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- [00:00]
A
I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission. Most of us have been conditioned by our smartphones charged to 100% panic if it drops below half. EVs are triggering the same instinct. But for the grid, a car sitting at 60% isn't a problem, it's an asset. That unused capacity multiplied across millions of driveways starts to look like gigawatts of flexible demand. The catch? It only works if people plug in. Today, Josh and Dan from OMI join us on how smart charging scales from a habit into a grid resource. We start with a live demo of a home EV charger. Then Dan picks up the bigger picture. Smart charging at scale, the economics, where all this is heading. These chargers typically cost £1000 to buy and install, but are they worth it? If you have questions during the episode on how the grid operates today, those are exactly the type of questions that Ko Moto Energy's Air analyst is built to answer. Now back to the episode. Let's jump in. So today OMI have come in and as everyone knows, we love people who bring in props. And so today Josh is sat with me with an OMI prop. Josh, over to you. Would you like to introduce yourself and also what the prop is?
- [01:16]
B
Yes. Okay, thank you very much. My name is Joshua. I work in the customer operations team at omi. So there to support customers any challenges that they have, any questions they have once they get a charger installed. The prop that we brought in for you today is our OMI Home Pro. It's our tethered charger. So we've got the charging cable is connected directly to it. And when it's installed at your home, you'll have a little holster as well so you can tidy the cable when it's not in use, stow the plug away and it's connected to our OMI app. So when you first get it installed, it will connect physically to your electrics via junction box, much like everything else electrical in your home. And on the screen of the Home Pro will be a QR code. And the installer will then inform you that there is an app that you download to pair with your charger. And you use the camera on your phone to scan the QR code once you've created an account. And then there's a few bits of few details that you need to fill in and then your smart charging. And the whole idea of OMI is to try and save you money on your charging to schedule to charge at times when it's cheaper based on your tariff.
- [02:36]
A
And this just to kind of. Let's double down on the prop for a second. So you say this just essentially plugs into your fuse board at home and then this charger, the end charger, that's a standard charger, would go into nearly every single ev?
- [02:51]
B
Yes, well, that's a good question. So the end of the tethered Home Pro is a type 2 plug. Type 2 is the way I like to think of it, is UK three pin plugs and European two pin plugs. Both of them allow you to plug things in and power them, but it's just a slightly different configuration of pins. Okay, so this is a type 2. We have had a type 1 previously and that was for older generation EVs. So type 2 is pretty universal, pretty standard for the moment. If you had an older ev, we do have a separate charger that's untethered and you can connect any cable to that. So that would suit that one.
- [03:33]
A
Okay. And the bit I love about this is a, this is a working model. So we're going to just press a few buttons in a second and we're going to turn on not an EV but a light. But the other part of this is that you are doing this day to day. You're talking to lots of people who've installed these. You must have had thousands of those conversations. So what is one thing that you always hear people getting wrong about home charging?
- [03:57]
B
Scheduling, I guess, is the one thing that people not necessarily get wrong, but they get confused about. So what we encourage, especially with OMI and if you have a cheaper rate at night, for example, is to plug in little and often keep your car topped up overnight every time you come home from work or a day out. Plug, plug the OMI charger in.
- [04:20]
A
Yeah.
- [04:21]
B
And if you've got everything set up, if you've got your tariff in there, you've added your car, all of your settings are applied when you plug in, so OMI will schedule to charge later.
- [04:31]
A
So when you connect the charger for the first moment, it's not like a petrol pump. It's not going to immediately start charging your car. It's going to go, okay, I'm connected. And then it'll think, right, right. When's the best time for me to be.
- [04:40]
B
Exactly.
- [04:41]
A
To be flowing in? Okay, and why is it, why is it so. Why does the box exist? Because it feels like it should be a wire. Right. What's in here?
- [04:50]
B
So we. Lots of electronics in there. It is essentially a smart switch. So it will switch on and off multiple times throughout a Session to charge your car based on your schedule. It's got a screen so you can see what's going on. You can interact with it. Uh, it's got three touch buttons on the front of the front of the charger, and we've also got indicator lights either side of the screen, so if you have it in view, you can look outside the wind of your window and see what's going on. You don't have to to be in front of it.
- [05:21]
A
Okay, let's do it. Let's, let's, let's turn this on and let's charge a light bulb.
- [05:29]
B
So we have. So for time. I've already set up an account and. And we are paired with the charger. So at the moment it's just idle. It's ready for us to plug in. And. But if I.
- [05:40]
A
But this could be anyone at home on their iPad, whatever, whatever smartphone you've got. So they could connect to this?
- [05:46]
B
Yes. Yeah. Once they've set up an account and they've paired it, there is a little bit of account set up. So you'll be asked to add your tariff, you'll be asked to add your. Make a model of car so that OMI knows what it's plugged into. Then that allows it to know the battery size, the charge rate of the car model so that it can inform the schedule and knows when to charge.
- [06:07]
A
It feels like one of the top things that I've kind of heard is that people go, I love smart charging, but what if I come home from the school pickup run and I know that I need to be out the door in another half hour to do a long drive? I don't want it to be doing optimized charging. I want to just get in, press the button, and the charge to flow. That's just handled on the app.
- [06:27]
B
It is handled on the app, but also on the charger as well. So smart charging is the default mode. Every time you plug in, OMI will try to charge cheaper. It will try to be better for the grid to start and stop charging at certain times. But there's a max charge mode as well. So you can activate that on the iPad. You can activate it directly on the charger as well. And that ignores all of your settings just for that one session.
- [06:52]
A
Right.
- [06:52]
B
Starts an immediate charge at the fastest rate. So you can top up for half an hour, get some more charging.
- [06:58]
A
What is the. What is the fastest rate?
- [07:00]
B
The fastest rate of this charger is 32amps, which is equates to about seven, seven and a half kilowatts thereabouts. We do have faster charges in other markets where there's a three phase supply. For example, we will have 11 kilowatts or 22 kilowatt chargers as well. But in the UK, generally about seven and a half.
- [07:23]
A
Okay. And for a standard EV, like how long does that take to charge a car up?
- [07:28]
B
So it depends entirely on the battery, but about 10 to 12 hours possibly, but very rarely would you plug in when it's 0%. So you're probably looking more like about five to eight hours, I would say, depending on how low your battery is.
- [07:44]
A
And these are cars that are at home on a driveway. People aren't driving when they're asleep, so there's plenty of time to charge.
- [07:50]
B
Yeah, which is why little and often every night is is better. Just plug. Then each night your car will top up ready for the next day. You're probably looking at three or four hours maybe if you do that every night.
- [08:00]
A
Okay, let's see the rubber. Meet the road and turn on this light. So that's our standard charger. Then this is.
- [08:10]
B
So this is a little adapter. This is our car without any wheels.
- [08:14]
A
And quite endearingly it has a label on it that says please return to Josh, which I love, so it doesn't go walkies.
- [08:21]
B
And then we've plugged that into our light, which is going to simulate our battery being charged.
- [08:26]
A
Okay, let's do it.
- [08:27]
B
Yeah. So we've got it all set up on our app, so you should see that pop up as well.
- [08:33]
A
Look at that.
- [08:34]
B
Okay, so that was a brief moment where the charger and the car were completing what we call a handshake. So there's a little moment where they have to both agree I'm ready to charge. And because of my settings, my. Well, first of all, I have a security setting enabled which is Approve each plugin. This provides peace of mind that no one's going to come up onto your driveway, park and plug in, plug in and start stealing some electricity.
- [09:03]
A
I did wonder about that.
- [09:04]
B
Yeah, interesting. It's very useful. So it's just waiting here in a pending state. So if I tap approve my plugin now, OMI is starting the session and one of our newest features that we've created and we're rolling it out to all of our users now, is the ability to provide your starting battery level so that it can create the more accurate schedule. It knows it's not starting from zero.
- [09:36]
A
Okay.
- [09:36]
B
It's not empty, so it's not reading.
- [09:38]
A
It doesn't Read like a car's battery level.
- [09:41]
B
There are certain brands that we have integrated that functionality for.
- [09:45]
A
Okay.
- [09:45]
B
Yes. And so when you choose your brand, if it's a brand that we do
- [09:50]
A
allow that, then it can do it,
- [09:51]
B
then it can do it.
- [09:52]
A
But when it's a light bulb, it needs a bit of extra information.
- [09:56]
C
Yeah.
- [09:56]
B
So for certain other brands that we don't have that, that support for you enter your battery level and then after 10 to 20 sessions, OMI has enough data to try and predict your starting battery level, so you shouldn't need to keep entering it in.
- [10:10]
A
Okay.
- [10:10]
B
Moving forward. But if I just set the battery level, the default level that we have as a fallback, if you don't want to mess around with it, is 20% for full EVs and it still assumes 0% for plug in hybrids.
- [10:26]
C
Okay.
- [10:26]
B
And so now my session has begun, so I've approved the session to start, I've given it my starting battery level. And the status banner at the very top of the app is saying scheduled, and just underneath that it's saying next charging at half past midnight. And the reason for that. So it's delaying the charge now. And the reason for that is due to our settings. So we have Octopus go as a tariff and that has a. From half past midnight to half past five. Has an off peak.
- [10:57]
A
A cheaper rate.
- [10:57]
B
A cheaper rate at night. Yeah. And so we don't want to be charging now at 20 to 3. So OMI's delaying that right. Until half past midnight to start charging.
- [11:06]
A
Okay, well, let's, let's, let's force it because otherwise we'll have a very long episode.
- [11:11]
B
Yeah. So straight from the app, we've got a max charge button. We also have a max charge button actually on the charger itself as well. So it's the first blue button there.
- [11:22]
A
There we go.
- [11:22]
B
There we go. Instantly. Yeah.
- [11:24]
A
Super straightforward. Well, Josh, I've loved this. Thank you for bringing such a good prop on. And everything works as expected. So, yeah, thank you very much.
- [11:33]
B
Welcome. Thank you for having us.
- [11:35]
A
So on today's episode, we have two of the OMI team who've come in. Josh who's just done the demo, and then, Dan, you're going to talk us through some of the stats that sit behind that and some of the stories on EV charging more broadly. First of all, that demo, like, is that sort of the normal. Did you learn anything new? Any extra features?
- [11:53]
C
Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot from that because actually I'm still waiting on delivery of my first ev. So going to be something that I can learn in terms of how to use my charger once, once that comes. So, yeah, very good that Joshua's taking us through that.
- [12:08]
A
Very cool. I think people will want me to ask, what EV are you getting?
- [12:12]
C
So I'm getting a Toyota Urban Cruiser, which is not the flashiest EV in the world, but I think it'll be a good, reliable run around.
- [12:21]
A
Okay, how old? What's the range on that like?
- [12:24]
C
So it's a 67 kilowatt hour battery. I think it gets 230 miles or something.
- [12:29]
A
Very good.
- [12:30]
C
But I know that people very rarely their full range because we're looking at the stats all the time in terms of what people are actually driving. So as Joshua was saying, I mean, it's very rare that you see a customer charging all the way from zero up to full on any given session.
- [12:45]
A
And what did you think about Josh's answer to what's the one thing that everyone gets wrong about home charging?
- [12:52]
C
Well, because my team's in charge of flexibility, we really value when we're given a little bit of optionality by customers. So if they've got two or three hours worth of charging that they need to do in the night, a, you know, maybe a six hour session to do. So it gives us a lot more flexibility than if someone's got to basically max charge that full session. So I'd absolutely reinforce that point about little and often plugging in whenever you can. It gives, you know, maximum flexibility to the system operation and maximum potential to take use of renewable energy and avoid when gas is on the system.
- [13:29]
A
Okay, I love it. And let's get into EV charging. So how widespread is it? Is it sort of a rapidly growing share of the market?
- [13:36]
C
Yeah, so, I mean, nearly a quarter of all new car sales last year were EVs. So that's brilliant in growth rate that we're seeing. We're now seeing a lot of EVs turning up in the secondhand market as well. So that really helps broaden the appeal of EVs. It sort of makes it a little bit more democratized and people who aren't necessarily in the market for a new car and it overcomes some of that initial investment cost hurdle. And obviously it's a cheaper way of motoring as well, which is really important.
- [14:11]
A
I'm not a massive car nut, I have to confess. But do you think this is partly because people lease a lot of cars these days? So the first EVs that came through were quite expensive. People lease them and now we're getting those kind of three.
- [14:22]
C
Now we're getting all of those three year old cars starting to hit the secondhand market. So yeah, it's making it a lot more affordable for more people.
- [14:28]
A
Okay. And then that was the start around the number of EVs that we have, which is sort of a quarter of the market. A quarter of new cars are EVs. The home charging, is that sort of like, are they one and the same thing? Do people, when they get an ev, do they always try and get a home charger or is it sort of 1 in 10 gets a home charger?
- [14:45]
C
I mean, you know, we're still at the situation where the majority of new EVs and indeed secondhand EVs, where it's, where it's the first EV in a household are looking to get a home charger as part of it. You know, that's you know, the biggest use case still. And you know, I appreciate that there are barriers for people who don't have off street parking, for people in flats, people who are relying on public charging infrastructure. You know, that is a bigger barrier for EVs at the moment. But really, you know, where we're focusing on the, on the home charge market and trying to make it as easy as possible for someone when they're, you know, when they're getting their first EV to have that charging facility available sort of from day one so that they can smart charge their car.
- [15:29]
A
Yeah. And start, I'm interested to ask the other, like to go in the other direction. So does anyone have two of these? Does it?
- [15:34]
C
Oh yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's not, it's not uncommon now for people to have more than one EV in the household. You know, some people will just have one charger and just plug the car in alternating at different times. But some people, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, have his and hers chargers.
- [15:52]
A
There you go. Yeah, that's the ultimate Valentine's Day next year. You know what, you know, what you need to buy. Okay. And then for the homes that get an EV charging point, like why does that go wrong? I can think of some obvious examples, but where do you see it going wrong?
- [16:08]
C
I mean, the most common issue when you're installing your EV is you do need to get permission from the local dno. At least you need to notify them, not get permission. But the barrier to getting an EV charger installed is normally if you've got a looped supply, that means that you're sharing your supply with one of your neighbors and you need to get it unlooped before you can install something of the capacity of a charger.
- [16:33]
A
What does that practically mean, like a loop supply? It kind of feels, I mean, I
- [16:37]
C
mean, it can mean some, you know, a little bit of disruption. So it can mean digging up your garden and putting a new, a new cable in with just a single connection for your household as opposed to one that's shared across your neighbors. So I mean, you know, it can be a bit disruptive and you do need to get the, the local network company into to do that.
- [16:55]
A
That sounds expensive. Is that something that I pay for as a, as a homeowner or something
- [16:59]
C
that we, that the DNO pays for? I. It's then paid for in all of our network charges. But that's the sort of standard service that the DNO will cover.
- [17:08]
A
But that's the process that we need to get through in order to make sure that each home has the ability.
- [17:13]
C
Well, yeah, you know, if we're looking to electrify the vast majority of our energy use, whether that's for transport or for heating or for whatever, then, you know, eventually we will need to go through this unlooping process.
- [17:25]
A
And sorry, do you have a sort of balance of like how many people are on, say, a loop supply versus an unlooped supply?
- [17:32]
C
I mean, it is still there. It's something that we need to check for. So it happens often enough that we have to talk to customers and take them through the process, but it is rare in the total number of installs that we do.
- [17:44]
A
Okay, so that's one reason why it might not happen. What might be the other reasons why people are struggling to get home charging installed?
- [17:50]
C
Some people, I think, are worried about the install time that it's going to take. We've worked really hard on making sure that we can do an install as quickly as possible. We've got a home survey app where people can, you know, show us around their home, show us their fuse board, and then we can process that on, on at the office end and look at whether we need to do a custom install or not, whether it's a standard install. Most standard installs now we can do within about five days. So, you know, in a lot of cases, we're going to be installing the charger before the car turns up.
- [18:24]
A
Yeah, I think that's just, that's just such good news. I think sometimes people think there's so much work that goes into doing this and actually the process of getting that upgrade, whatever it is, is, is actually very quick. And maybe one Thing we've kind of implied but haven't actually talked about is the kind of difference in home charging and sort of charging when you're out and about. So why does, why should someone get a home charger? Obviously there's a convenience of being able to charge overnight, but is there like, what's the economics difference like between the two?
- [18:51]
C
I mean, you know, it is, it is a lot cheaper. You know, if you're looking at a typical night rate of maybe 14p per kilowatt hour, or even if you've got one of the dedicated Smart tariffs from your energy supplier, you could be down at 7 or 8p a kilowatt hour. Then you know, that is way cheaper than some of the public charging where it's at 50p a kilowatt hour or even like 75p on some of the fast charger. So, you know, it is a lot more economical and it's, and it's substantially cheaper than driving with petrol as well. So, you know, on the smart, on the best value, Smart Tower, if you're looking at about maybe the eighth of a price of petrol. So, yeah, it's great.
- [19:27]
A
That's crazy. That's a crazy difference. It does make me think, and whether this, you're actually allowed to do this or not, but like for your home chargers, Josh was showing something that said, oh, I don't want to allow someone to connect to my home charger if they drove up on your driveway. I kind of think of it the opposite way. I'd almost rather like have people coming to my home charger and I'd charge them like a little bit more than whatever my home rate was. And I'd sort of run my own like a petrol station, but for, but for.
- [19:54]
C
Well, you'd come up against a maximum resale price. But anyway, they're very good reasons, they're
- [20:01]
A
very good reasons why I'm not allowed to do that. But I've thought about that before and I've always wanted to ask the question. Okay, so moving on from the sort of logistics and the basics of these home charges, I want to ask about Crowdflex. So do you want to just talk through what Crowdflex is and sort of what do you, what surprised you about that initiative?
- [20:21]
C
So Crowdflex is a long running trial. We've just finished the third phase of Crowdflex where we took 22,000 of our customers through a program of bringing them through the journey of what it takes to smart charge your car a little bit more smartly and to look at whether Providing incentives for customers to plug in more often results in customers plugging in more often results in more flexibility and therefore results in more dispatch when we were getting signals from the national grid to turn down or turn up consumption. So, so we were basically looking all the way through the process from customer communications to it actually turning up in the control room at niso's end.
- [21:05]
A
And when you say incentives, do you mean money?
- [21:09]
C
Yeah, yeah. So I mean money is important. And you know, recruiting customers in the first place, you have to give them a sort of reason to join the program. And at that point offering a cash incentive or a voucher incentive in the trial that we did was really important. You get much better take up if you say that there's something in it for the customer. But we did messaging also around the environmental benefits and the benefits to the grid. And what we saw is that first of all we saw a very low dropout rate. So we only saw a 5% dropout rate in customers who were engaged in the trial. So that was really positive. People didn't really switch off from the trial in the way that they did with some of the other trials that we've seen where customers have to take a much more active role. Because, you know, what we were asking them to do was incredibly simple. It's just plug in more often. And if customers plugged in the right number of times a week, then they got one of the incentives.
- [22:07]
A
So you're not asking them to kind of rush out and unplug or plug in anytime. It's just essentially every time you get home, plug in, that's it.
- [22:14]
C
And no email saying an event is coming up, you need to switch off during these hours or anything. Because basically the technology dealt with all of that for them, just as long as they were plugged in. Yeah, so, so that's why the incentive was geared around making sure that the customers plugged in as often as possible.
- [22:29]
A
I think this is one of the most common things around flexibility that we get wrong, particularly when we talk sort of when we portray it to everyone who is a user. Like we, we talk about domestic flexibility and then people have this image of people sort of sat in their own home with the lights turned off. And that's absolutely crazy. That shouldn't be what flexibility is at all. Flexibility should be, as you say, you plug in and there's some smart piece of kit somewhere that's optimizing between half past midnight and half past two. And what that does is it means we run gas less. And that feels like such a Win. And yet we still have this kind of concept of the people sat in the dark because the light bulb was using energy.
- [23:06]
C
And what we saw in Crowdflex was by combining those two effects. So you do want some change in customer behavior. You don't want customers to still do their old behavior of just driving the car until the battery's entered and then filling it back up again in one big session, because that doesn't give you any of that flexibility. So there needs to be a sort of trade off between the behavioral side of things, making sure that they've got the app set up correctly with the right tariff details in it. There is a little bit of friction for customers making sure that they plug in every time and you know, even, you know, if you've got a bootload of shopping or something, you know, just making sure that you just take that quick step just to plug in the charger. So, you know, it requires a small amount of effort on the part of the customer of a change in habit for the customer. But still, yeah, most of the functionality is delivered through automation.
- [24:03]
A
So let's talk about the money side, because I think that's obviously part of what motivates people to do this. So what would be a, say, a typical non flexible charge cost and what might you save, say as a percentage with the flexibility of charging in this way?
- [24:19]
C
So the way we structured the Crowdflex trial was that customers got a tiered incentive, so between one and three pounds a week, depending on the number of times that they plugged in. So the maximum incentive you could earn sort of around that cup of coffee a week sort of level. And you see in other apps which try and get you to do something like vitality or something that's a similar level of in of incentive and it's enough to get the customer into a new habit.
- [24:44]
A
Okay, to do to go from one side to another side. So we've just talked about how customer behaviors might change. You also talked about this then feeding up into the niso's control room. How, how was that sort of received? Are they, how aware are they of, say, what the nation's doing on their EV charging?
- [25:06]
C
So what we saw is that by those availability incentives of about one to three pounds a week, we got customers to increase the number of plugins by 32 to 37%. So, you know, that was a really significant change in behaviour on the basis of, you know, what is, you know, a relatively modest incentive. And by doing that, we saw that that fed through into an increased level of flexibility. We had about 60 events that the National Grid called, that NISO called and during the trial. And we saw that in those 60 events, the customers who plugged in more often delivered more flexibility. And that meant that the control room got more of what they were asking for. And the whole idea of Crowdflex was to help NISO build a model which allows them to predict exactly what they're going to get when they pull that lever and say, right, okay, you know, we want to trigger an event from, in our case, the EV chargers, okay.
- [26:04]
A
And they, they're just using those batteries just to sort of shift the demand. There's not some sort of super fancy frequency response type, very rapid response happening.
- [26:14]
C
It's just this is, you know, this was like, you know, for, for, you know, between half an hour and, and two or three hours in a, normally in an evening peak. You know, how do you get that, get that response in a sort of, I guess, reasonable turnaround.
- [26:32]
A
Okay. And we are seeing more and more regulation coming towards the smart charging end of EVs. How do those mandates sort of help or hinder you as a business?
- [26:44]
C
So I think, you know, there are a lot of really positive things around flexibility. I think, you know, trying to standardize a lot of the way in which organizations work is good because it gives a sort of consistent customer experience. I think the thing that we are really aware of is that in order to offer customers a sensible level of incentive, we need to have some sort of predictability of revenues. And at the moment, I think the balance between the revenues that we're able to access as an aggregator, the uncertainty of some of those revenues, and then the increased level of regulation coming in, which is good things. It's about cybersecurity, it's about making sure that we've got customer protection. You know, those are all good things, but we need to make sure that that comes in at the same time as being able to earn a sustainable revenue, because otherwise you're just not going to, not going to be able to afford the extra demands that that regulation puts, puts on a smart charger.
- [27:43]
A
Okay. And maybe just to kind of give people a bit more of a flavour of some of those regulations coming in. Like what are the ones that are most commonly talked about?
- [27:50]
C
So we've got the load control and flexibility service provider licensing regulations coming in. We've also got a new set of energy smart appliance ESA regulations that govern the functionality of a device. So making sure that you've got the right level of metering and then the right level of control, the right level of cybersecurity available. And for us, it's really important that alongside those increased regulations which do require us to evolve our product to make sure that we've got the right backend systems, but there's a level playing field there making sure that customers who are using the smart functionality on that are still able to access those services.
- [28:35]
A
Okay, so moving from, say, the constraints and the regulation, that's changing perhaps to be as kind of optimistic about the future as possible. How big could this be? So, I mean, let's say UK peak generation today is about 40 gigawatts. It's moving up to, say, 60 or 70 as we get further into the future. But how big could that EV fleet be and what sort of impact could it have on that demand?
- [29:00]
C
Look, you know, the vast majority of EVs that are going to be, you know, that are still going to be bought over the next few years are still going to have the ability to charge at home. You know, we're still seeing more chargers go on the wall. We're still seeing, you know, hope. Now we're seeing new builds going in with chargers by default. And I think, you know, that's really important to try and make sure that we sustain the EV transition. But, you know, once we, once we get there, I mean, you know, typically, you know, we've only got flexibility when the customer's plugged in. So not all customers are going to be plugged in all the time. But of that 7.4 kilowatts that Joshua was talking about, we see about 1 kilowatt available to us for flexibility. So, you know, for every 100,000 cars, that's about 100,000 kilowatts. So, you know, you've got, for 100,000 cars, you've got 100 megawatts available. So, you know, that that quickly scales up into the gigawatt scale once we're in millions of millions of vehicles.
- [30:00]
A
Yeah, and the flexibility we're talking about there so often, and this is kind of a really interesting part of the EV fleets, right, that when people park at home, they've kind of got options. So you could either not plug in and just be someone who just plugs in for an hour and then takes it out and you just, you kind of just, just block as much as you can into that one hour, or you could be someone who's slightly smarter in terms of how we would talk about them as people who charge. So they would plug in and then there would be a sort of smart charging program. That would happen over say a course of 10 hours or 20 hours, whatever it might be. Then there's kind of the far end, which is something called V2G. Vehicle to grid. What is that? How is it different to smart charging?
- [30:41]
C
So vehicle to grid is basically, it allows for bi directional charging. So as well as putting energy into the battery, you can take energy back out of the battery as well. And there's sort of like different variants of the vehicle to grid like you were talking about, where you export that power to the grid. Or there's vehicle to home or vehicle to load, where you actually use that power to power the rest of the home. So that would give you the ability, for instance, if you are on a day and night tariff.
- [31:08]
A
Yeah.
- [31:08]
C
But during the day you could discharge your battery to power your home and then charge it back up again at the night and therefore make that saving.
- [31:16]
A
Yeah.
- [31:16]
C
On day and night rates for your. For your whole. Whole home.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah. So I think that's so cool. I think, I think maybe the other thing might actually happen, which is that the amount of solar we're now seeing on the system. But I've also got solar panels on my home and I think when the export rate I'm getting paid nothing for it. Like I might as well flow that into my, my car and then, then when the sun goes down, I'll just flow it out of my car and I use that to power the. Power the house. I think right now with V2G, I think sometimes people go, oh, I've just got this brand new expensive EV and do I want to sort of work it hard and do that flexibility? I think as we more get sort of the older cars coming through that still have many kilowatt hours of capacity left, I'm quite excited about that because I might be able to get some sort of V2G on my driveway and I could be able to sort of optimize that. Maybe I'm just a horrendous battery nerd. And so I get excited about these things. But is this something you think about? Is this.
- [32:08]
C
I mean, you got to remember. But for most. Sorry, I'm going to sound a bit pejorative, but normal people, they're not concerned about what's happening on the grid or any of those sorts of things. Their needs are principally around their mobility needs and want to make sure that they've got a battery that's charged when they want to drive. And personally, I think we can solve a lot of the problems for VTG that are technical in nature within the industry. But really what we need to do is land this change in culture in terms of the way people use their EVs as we've been talking about. You know, plug in often, charge often charge a little bit and don't require your battery to be completely full at all times. You know, we know that people don't use their whole battery most days, but it's like, you know, going comfortable. But if you like let your battery, you know, go down to maybe, you know, 60 or 40% rather than always at 80 or 100%, but you can still meet most of your day to day needs and if you need to, then you hit the max charge button.
- [33:15]
A
Yeah.
- [33:15]
C
And you know, you take it up to full before you go on, along on a long trip.
- [33:19]
A
Yeah.
- [33:20]
C
But on a day to day basis, allow yourself to use a little bit less of that battery because without that, that's where V2G is going to falter. Because there's not going to be enough capacity available in people's batteries to discharge as well as being able to charge them.
- [33:38]
A
Because you were saying your new car when it arrives is 260 or 250 miles of range. I mean, that's. How many journeys do you genuinely take that are 260 miles long? Very few. I wonder if we're all kind of trained by smartphones and that we want to wake up and see our smartphone at 100% because the smartphone over the course of a day runs out and we kind of have that mindset from smartphones that we take to EVs.
- [34:01]
C
It's, it's phones, it's, it's the way you fill your car up. It's, I mean, you know, we've been told for years to avoid plugging things in when you're not using them, to avoid vampire electricity and that sort of thing, you know. But a smart charger, you know, a smart charger does not sort of like pull energy from the grid when it's, when it's otherwise switched off. You know, it is there to provide that switch based on what the, what the grid needs and you know, whether the wind's blowing and the sun shining.
- [34:30]
A
I hope this has given people some of the silly questions that I've been asking. People are thinking, yes, okay, I feel like I'm now getting the confidence to have one of these in my home. Dan, I'm going to wrap up with one more question which is to ask you that if I put you in charge of EV charging across all of GB and perhaps all of Europe, tomorrow. What's one change that you make?
- [34:51]
C
I think that, you know, the thing that really concerns me at the moment is, you know, we're spending a lot on grid reinforcement. We're spending a lot on, you know, trying to make sure that we can meet peak demand. I think, you know, I'm really worried that smart charging will mean that a lot of that isn't strictly necessary. You know what I'd love to see? So if I ruled the world, I would basically say that you could enter into a contract for flexibility that was as good as steel in the ground. So, you know, there would be step invites for new providers to come in and replace them if a company went bust or something.
- [35:25]
B
So.
- [35:25]
C
But you could effectively get a sort of 10, 15, 20 year contract for flexibility that allows you to basically not put steel in the ground and make sure that, you know, everyone's bills are not paying for, you know, 20, 30 years of an asset, but instead flexibility can provide that at a much lower cost.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah. So can we run the network hotter?
- [35:47]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [35:48]
A
I love it. I share the view. Dan, thank you very much and for the OMI team for coming in. This has been a great, a great prop and a great talk through EV home charging.
- [35:56]
C
Brilliant. Thank you.