299 The Sam Clarke Episode

Gary Comerford (: 00:00

Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV 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 Gridserve 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 Gridserve in the discussion, but he's not here as an official representative Gridserve, and his views don't necessarily represent Gridserve at all. So bear that in mind when we talk. Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Clarke (: 00:50

Well, thank you again for having me, Gary. It's always a pleasure.

Gary Comerford (: 00:54

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 what seems to be an endless stream of crud that's coming from social and mainstream media.

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?

Sam Clarke (: 01:28

It's a very good question to start things off with, isn't it? I think over the last years, 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 is 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 gonna win in the long term. Headlines are short-termist. They're the tomorrow's chip paper, as they say. And I just think that over the fullness of time, we will force this out. I'm reminded.

of the, 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...

clarify some of the things that are being accused, which are getting more more profound or alternative in their views as time moves on. personally, 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.

Gary Comerford (: 02:58

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 got to be a different way of addressing it.

Where do you see that balance? Do you go in and reply on every comment that you see or not?

Sam Clarke (: 03:31

I don't Certainly 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.

Gary Comerford (: 03:32

You

Sam Clarke (: 03:41

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, 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.

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.

Gary Comerford (: 04:45

Now you mentioned EHGVs and Z-HID, and I know in one of your many roles, you're doing some great work there on the Z-HID 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 you 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 HGV pricing and for larger organisations who charge a lot of companies like GridServe, like Milence who will offer HGV charging, they can actually negotiate better terms.

with directly with the ChargePoint 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 sort of negotiate that kind of agreement or is that sort of restricted to UK based HGV operators?

Sam Clarke (: 05:52

think there's two answers to that question, Gary, for me. So 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. And 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 twins or associated with one of those larger organizations. 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, that Green Flux

here

which is our backend 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 includes the UK so 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.

is European cross, well there will be a European crossover which hopefully will help people that come over here who are seeking, 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 GridServs 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 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.

Gary Comerford (: 08:10

Yeah, I will come on and cover, as you would imagine, public charging pricing and what sort of the barriers are there. But something has just occurred to me then, if you're talking about creating a direct relationship with somebody so that you can pre-hedge the energy purchase and sort of leverage some lower prices, what's to stop an enterprising group of, a large enterprising group of high mileage EV drivers getting together?

Sam Clarke (: 08:14

Yes, you might.

Gary Comerford (: 08:38

and approaching a charge point operator and say, look, you give these kinds of discounts because EHGVs are going to take a large amount of energy at 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, know, 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 Charge Point operator and said, would you be open to that? Would you be open to that?

Sam Clarke (: 09:14

The answer is yes. The other answer is nothing in regards to the first part, which was what's stopping someone. And indeed it's already happening. So I can give you one example straight away, which is Volt Loader. So Volt Loader will always have a place in my heart as a electric heavy goods vehicle only, haulier

Now that's a blinking difficult thing to do from a standing start. I, know, 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, you're only using fully electric from day one is incredibly difficult, but they've done it.

Better than that, are consolidating with their own aspirations, their hauliers and their clients. They've got depot charging at their depots, they've got depot 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. So that enables them to, as a collective, almost have their own little consortium of users, which means as a enterprise, we see one customer

that's consuming quite a lot of energy, it's lots of consolidated people doing so, and that's fine, because that shows the market's moving, it shows there's a 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 utilization on a nascent market network like EHGV is power to the elbow at this point. Gridster's very fortunate at being the busiest network

country and I know you're going to come to this later but you we are we are incredibly lucky to have such a such a prolific network on the on the motor service areas and we've now got an underutilized network knowingly and predictably that it sits right next to it in the same location as it's not being utilized as heavily as the other one because the HDVs aren't there yet but we've got to create these solutions with our partners and with with clients like VoltLola and like the roaming parties to find ways of increasing our new size ization because that's the justification we need to do more of it.

Gary Comerford (: 11:12

And that's given me a nice little state 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 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?

Sam Clarke (: 11:50

Well, first and foremost, caveat, 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. You are you putting an extension, a garage, a third story? What are you doing? You know, and what quality of, there's so many variables to 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 HDV 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 astronomic. We know that. That's commonplace. And it's taking a long time for some of those grid enablements to be energized 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.

Gary Comerford (: 13:26

Yeah, that's, it is one of those things, you know, I did a fairly detailed analysis of all the M1 charges out there and our good friends at Zapmap gave me some utilization figures. And I kind of want to talk a little bit about utilization and the first mover advantage. So as I say, I got data from Zapmap that showed me all the CPOs that were present on the M1.

And it indicated that Apple Green, for example, have way more actual chargers up the M1 corridor than say Gridserve. They're also priced.

generally cheaper than Gridserve But Gridserve has far higher utilization 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 kid on the block?

Sam Clarke (: 14:21

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 chargers. And those medium-powered chargers, which sit on the same locations as the Applegreen ones, because that's a Welcome Break site. So welcome break have their own high-powered chargers, 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. So 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's on this podcast, but I know we have exceptionally good figures. Our reliability has improved dramatically.

up, the dwell time is going down, there's more 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, you know, I'll stick with the guys that I know. So maybe there is bit of brand loyalty that's starting to emerge, which, you know, is obviously no bad thing. And, you know, our figures suggest that every month's a record month. So, you know, we're not doing, we're not doing too badly. And as you say, the price points are similar.

The only one which is perhaps material different is Tesla, but other than that, most of the big CPOs with high power charging in these sort of locations have broadly a similar price per kilowatt hour.

Gary Comerford (: 15:55

It's almost like you've got my questions in front of you because my next question is talking about public charger pricing. Now, notwithstanding what you've just said, we've recently seen one charge point operator quite convincingly break through that 90 pence a 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 see the general direction going?

Sam Clarke (: 16:01

okay.

Yeah.

Gary Comerford (: 16:24

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 ballgazing for me.

Sam Clarke (: 16:33

Yeah, I wish I knew the answers to that Gary as much as you did really. think they'll stay reasonably high, certainly relative to know, depot or domestic charging, it's always going to be a higher price. I just think that we that you know, there are levers that government can obviously help us with. We've got

the standing charges going up: 1000

government intervention to bring those prices down. And then that's just sort of the.

the linear style variable costs that we're aware of that some of which are unavoidable and some I think we can definitely help that the net result of which brings the brings the prices down. And then we've got stuff that is a bit more creative right so we've got you know the premium charging that might be on the motorway but then there's there's membership or subscription models or off-peak incentives or time of day.

pricing, congestion pricing, membership discount, dynamic pricing. Yeah, 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 like to see. But we are going to have to be more creative and particularly smarter, 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 CPOs in the UK, lots and lots of different charger types, lots of different types of user experience. So it's already inevitably complex.

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. So 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 InstaVault you're referring to that's now in the mid 90s, which is pretty strong. So that is a way too big a gap.

and we've got to find a way to bridge it.

Gary Comerford (: 18:52

One of the ways when I speak to ChargePoint operators, they always talk about this, 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, regardless of whether you sell one kilowatt hour or one gigawatt hour, you're still paying the same amount of fixed price.

What point do you see, what sort of projections are you looking at where you can say, well, now look, our utilisation is going to get to that point where, you know, 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.

Sam Clarke (: 19:36

I have a feeling I'm gonna walk into your next question by answering that. And I think...

Not all CPOs are created equally. We've got regional ones and national ones. We've got those with low utilization and those with very, very high. So I think the economics you just described for some are incredibly sensitive when it comes to utilization, as you said. And for others, it might be more a case of the investment and the debt that's been raised in order to build the infrastructure needs paying back. And it might be that the interest in payment on the debt finances is of greater sensitivity than the utilization.

figures for example. So I think depending on the size of the CPO the levers could be different but obviously utilization is key for everyone. Everyone wants to be 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?

Gary Comerford (: 20:30

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, and charge of pricing, I want to get your opinion on the Tesla supercharger network. Now know you drive a Tesla, you have done for several years, as does your partner, Sara What's your view on how Tesla can charge say 22 pence a kilowatt hour to drivers charging at seven o'clock at their.

Sam Clarke (: 20:33

I you might.

Gary Comerford (: 20:57

Winchester superchargers. And I'm talking about non-Tesla supercharging, non-Tesla vehicles charging there. And yet they drive three or four miles down the road to the InstaVault Super Hub. And even with the discount they're offering there, it will be twice as much. do we think, I mean, I have my own thoughts on this, but why is there such a discrepancy even between quote unquote low prices?

at sort of off peak rate.

Sam Clarke (: 21:25

I think it's reasonably simple. I could be wrong. I'm a simple man, Gary, but there is, you a few years ago there was no public charging infrastructure at all. and so market needed to be created in some cases, the likes of Gridserve and others. This is, this is a founding business that's only been around seven or eight years. It's 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, 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, years as well. Their infrastructure has been around and has 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, 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're 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 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. know, 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 works is the same. So 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.

Thank

Gary Comerford (: 23:29

Yeah, I think you're right there. And 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. Now, sort of looping back a little bit, we talked about...

Sam Clarke (: 23:45

Never gonna happen. Never gonna happen.

Gary Comerford (: 23:52

The fact that the government are going to be doing, they're 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?

Sam Clarke (: 24:17

I wish I knew the answer to that question. And I don't know if I do. I think we touched on a little bit in 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.

Gary Comerford (: 24:31

Mm-hmm.

Sam Clarke (: 24:37

things at lower cost, and 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 obviously got.

elements of grant funding through particularly in the commercial sector through the depot schemes and the ZHID trials, the HGV trials of putting vehicles on the ground and the infrastructure being subsidized to do so. These are all good levers that the government can help and can 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. 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 grid and things like that be a smoother process, then maybe they're the levers that were within the government's power to help us along the way. That's, I'm not sure.

Gary Comerford (: 25:29

I 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 headquarters 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 Chargepoint operators, they talk about the things that 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. 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?

Sam Clarke (: 26:42

It doesn't, I'm afraid, and I think I share your view. And I have complained about this and even spoke to Kier Mather 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.

Gary Comerford (: 26:44

you

Sam Clarke (: 27:03

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 long-ish 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...

for UK PLC to operate. And that's a great frustration. the only thing I can hope might happen is a bit more joined up thinking. Like, please, could they just do that? Like, 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've got the answer, all this goalposts have shifted and we're into a different landscape. 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, think, in terms of the inconsistencies here. But that's definitely something that could be improved. Because it breeds efficiency. And then we can reduce costs as a result.

Gary Comerford (: 28:41

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 chargers. It can be confusing for customers. Perfectly valid statement. Totally agree. 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 chargers.

Sam Clarke (: 28:47

Okay.

Gary Comerford (: 29:09

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.

Sam Clarke (: 29:39

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, 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 that's predicated on a one step learning of the vehicle and then therefore doing it thereafter. Whereas plug and charge is more a certificate based system with the vehicle where there's various certificates throughout 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 they 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 chargers. I think the problem that we...

Gary Comerford (: 30:29

Yes.

Sam Clarke (: 30:47

mustn't get to, well, not the problem, the problem you've already mentioned is that there is not necessarily joined up thinking with different charge point 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 a regulatory intervention that needs to make that setup thing the same for everybody, no matter whether you're Orange Osprey or Green GridServe or whatever it might be. But my only sort of

wince, suppose, is that give us a chance. There's an awful lot going on in this space. And also 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. It's not just the charge operator, it's the hardware and the vehicle as you've already alluded to. So we've got to 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 ultimately everyone has a regulation of contactless anyway. So if you haven't got plug and charge, you've still got your contactless and/or 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.

Gary Comerford (: 32:21

That's understood. But it does bring 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 150 ChargePoint operators and

I say this every time I have this conversation, Niall Riddle with his pages and pages and pages of CPO apps on his phone, because he's got everyone that was ever made. And I was in a conversation with a 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 charge point operator. I said to this CPO, what are you doing with that? Are you offering the discount to specific customers? you, 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. Ionity 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 app 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.

Sam Clarke (: 34:24

Okay, well again, thoughts my own, not necessarily of my employer. first and foremost, I it springs to mind, you articulated some of the variables of 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 their contact details, et cetera, whereby we can have a clearer understanding of the type of use case on a person or.

Gary Comerford (: 34:27

Yep, understood.

Sam Clarke (: 34:51

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. mean, wherever you go and buy things, digitally or otherwise, people are collecting your data as a result. So that exchange is happening in all walks of life, not just charge point and operation in terms of learning or customer 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. 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, et cetera. I think some people, as you say, have been more creative with that than others. Our focus has been on, or Gridster'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 chargers 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. So again, we've got lots of different types of operator in the marketplace that may have different levers to pull on this one. 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. I think other 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're on a 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, right? So I think in that respect, we're just following form of consumer behavioural patterns.

Gary Comerford (: 37:09

Yeah.

And the specific question I asked this CPO was if you've got, if your data showed you that you've got a specific customer and they charge at the same charger at the same time every week for, you know, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, are you offering them specifically something to sort of thank them for doing that? Are you offering them, as you've already mentioned, you know, 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 analyze that data and do something with it. And they've got, and there are other CPOs that don't necessarily have that level of data.

and not sure I'm an answer on that, I think that's just a comment. But if you do have an answer then fair enough.

Sam Clarke (: 38:16

I do actually. And I think what you just described is it fits neatly into a membership model, does it not? You know, if you're, you've got someone that is regularly a user of a particular network, then the, the logical play there is, well, there's a membership, however, for X, whatever pounds of pence it is per month enables you to have that, discounted rate as a result. And the logic being, well, you you're, you're paying certain amounts 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

you know, the net result is that you're probably ending up with a discount, but also we're buying, well, we're selling or someone is selling a loyalty through that membership scheme. So to me, that feels like a, like a simple membership model where, where you're discounting your pence per kilowatt hour for your regular users. And by, in return, they're taking a small commitment to you for doing so.

Gary Comerford (: 39:06

Yeah, that makes absolute sense. Yeah. I want to come back on a discussion that occurred on the EVCafe News recently, a couple of weeks ago. The discussion was about measuring uptime. And you quite rightly talked about the myriad of variables that all have to work all the time to provide a charge. Sara 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 going through the back of my head, but Tesla. Now they have all, 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 Polestar in on a supercharger, get the app out, it will work? And I can't necessarily do that with any other ChargePoint operator.

Sam Clarke (: 40:17

I'm reminded by a interview with, I think it might've 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. know, there were 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 in the vehicle. So just to put the window up and down required six different companies in order to contract with to do it. And therefore that 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.

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

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, 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 Payter devices or the electronic digital stuff that goes with it, whether we're using ABB, Alpatronic, 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, well is the same solution as Tesla's. But I think for us, or for us being the rest of the rest of the CPO network, we have to buy in the chargers 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 GreenFlux. 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 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.

Gary Comerford (: 42:52

Your thoughts on the eVED 3P a 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 is 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?

Sam Clarke (: 43:16

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, you know, and...

and NHS cost savings potentially as 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.

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? Just get the banding right such that there's a fairness associated to it. In much, I think it's the same or similar, you know, benefit in 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 benefit in kind tax went from about 20 pounds a month to about 400. But that also showed me if I was, 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, right? Now.

Why can't we use the same mechanisms in Benefit in Kind as we do, and we already have in Road Fund licensed of today, but just get it in a fair breakdown? 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?

Gary Comerford (: 45:38

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. There's also downsides, like for example, my 25 year old nephew's just bought a 27 year old Ford Escort, 1.6 liter, and he's paying less VED than I am on an electric car. And that's not right. Yeah, you know, he's pumping out emissions at the back because it's a 1.6 liter petrol.

I'm pumping nothing out. Why is he paying 25 pounds and I'm 195 pounds? know, things like that need to be definitely sorted out.

Sam Clarke (: 46:16

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 mechanism still sound it's just that that 27 year old car needs to be taxed fairly relative to your

Gary Comerford (: 46:25

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Sam Clarke (: 46:41

modern electric car that has a completely different emissions rating. And maybe other things need to be factored. Maybe the weight of vehicles should be a factor. Maybe the age of the vehicle should be a factor in regards to, 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. 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.

Gary Comerford (: 46:44

Mm-hmm.

Sam Clarke (: 47:08

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 2,000 is going to be using a lot more of the roads network than the former than the latter. Now, 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 in thinking, well, this is just ripe for manipulation.

Maybe it's just the privilege of owning a vehicle, whether you do 10 miles a week or 1,000, 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. just think the mileage thing is going to be, I fear, going to be a real difficult thing to police manage and is going to end up costing even more money as a result.

Gary Comerford (: 47:57

Yeah,

yeah, too many loopholes in there. Would you support, controversial opinion, would you support an additional cost, half a pence, penny per kilowatt hour, added to EV charging, either public charging and or private charging?

Sam Clarke (: 48:12

For what?

Gary Comerford (: 48:13

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?

Sam Clarke (: 48:32

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 the she drives an EV now, but before she did that, the petrol price has the tax, the the effect, the equivalent of VED is, is, 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 different, 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.

Gary Comerford (: 49:41

Yeah, it's, I've got a Zappi. My Zappi 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. 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, could determine a price, an additional levy per kilowatt hour. If we were to go down that route.

Sam Clarke (: 50:05

But then

there would have to be a law that enforces you to share that data in order to be taxed accordingly, right? Otherwise it's at your gift to declare 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?

Gary Comerford (: 50:13

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, good point, well made.

Sam Clarke (: 50:35

Thank you.

Gary Comerford (: 50:35

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 ChargePoint operator network. Now we've already seen a number of ChargePoint operators who've been subsumed into other ones. Did we not have one today? Pod have taken over EO. Yup. So I think that's, is that four or five that's happened this year? Now, again,

Sam Clarke (: 50:56

Yeah.

Gary Comerford (: 51:04

a little bit crystal ballgazing where we're going to be in 10 years time how many charge point operators are there going to be.

Sam Clarke (: 51:10

Yeah, again, caveatting comments are very much my own on this one. But how many are they going to be? So what have we got at the moment? About 150 different CPOs. And that's too many, I think. There's too many small operators there. The networks overlap too much. The utilization is uneven. And probably, arguably, that creates higher cost of

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. So what's going to happen? think in an island, the size that we are, the number of vehicles we're to have on the road, you know, I can't, I don't know off the top of my head, Gary, maybe you do know how many fuel different fuel providers are in the UK and whether or not that's a good barometer or not. thinking out loud, but you know, if there's

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 sort of 10 or 15 CPOs that govern the whole of the UK in public charging, I'd be a bit nervous about that. 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 a growth market.

Lots of people vying for a market share and now things are being consolidated down to a point. don't know, my crystal ball 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.

Gary Comerford (: 52:55

I think if we look at a Webfuel, I think there's something like three or four big supplies. You've got the BP, Shell, Esso, 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 a can of worms. I think you'll agree, yeah.

Sam Clarke (: 53:26

Yeah, yeah. But there's definitely some

benefit in it though. 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 and resources and and economies of scale and simplicity of software etc etc 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

Gary Comerford (: 54:06

Indeed.

why is there no Gridserve presence at the new motorway service area in Rotherham on the M1?

Sam Clarke (: 54:11

which I rather on the M1, can't which motor service area.

Gary Comerford (: 54:15

Junction 33,

it's a welcome break.

Sam Clarke (: 54:18

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

Gary Comerford (: 54:30

Why would two of the three main motorway service area providers, Apple Green and Moto, with whom you've had a long standing relationship charging wise, elect to start their own charger and offerings at sites where you already have a presence?

Sam Clarke (: 54:42

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, however long, 20 years, Christ, how long have I been 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 motor 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 motor service areas want to see what kind of market leverage they can do, I would imagine, in the same space as 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 have 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 fullness of time.

Gary Comerford (: 56:02

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

Sam Clarke (: 56:06

Thank you.

Gary Comerford (: 56:07

So I hope you enjoyed today's show. It was put together this week with the help of Sam Clarke. thanks for his time.

Sam Clarke (: 56:07

Yep.

Gary Comerford (: 56:12

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com and on the socials I'm on bluesky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. So why not follow me there?

Thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon on a monthly basis and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one. If you enjoyed this episode, why not buy me a coffee? Go to coffee.com slash EV Musings and you can do just that. KO dash FI dot com slash EV Musings. Takes Apple Pay too.

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Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as the links in my regular evening musings newsletter and associated articles. Now I know you're probably driving or walking or jogging or in the shower or washing the car but if you can remember and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes please, it really helps me out. I did go out and go in and have a look recently at some of the most recent reviews. Thank you very much for those who took time to do that for me.

Gary Comerford (: 57:41

Now, if you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me using zv.bsky.social with the words wide and varied. Hashtag if you know, know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co-founder, Simon, and I'll fill this bit in later.

Sam Clarke (: 57:58

we are privileged to be reasonably high-profile individuals in the EV industry and people do listen to what we say.

Gary Comerford (: 58:04

Thanks for listening. Bye.