This is a transcript of the speech given by Matt Hilton at Solar and Storage London 29 April 2024 12.20hrs Charge EV / Solar Innovation Stage

Electrification: For the many not the few?

Good afternoon, my name is Matt Hilton, Founder and Director of Brimstone Energy. We are a UK start up whose mission is to guide ordinary people through the green energy transition. Most of our clients who ask for an energy ecosystem are self-confessed geeks. They all learn a tremendous amount about low-temperature heating or battery storage before engaging with us. Universally they say that the journey to decarbonisation isn’t easy, and requires many hours watching YouTube, reading blogs, or trawling websites.

So we know that if this industry is to have a meaningful impact and to bring low carbon technology to the mass market, then we must have a relentless focus on the customer experience. We must make the process of assessment, education, implementation and aftercare as frictionless as possible.

What I want to talk about today is specifically with regard to removing the frictions associated with owning an Electric Vehicle, and mechanisms that might allow a broader range of people to drive an EV. We must ensure that Electrification: For the many not the few becomes a reality.

Elon Musk and Tesla had a specific business model in mind in the early days, which saw wealthy customers buying expensive electric vehicles which would create demand for electric cars, and gain traction in the marketplace. This made sense in the early days.

Fast forward to today and the variety of electric vehicle models on the market has increased dramatically, but they remain focussed on the premium end of the market.

The market is geared towards making the electric vehicle experience desirable for wealthier citizens. For those that can afford it, they can have a sleek high tech car with a very large range, a smart home charging system to ensure their car is fully charged every morning at very low cost and a fast growing network of rapid chargers across the nation for when a quick top up is required.

But are the benefits of this automobile revolution equally shared across society?

I would argue not.

There is hope that things will change. Quentin Wilson’s FairCharge is campaigning to broaden the accessibility of EVs to lower income families. Its objectives are centred around equalising the VAT charge on public chargers (currently 20%) to that of domestic chargers (5%). It is also looking at ways to make it easier for lower income groups to afford an EV, including tackling the prohibitive insurance costs for EVs in general and younger drivers in particular.

But I would put it to you that whilst these big-picture factors are important to driving change at a national level, if we draw things down to the specifics, at a local level, I think this country has some real challenges ahead.

On our current trajectory, in the next 5-10 years we are heading towards the entrenchment of a society where the rich drive EVs and the poor are frozen out of automobiles.

The rich will benefit from tax advantaged purchase arrangements, lower running costs, easy access to chargers at their home and better health outcomes.

The poor will most likely be left with the higher running costs of a conventional car. If they do get an EV they face higher insurance costs, they will have a continual struggle to access public chargers and when they do manage to find a plug, will pay significantly more for the privilege.

I am a Geographer by background. One of the criticisms levelled at Human Geography as a discipline is that it is a bit woolly. It has so many sub-disciplines that there isn’t a unifying theme. My one-time next-door neighbour was a Professor of Fashion Geography. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that is a useful topic or not.

But the core strength of Geography is that it brings together disparate ideas and focusses them on the human experience.

For instance, a geographer will draw in the ideas raised by behavioural scientists and marry them up with the technical ideas presented by the de-carbonisation industry.

In the book Transport for Humans, behavioural science and marketing giants Rory Sutherland and Pete Dyson write about the need to design transport solutions for Homo Sapiens rather than Homo transporticus. This is an in-joke, pointing fun at economists who create an idealised version of a human being known as Homo economicus.

“Homo transporticus, has stable preferences, makes lightning-fast calculations about cost, convenience, and travel time, and always chooses better options when they are available.”

“Homo transporticus is an idealized traveller—what economists would call a “representative agent.” Average in every way. These simplifications can simplify demand forecasting, price modelling, and cost-benefit analyses of new infrastructure, but they leave out much that is important about real human beings. For instance, our physiology, psychology, and differences in mobility.”

In the EV Market, I would suggest that the idealised customer has the following characteristics:

• Male
• A tech native
• Enthused by new and emerging technology
• Wealthy
• Has his own off road parking
• Has access to a smart charger and cheap overnight electricity
• Able bodied
• Plenty of time and no stress

So I want to draw our attention away from the idealised customer.

In reality, this is a small cohort of people.

In reality the vast majority of people do not conform to at least one of these characteristics.

So we must focus on the customer experience. Who is the customer? The entire UK population is the customer. We cannot simply segment the market place, we need to provide solutions that will work for everyone.

I am now going to use Reading as a case study. It is where I grew up, so I know it well. For those not familiar with central Reading, it is a unitary authority that has a particularly high proportion of homes (approximately 45%) that do not have off-street parking. The old Victorian part of Reading is dominated by terraced housing built to accommodate workers in the biscuit factory, Huntley and Palmers.

Reading Borough Council published their draft “Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Strategy” last year. And whilst the strategy remains in draft, and does make reference to stakeholder engagement, I cannot get beyond the idea that this is something that is being done “to” other people.

A homeowner with a driveway can have their own dedicated EV charger meaning access is assured and reliability is likely to be close to 100%.

Someone who lives in a terrace, whether they rent it or own it, simply doesn’t have access to a dedicated parking spot which they own and control. They are going to have a different experience of owning an EV.

Access to a charger will not be assured, access will be less convenient, and the reliability of charging infrastructure will likely be lower.

The people living in these homes generally occupy the lower socio-economic groups and are more likely to be from ethnic minority communities. Poorer EV drivers are more likely to drive older cars (with degraded batteries) or smaller cars (with smaller batteries). These will need charging more frequently.

Let’s have a quick tour of the area.

Here we have some grotty looking HMOs or shared housing, in what were once upon a time beautiful houses. Although there is plenty of off-road parking available, can we really expect the property owners to spend thousands installing EV chargers willingly.

What about here? Should every front garden be ripped out to provide hard-standing for cars? It is hardly the environmentally friendly answer.

What about your classic terraced street. No room for off-street parking, no dedicated parking.

In this road, we have no parking at all. Are these people to be denied the opportunity to have a vehicle

Some firms are proposing innovative pavement friendly charging solutions. But I want to draw us back to reality. Our reality in England. This pavement is already a mess, unlikely to be resurfaced in the next decade. Under the ground there are lots of different utilities. This is not an easy or cheap environment in which a home owner can just go and install an EV charging solution.

And let us retain our relentless focus on the customer experience. Imagine the customer is a single parent dealing with a baby and a pram, on a dark December evening with snow lying on the ground.

Or that the customer is an elderly man that needs to walk with the aid of a walking stick.

Or simply that the customer simply needs to charge up 6 nights a week, and that she doesn’t care what the solution is so long as it is easy and doesn’t become a chore.

As at the publication of this report in April 2023, Reading had 116 public EV chargers. Of which 46 were located in privately owned multi story car parks, and only 16 [yes 16] were on-street chargers.

The report states that there is a requirement for one charger per 3 vehicles which it bases on a national average annual vehicle milage of 7,500 miles.

Does this statistic stand scrutiny? At 3.6kW, you’ll need about 11 hours charging time to receive a full charge for a 40kWh battery. A driver covering 15,000 miles a year will basically need exclusive access to this charger between 7pm to 6am every night. 

At a 1:3 ratio, the report states that Reading should be providing around 3,000 on street chargers by 2030 to enable EV growth.

No funding mechanism is proposed, and the strategy seemed to have an aspiration that the Government will step in with some funding.

But despite these concerns, let us imagine a future scenario in which Reading does in fact have sufficient On-Street chargers to meet demand, and that these chargers have availability and reliability that matches the experience of someone with their own driveway.

We then need to talk about what I consider to be the biggest elephant in the room: pricing per kWh.

I have gone through the Reading EV Strategy document with a fine toothcomb.

There isn’t even an acknowledgement that residents using these public chargers will pay more than residents with their own private charger.

Let’s run through the scenario.

Our old friend Homo transporticus can currently charge on Octopus Go for 9 pence per kWh; perhaps even less.

If they are charging on a 3 pin plug, there is no further investment required. If buying a 7 kW home charger, they’ll need to spend about £1000 to buy and install the charger.

The tariff on one of the 16 Reading Council lamppost 3.6kW chargers is apparently an attractive 30 pence per kWh according to user inputted information on ZapMap [I couldn’t find any reference to the price anywhere else – a problem in itself]. These devices are not giving live information to the Zap Map network, so unfortunately you wouldn’t know if they are in use until you arrive.

Reading has a surprisingly dreadful set of public rapid charging options, only alleviated by the recent opening of the set of 8 Instavolts at the Madjeski Stadium – but these cost 85 pence per kWh.

At home, thanks to my handy PodPoint App, I know that my Nissan Leaf received 4818 kWh at home last year, and drove about 15,000 miles.

So my quick maths tells me that after about 12 months you’ll recoup your £1000 investment in a home charger versus exclusively using Reading Council’s lamp post chargers, and less than 4 months when exclusively using Instavolt.

Or to put it another way I have spent £396 at home on electricity over the past year, versus an expected £1445 with Reading Council and over £4000 at Instavolt.

Now if FairCharge are successful in their campaign, it might be the case that this cost falls somewhat.

But the big issue, the elephant in the room, that I don’t hear anybody even acknowledging as an issue in the public discourse is this:

We need to find a way for 3.6 kW and 7kW public chargers to achieve cost parity with domestic chargers.

The last argument I’ll throw out there is this: Petrol has actually been a tremendously liberating force. Just think about the cultural significance of Route 66 to the USA. Petrol is highly egalitarian at the point of sale. Everyone pays the same price at the pump. There are no special deals whereby rich folk pay less. To forcibly move away from this model is in many ways a backward step for society.

Electrification: For the many not the few? Ideas.

So here are three ideas that I have for how to address this issue.

1. Genuine hubs for overnight 7kW charging. The level of ambition set out in Reading, just isn’t adequate.In the right locations we should be setting out our ambition for genuine charging hubs, where folk can reliably park up overnight and charge their car, in locations close to their home. We should routinely be seeing hubs of 200 chargers. These need to have a competitive price for overnight charging, with limited or no overstay charges.

• Dual use infrastructure. Most workplace car parks are empty at night. But couldn’t other patrons use the car park to charge their cars? This could be ideal for urban areas, where office blocks are located adjacent to dense residential zones which are the exact same areas that require innovative solutions. By maximising the use of the infrastructure, with customers both day and night using the charger, the price per kWh can be reduced while simultaneously the property owner is increasing their overall profit.

• Ownership model. Could a co-operative ownership model work? The £1000 that homeowners would invest in a domestic charger could instead be directed to a co-op as an investment into that co-op. The co-op would then own and maintain the infrastructure.

Alternatively, an extension of the Ripple Energy model, in which your investment yields a discount on your energy consumption, but in this case specifically linked to your public charging consumption. This could also be linked to the experiments by Octopus who were recently offering Plunge Pricing on certain public charging networks.

We understand that there are many hidden complexities here.

Reflecting on this issue over the past few weeks whilst I prepared for this speech I think the biggest problem is one of leadership from Central Government, who should be acting as a convening power to find solutions which look after the whole of society. And in lieu of this, we have entrepreneurs and small companies attempting to fill the gaps with products, which by definition, only meet the needs of some customers.

Everybody needs to retain a steadfast focus on the consumer experience. It isn’t reasonable to expect the pensioner to need to move her car away from the public on-street charger at 10pm, so that her neighbour who is a single mother can charge her car whilst her baby sleeps alone in the house, on a winters night when it is pounding with rain.

We cannot sleepwalk into a society where the poorer and marginalised members of our society pay multiples more for electricity than Homo transporticus. Electrification: For the many not the few?

Thank you for listening, and I would welcome any better ideas for how we can solve this problem.

Brimstone Energy UK will guide you through the Green Energy Transition.