? That

would be a huge help, I think, because I've experienced through the EHGV stuff the,

like I said, best intentions. There are many, many good people in government. Whether it be

through Innovate DFT or others that I've worked with for many years now, you've got nothing but

the best intentions, but they are completely hamstrung by the DFT, by the Treasury, by other

people in other offices that they have to wait months and months for answers to things on. And

then by the time they got the answer, all this goalposts have shifted and we're into a different

landscape. And it doesn't feel like the government doesn't run like a company in many ways, and I

wish it sort of did a bit more. I wish there was more commercial enterprise that was inside government

that might be able to join these dots up and then recognize how inefficient the operation

is. But I'm at risk here of just moaning, much like you were, I think, in terms of the inconsistencies

here. But that's definitely something that could be improved, because that just agrees. It

breeds efficiency and then we can reduce costs as a result.

I'm jumping around topics now and I appreciate that, but I do want to talk about plug and charge

versus auto charge now. Now, a refrain I've heard from a number of ChargePoint operators is that

plug and charge has a problem in that it doesn't work on all cars, it doesn't work on all charges,

it can be confusing for customers. Perfectly valid statement, totally agreed. So what a number of

ChargePoint operators have done is switch on auto charge. Now, the problem I have with that is that

it doesn't work on all cars, it doesn't work on all charges, and it can be confusing for customers.

Especially if, for example, they've set up auto charge with FastNed and they take the same car

with the same attached payment method to Osprey to use their plug and charge,

and it won't work because they have to set it up there. And then they go to

GridServe who've set up auto charge and they have to set it up there again.

So what are the factors that would make a ChargePoint operator elect

to go for auto charge versus plug and charge?

Okay, so first of all, it's probably worthwhile clarifying what the difference is because they

sound the same. So auto charge is the element by which you or we as a CPO learn the MAC address

effectively, the unique identifier of the vehicle such that the next subsequent charges are,

we recognize when something plugs in, goes, ah, I know that vehicle, that's okay, you can charge

and we'll sort the billing out without you needing to tap a card or anything else.

So principally that's predicated on one step learning of the vehicle and then

therefore doing it there afterwards. Plug and charge is more a certificate based system with

the vehicle where there's various certificate straps, the chain, which all communicate with each

other. And that's the thing that's set up remotely if you like in a slightly different way.

But that certification process is predicated, as you said, Gary, on newer vehicles.

So they both work in the same way principally, you plug in and things start charging.

But the mechanism by which to communicate it is different.

Auto charge is good because it covers legacy vehicles. So most of the vehicles already in

the public domain can be enabled that way. Future vehicles, the more sophisticated solution is

the plug and charge one with a certificate digital system in the vehicle and the charges.

I think the problem that we mustn't get to not the problem, the problem that you've already

mentioned is that there is not necessarily joined up thinking with different charge

and operators, different hardware providers, different vehicles. But the principle of what

we're trying to do is very sound and is a good one. We've just got to get to a consistency in

terms of the way in which that is engineered in the marketplace such that it works seamlessly

all the time. And we're just not there yet. Everyone's working hard to get to the point

where we've got a nice, neat solution, which is probably a digital one, probably the apps that

just need to make life simple. So you almost don't even know which one you're using. It just works

by virtue of a simple setup phase on whoever's app, something along those lines. Maybe there's

regulatory intervention that needs to make that setup thing the same for everybody,

no matter whether you're orange offspray or green grid serve or whatever it might be.

But my only sort of wince, I suppose, is that give us a chance. There's an awful lot going on in

this space. And also a charge plug and charge automation is just one of those variables that

we've got to try and unpick amongst a multitude of different players within. It's not just the

charge and operator, it's the hardware and the vehicle as you've already alluded to.

So we've got a trial stuff. It ain't going to be perfect. It might be niche. People might need to

learn a little bit that it'll work there, but it won't work there for now. I mean, ultimately,

everyone has a regulation of contactless anyway. So if you haven't got plug and charge, you've

still got your contactless and all your roaming card. So you're not going to fail to charge. It's

just not quite as convenient as it might be in the future. So, you know, all I would say was just

give us a chance to try and smooth this out and make it work more universally in the future. But

that is not an overnight fix. That's understood. But he does break me on to my next point, which

is this whole concept of owning the customer charging experience. And there's a general

feeling amongst ChargePoint operators that they want to own this experience. And in practice,

what this means generally is forcing or guiding the customer into using a particular CPO app.

And now we've already mentioned the fact that there's, you know, 150 ChargePoint operators. And

I say this every time I have this conversation, Neil Riddle with his pages and

of CPO apps on his phones, because he's got everyone that was ever made. And I was in a

conversation with a charge and unnamed ChargePoint operator recently, and I said to them, okay,

what are you doing with all this data now that you control the customer charging experience?

So every time somebody plugs in sets a charge up using a CPO app, that CPO is gathering data about

the vehicle, the customer, the amount of charge that they're putting in when they're charging,

charge rate, the charge curves, all that sort of stuff. So there's a huge, I'm assuming somewhere

there's a huge pool of data for each ChargePoint operator. I said to this CPO, what are you doing

with that? Are you offering a discount to specific customers? Are you offering coffee to

particular customers? What is the customer getting in exchange for being the product in this case?

And they didn't have a suitable answer. Now, some CPOs do this, I honestly, for example,

offer a discount on the ad hoc price if you use their app. Osprey charging offer a discount on

weekend charging. You can collect points for free charging, things like that, Apple Green

Electric offer discounts via their app. But some apps give no financial benefit despite

tracking your data and usage. BP Pulse, for example, Gridserve, for example, the ad price

and the ad hoc price are the same. Talk to me about owning the customer experience, why CPOs

like that and what the customer should get out of that. Okay, well, again, so what's my own,

not necessarily of my employer, but first and foremost, the thing that springs to mind is one

you articulated some of the variables or the types of data that we're capturing as a result.

Much, in fact, the majority of the things that you listed, we already collected anyway through

contactless. The difference being through a direct app is that we know a little bit more about the

person, and maybe we have the contact details, et cetera, whereby we can have a clearer understanding

of the type of use case on a per business as opposed to contactless. So a lot of the charging

information we would know either way. The second thing that springs to mind is this is not unusual.

I mean, wherever you go and buy things and digitally or otherwise, people are collecting

your data as a result. So that exchange is happening in all walks of life, not just

ChargePoint operation in terms of learning your customers as you go along. Third point is that

that is sensitive information, not just obviously where we have to protect the consumer, but also

that's valuable information. You know, as the busiest network in the country, Gridserve knows

probably a lot more about the behavioral patterns of charges on the motorway than anybody else does.

That's incredibly valuable. And we wouldn't want to necessarily share too much of that publicly

because it's a USP based on our own popularity. I think then there is definitely, again, thoughts

my own, I think that we are moving more into a consumer based environment where it's not just

about the charging. So if we know more about the customer, we should be able to, we being the industry,

should be able to offer more incentives for the coffee you might like to drink when you stop

and charge or the other facilities that you want and therefore start to harbor that loyalty as a

result of marketing discounts, etc. I think some people, as you say, have been more creative with

that than others. Our focus has been on, or Gridserve's focus has been on getting the charging

delivered and successful and reliable more so than the value ads that we might have benefited

or the customer might have benefited in the long term as a result of being on our app.

The likes of BP, for example, have charges at petrol stations where they're already selling

coffee. So there's a natural link to be able to offer something else as they did historically

in the past, I recall. And so again, we've got lots of different types of operators in the

marketplace that may have different levers to pull on this one, but you can understand why

different charge point operators want to own the customer and want to learn more about them and then

be able to upsell them other opportunities which also might leverage a broader revenue stack as

a result. And I think other, so different CPOs, I suspect are doing it for different rates for

different reasons, but I think we'll all get to the point where charging is not the only thing

that you're consuming or you're transacting with when you are on a charger's CPOs app.

I think it stands to reason that because you're stopping, even in the future,

if it's only five or 10 minutes, there's an opportunity to upsell something else that you

may or may not want to purchase whilst you're charging, much in the same way as the petrol

market has done for year upon year. So I think in that respect, we're just following form of

consumer behaviour patterns. And the specific question I asked this CPO was, if your data

has shown you that you've got a specific customer and they charge at the same charger,

at the same time every week for 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes,

are you offering them specifically something to thank them for doing that? Are you offering them,

as you've already mentioned, a coffee? Are you giving them a penny a kilowatt hour discount or

something like that? Focused on that particular customer, not everybody who charges here gets

this discount. And the answer was no. And to me, that's a missed opportunity. But also,

it then makes me question, well, what are they actually doing with that data? And I think I

don't have empirical data of this, but I think that there are CPOs who've got good teams that can

analyse that data and do something with it. And there are other CPOs that don't necessarily have

that level of data. And I'm not sure I'm wanting an answer on that. I think that's just a comment.

But if you do have an answer, then fair enough. I do, actually. And I think what you just described

is it fits neatly into a membership model, does it not? If you've got someone that is

regularly a user of a particular network, then the logical play there is, well, there's a membership

for X, whatever pounds of pencil it is per month, enables you to have that discounted rate as a

result. And the logic being, well, you're paying a certain amount a month, but that's offset and

probably more than offset by the virtue of the discount you're receiving on the regularity of

the usage. So the net result is that you're probably ending up with a discount, but also

we're buying, well, we're selling it or someone is selling a loyalty through that membership scheme.

So to me, that feels like a simple membership model where you're discounting your pence per

kilowatt hour for your regular users. And in return, they're taking a small commitment to you for

doing so. Yeah, that makes absolute sense. Yeah. I want to come back on a discussion that occurred

on the Evie Cafe News recently, a couple of weeks ago. The discussion was about measuring up time

and you quite rightly talked about the area of variables that all have to work all the time

to provide a charge. Sarah jumped in and talked about payment terminals being a

failure point that's not necessarily measured. Again, perfectly valid. But all the time this

is happening, there's two words that are going through the back of my head, but Tesla. Now,

we've talked about this already. They have all the same constraints that the other

charge point operators have. And again, I'm talking about the usage of superchargers by

non-Tesla vehicles. But I've never encountered anyone who has a problem starting a Tesla charge.

I've never encountered a Tesla unit not working, although I know they do exist.

But I've encountered issues on pretty much every other network I've tried over the years.

How do you account for that? How do you account for the fact that I can go up

at any time of the day or night, plug my post star in on the supercharger, get the app out,

and it will work. And I can't necessarily do that with any other charge point operator.

I'm reminded by an interview with, I think it might have been one of the most senior people

at Ford a few years ago talking about the build of their Mustang Mach-E and the fact that there

was something like 800 different companies that they needed to twin with in order to build

a Ford. Different company had the wiring loom on the window of a different company,

had the motor, and that had a different operating system in it that connected to the main operating

system of the vehicle. So just to put the window up and down required six different companies in

order to contract with to do it. Therefore, you extrapolate that across the whole car,

you've got a hugely, hugely complex bunch of moving parts to create a Ford.

Tesla make Teslas and they've got Tesla Motors and Tesla Windows and Tesla Glass and Tesla

wheels and et cetera, et cetera. I think they have benefited in this marketplace by doing so much of

it what they've built themselves, right? And up until recently, it was only Tesla cars that

could charge on Tesla chargers. So what they've done very cleverly, I think, has been able to

create that ecosystem. Again, leaning into the fact that they're a very popular car maker

to provide hardware associated to it that works seamlessly with the vehicle.

They've also managed to bridge that gap over to your Polestar and others like you that enable

that reliability to remain still further even though there is an interaction with alternative

vehicle types. But I think what they've done very, very well is they've simplified matters.

Their cars are simple because almost all the component parts come from Tesla designed by Tesla

and similarly their hardware is their hardware. Whereas the rest of us mere mortals have got

multitude of different components, whether they be pay to devices or the electronic

digital stuff that goes with it, whether we're using ABB, Alpetronic or

whoever else in the marketplace from a hardware perspective. And there are a number of other

different component parts within that that create what appears to be, what is, the same

solutions as Teslas. But I think for us, or for us being the rest of the CPO network,

we have to buy in the chargers. We have to create our own, in some cases, create our own

CPS platforms to build and run these vehicles or we're buying somebody else's like in our case,

we use Green Flux. So that's another component part to link it all together.

And I think when you've got more and more links in the chain, then if one of them starts to break,

then the chances are that you'll fail more often. And so I think I can only assume, and this is

just thinking off the cuff, Gary, but I think Tesla have just done a very good job at keeping

things simple. And that's probably manifesting itself in a simplest operational network than

the rest of us, because we've all had to do the rest as a standing start using external components

rather than building ourselves. Your thoughts on the eVed 3p mile are well known and more or less

aligned with mine. But I think there might be value in having a discussion about how this might

play out. Now, we both agree that eVed's the wrong solution to the problem. There's a huge

number of issues with the current proposal, not least how do you track accurate mileage driven,

but it's also penalizing EV drivers at the time when we want more of them to come on board.

Is there a solution that makes sense? Is there a solution that makes sense?

It's definitely a difficult thing to do, isn't it? I appreciate and understand that

we need to find a way to bridge the gap with fuel duties declining, and therefore there needs to

be a replacement for that in some form or another. One of the more sort of macro things that I've

always talked about over the years is not just looking at the reduction in fuel duty, but are

there other savings across the wider economy by air pollution? And then HS cost savings potentially

is a result of less people having respiratory issues, for example. Should those things be

factored into some of this offset to find a more realistic deficit that needs to be fulfilled?

And no matter what that deficit is, whether it's in full or in part, based on leverage from other

parts of the economy, we've still got to find a way of charging people effectively. And I understand

a lot of the reasoning why the government has come up with this is eVed Pence per mile solution.

I can see the merits of doing it, but I don't think like you, I believe, not the right way

to construct it. But it is a tricky one. And to try and answer your question,

I just don't know whether keeping things simple and retaining an excise duty based on vehicle

size or performance or emissions, like we already do. Why can't we just keep doing that?

What's wrong with the system as it stands? I appreciate that the electric vehicles need to

be taxed because we're all using the roads in the same way. But why can't we just

use the model that's already in existence and just get the banding rights such that

there's a fairness associated to it? I think it's the same or similar and benefiting kind.

A few years ago, our HR system accidentally didn't tick a box on my electric car. And

the performance of my Tesla was forecast as if it was a petrol equivalent, which of course

means it's incredibly high performance. And so my benefiting kind tax went from about 20

pounds a month to about 400. But that also showed me if I never would I have a Porsche 911 as a

company car, but if I did, I'd be paying a damn sight more for the benefit of it. Now,

why can't we use the same mechanisms in benefiting kind as we do? And we already have in road

fund license of today, but just get it in a fair breakdown. I don't know why. Maybe I'm asking you

the question back. Why can't we just do that? What's wrong with sticking to the system, but

just pricing it accordingly? Yeah, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. There's also

downsides. For example, my 25-year-old nephew who's just bought a 27-year-old Ford Escort,

1.6 litre, and he's paying less VED than I am on an electric car. And that's not right.

You know, he's pumping out emissions at the back because it's a 1.6 litre petrol. I'm pumping

nothing out. Why is he paying 25 pounds and I'm paying 195 pounds? You know, things like that

need to be definitely sorted out. But that doesn't speak to an issue with the process. That speaks

to an issue with the bandings by which things are priced at. So you've not quite answered my

question back to you, I suppose, because whilst I agree with you in terms of that not being right,

I think you're saying the mechanisms still sound. It's just that that 27-year-old car

needs to be taxed fairly relative to your modern electric car that has a completely different

emissions rating. And maybe other things need to be factored in. Maybe the weight of vehicles

should be a factor. Maybe the age of the vehicle should be a factor in regards to, well, if it's

lasted much longer, then maybe there's a net gain in its carbon intensity relative to putting another

new vehicle on the road. Or maybe those things all need to be factored into the algorithm that says

that car costs that to go on the road and yours costs something different. Now, maybe there is a

mileage declaration in there somewhere, perhaps, in order to recognize the fact that someone that's

doing 20 miles a week versus that someone doing 2000 is going to be using a lot more of the roads

network than the former than the latter. Now, is that an annual declaration requirement of some

sort that is reconciled against the MOT? I don't know. But the second you get into some sort of

mileage thing, how you police it suddenly blows my mind and thinking, well, this is just ripe for

manipulation. Maybe it's just a privilege of owning a vehicle, whether you do 10 miles a week or a

thousand, you're paying to use the roads, no matter how much you actually use them. And the rest

is worked out based on the facts and the data that we all know based on the vehicle and the

registration. I just think the mileage thing is going to be, I fear is going to be a real difficult

thing to police manage and is going to end up costing even more money as a result.

Yeah. Too many loopholes in there. Would you support controversial opinion? Would you support

an additional cost half a pens, penny per kilowatt hour added to EV charging, either public charging

and or private charging? For what? In place of EVED. Because it's basically, it's doing what the

fuel duty does, which is there's a amount of money you pay for putting in something that's

making your car go forward. For fuel, obviously, it's petrol and diesel. For electricity, it's

going to be kilowatt hours. So should we be adding a duty on top of that?

No, I don't think so. And the reason why I don't think so is I am reminded by my mum,

who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, and she drives an EV now, but before she did that,

the petrol price has the tax, the effect, the equivalent of the EVED is taxed on the petrol.

So the more petrol you use, the more you're taxed. And I get that. But the reason why I think it's

a no is because that's a simple system whereby the only fuel source, theoretically, is the petrol.

Whereas we've got the complexity with your logic of how do you do that if you're charging from

home versus using the public network? And are you discriminating against people that don't have the

luxury of avoiding that tax by not paying it at home? Or I just think that again, I get the logic,

but how do you police it? How do you manage it fairly based on the basis that the fuel,

not only is it a fuel or an energy element, but the place by which you receive said energy

can be so vastly different, depending whether you're getting it from your public network or

whether you're getting it from the side of your house. So how on earth you would

tax that? I don't know how you do it in practice.

Yeah. I've got a Zappy. My Zappy knows exactly how much has gone through it to go into the vehicle,

and it doesn't matter whether it's come from the grid. It doesn't matter whether it's come from the

solar. It knows. I've got to assume a large proportion of the vehicles of the charges that

are installed can do something similar. That's got to be a basis on which we could

determine a price, an additional levy per kilowatt hour if we were to go down that route.

There would have to be a law that enforces you to share that data in order to be taxed accordingly,

right? Otherwise, it's your gift to clear what you want to declare. So either it's not

a regulatory intervention and everyone will just lie about it or it is, and we've all got to give

over an awful lot more data, which I don't mind, but most of the general public are very against

sharing all of that data to the government. So I'm not quite sure, again, how would you police

that data transfer fairly? Yeah. Good point. Well made. Thank you. We did talk about this earlier,

but I think we're going to have to have that conversation a little bit more depth, which is

consolidation of the charge point operator network. Now, we've already seen a number of

charge point operators who've been subsumed into other ones. Did we not have one today

pot of taking over? Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's, is that four or five that's happened this year?

Now, again, do a little bit of crystal ball gazing. Where are we going to be in 10 years,

town? How many charge point operators are there going to be? Yeah, again,

I think comments are very much my own on this one. But how many are they going to be? So what

that's too many, I think. There's too many small operators that the network's overlapped too much.

Utilization is uneven. Probably arguably that creates higher costs of capital expenditures

as a result. So I think that there are too many. The consolidation in the markets is predictable

and inevitable. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. But how far do we go

down that road as an industry or as a marketplace before eyebrows are raised the other way

in terms of monopolies or duopolies or anything that might happen in that regard?

What's going to happen? I think in Ireland, the size that we are, the number of vehicles we're

going to have on the road, I can't remember. I don't know off the top of my head, Gary. Maybe

you do know how many different fuel providers there are in the UK. And whether or not that's

a good barometer or not, I'm thinking out loud. But if there's 150 CPOs today, if there were

50 in the future, is that too little or too many? That feels about right to me potentially.

But if we're getting down to the sort of 10 or 15 CPOs that govern the whole of the UK

in public charging, I'd be a bit nervous about that. I think that's probably too few people

controlling too many charging sessions. But it does feel like there's too many at the moment.

And again, that's natural economics. It's understandable. There was a proliferation

in the growth market. Lots of people vying for a market share. And now things are being consolidated

down to a point, I don't know, I'm micro sub all is no better or worse than yours. But I think

we'll continue to see some degree of consolidation because that's just market economics doing what

it does. I think if we look at wet fuel, I think there's something like three or four

big supplies. You've got the BP, Shell, ESO, I think are probably the big three. And then you've

got some little ones, Texaco, Jet, Merco, things like that. So I don't think there's more than about

10 petrol suppliers. But of course, there are companies like MFG who have the franchises for

a lot of those. So how does that work? Do we count them as a supplier versus the actual fuel

that they're supplying? It's kind of worms. Yeah, yeah. But there's definitely some benefit

in it though. I mean, going back to some of the questions you asked at the beginning of this

podcast in regards to complexities around plug and charge and auto charge or various apps doing

various things or different hardware providers operating their systems in different ways. If

there is an element of consolidation that simplifies things, then I think inevitably,

whilst there's always pain when companies come together, I can say from personal experience,

similarly, there is a degree of consolidation of logic and resources and economies of scale

and simplicity of software, et cetera, et cetera, that hopefully will have a net positive result

for the end consumer. But that's going to take a few years, I think, but we'll see what happens.

I think it's an exciting market to be in, that's for sure. Indeed. Why is there no grid serve

presence at the new motorway service area in Rotherham on the M1? Which I, Rotherham on the M1,

I can't, which motorway service area? Junction 33 to Welcome Break.

A Welcome Break. So we've got different relationships with different motorway service

areas. Welcome Break are typically doing high power charging through their subsidiary in Apple

Green. So that will be the reason, probably strategically, why that's the case.

Why would two of the three main motorway service area providers, Apple Green and Motor,

with whom you've had a long-standing relationship charging-wise,

elect to start their own charge and offerings at sites where you already have a presence?

What I will say, I think, is a comment that I made earlier in this podcast in that the

concept of charge point or public charging didn't exist 15 odd years ago or however long,

20 years, Christ, how long were we doing this for? And so we've seen different market players

in the market that have merged from different places, whether that be oil companies, energy

companies, growth startups like GridServe, established people like motorway service areas,

and I'm sure I've missed multitude of others. So everyone is recognizing there is a strong

marketplace and everyone is trying to see how they can move and shape in that particular space.

So it stands to reason that some of the motorway service areas want to see what kind of market

leverage they can do, I would imagine, in the same space as a growth, in a growth market.

Now, sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. It's dependent on the experience and the resources

and the tools at your disposal when you're doing something from scratch versus trusting partners

that have been doing it a very long time and have got a long-standing relationship or experience

in doing so. Again, we'll see things settle over time going back to the previous topic about

consolidation. I think there's lots of different players in the market, some will shine, some

will go, actually, that's too hard basket, we're going to leave it to the professionals and everything

in between. So it's not surprising to me that we can see lots of different types of players that

originated from affiliated markets looking to move into this particular market space,

some will stay, some will move. We'll see what happens in the form of time.

Sam, great discussion. Thanks a lot for your time, much appreciated.

Thank you.

So I hope you enjoyed today's show. I was put together this week with the help of Sam Clark,

many thanks for his time.

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299 The Sam Clarke Episode

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