287 - The Supermarket Charging Episode

Gary Comerford (: 00:00

Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

On the show today we'll be looking at charging while you shop.

from a pro point of view, you're already there. So why not? I mean, you go to the supermarket on a regular basis. And if you're like me, you have to drive there. If you're in the middle of London, probably less so. So while you're there, why not, instead of parking and having the car do nothing, just hook onto a charger and pump some electrons into the car while you're doing nothing. It's the old adage of I don't stop to charge. I charge where I stop.

Now our main topic of discussion today is supermarket charging. Supermarkets have been selling petrol to the public for many years. They tend to use own brand outlets rather than invite companies like Shell, BP, Esso or Texaco on site. And as a generalization, they sell petrol at a price which tends to be lower than the average high street price. For example, at the time of writing...

Shell in my local area is selling petrol at 133.9p per litre. My local Morrison's is selling at 128.9, a saving of 4p a litre or 18p a gallon. At the next town over, Shell are priced at 137.9 a litre, with the nearest Morrison selling at 128.7, a difference of over 9p a litre or 41p a gallon. It's generally thought that supermarkets do this.

as a loss leader by selling petrol at below cost. in recent interview I did with Sainsbury's, they assure me they don't sell it at a loss. Now this means they're using various pricing strategies to reduce the price per gallon to the absolute lowest it can be and still make a profit per litre, even if that's a penny or even a half penny a litre. The idea is to bring you into the store where you'll buy more stuff.

So on the face of it, charging your car at a supermarket is something that should be quite normal. After all, as I've just said, we've been filling our cars with petrol at supermarkets for many, years. Why would charging be different? It's quite surprising to learn therefore that supermarket charging as a concept wasn't something that was embraced by the industry in a big way until relatively recently.

but it has actually been around in smaller versions for a long time. Way back in time, GeniePoint struck a deal with Morrisons to add a single 50 kilowatt charger at most of their stores. I spoke with Dee Humphries, who was at the time the CEO of GeniePoint, about this in one of my earlier round table episodes. Number 141, I had her, Tom Hirst from Fastned, and James McKimey, who was with Podpoint at the time, to talk about their respective companies.

And one of the things that came out of that discussion was that a single low power charger at a supermarket probably wasn't going to be the sort of thing that would be the long-term solution. You couple that with poor hardware choice and a high charging costs at GiniPoint. And it's no surprise that these were very poorly received and I would imagine had very low utilization. And we'll come back to Morrison's a little later on. Next up with Tesco who employed Pod, formerly Podpoint, install

a couple of chargers in each of larger stores. They were free to charge to start with, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rising fuel prices meant they added a tariff to chargers at their sites. Now this had the dual effect of decreasing utilization, but also freeing up chargers for people with a genuine need rather than people who found it cheaper to leave their car on a Tesco pod charging overnight to charge for free rather than using their home electricity, which would cost them something.

Then in a move which surprised a lot of people, supermarket chain Sainsbury's made a big play in the supermarket charger field by installing a lot of high power, chem power chargers at a large number of their stores in a rather short time. At the time of writing, they've gone from zero to 81 hubs at their stores, providing fast, reliable charging at a cost that's high, but not as high as many others in the market. In fact, the head of Sainsbury's smart charge, Patrick Dunn,

told me that when he surveyed or when they surveyed customers, price did not come out as the highest priority, but it was down around two or three. Now, not to be outdone in the supermarket charging stakes, Lidl got into the game. They had seven kilowatt chargers and a number of their stores usually branded as Potpoint, but they then created their own charge point operator and installed usually a single 50 kilowatt, three headed charger capable of CCS, CHAdeMO, and AC charging.

in one place. They now have hundreds across the country with a large number of them within the M25. There are also chargers at pretty much every major supermarket brand, although not at all stores. Asta have them, Waitrose have them, Marks and Spencer have them, different CPOs, different prices, different charge speed. I will cover charge speed in a moment. Now I want to loop back to Morrison's for a second or two.

I mentioned that GeniePoint worked with Morrisons and installed a single 50kW unit at almost every suitable store. A couple of years back, MFG, Motor Fuel Group and Morrisons came to an agreement where Motor Fuel Group purchased 337 of the Morrisons petrol forecourts and 40 associated sites and would be using them for ultra-rapid EV charging development. What this meant was that GeniePoint were out, generally speaking, and MFG were in.

At the very least, the old GeniePoint units were ripped out and replaced with rather neat looking MFG dual head 50 kilowatt chargers. At best, it meant that complete new hubs were installed with dual headed Alpatronic units, canopies and other facilities. They were targeting the installation of 800 ultra rapid 150 kilowatt EV chargers in hubs within the first five years alone. Pretty impressive. All at around 79 pence kilowatt hour at time of writing. Not the cheapest.

but most certainly not the most expensive.

So summarizing the move, we've gone from not having any charging at any supermarkets 10 years back, to having slow charging at some supermarkets, to having rapid or ultra rapid at a lot of supermarkets, all within a relatively short period of time. Now, of course, nobody's releasing utilization figures yet, but a cursory glance at ZAPMAP at random times of the day indicates that a lot of these larger, more powerful hubs tend to get good occupancy and utilization.

For example, I checked a random sample of smart charge sites in London and it wasn't unusual to find over half the units in use and in some cases only two out of seven units available for use with the rest being occupied. Now this is obviously great news for companies like Sainsbury's and if you want to hear more about the Sainsbury's story, I did a complete episode with Patrick Dunn from Smart Charge, episode 227, link in the show notes.

So let's have a look at the pros and cons of supermarket charging.

Well, from a pro point of view, you're already there. So why not? I mean, you go to the supermarket on a regular basis. And if you're like me, you have to drive there. If you're in the middle of London, probably less so. So while you're there, why not, instead of parking and having the car do nothing, just hook onto a charger and pump some electrons into the car while you're doing nothing. It's the old adage of I don't stop to charge. I charge where I stop.

Now the next thing to look at from a pro point of view is loyalty cards. Supermarkets were always good at allowing you to use your club cards and loyalty cards when buying petrol. It's a great way of rewarding you for doing something you'd need to do anyway. Now Sainsbury's have done this with their smart charge offering where you can earn nectar points and at the time of writing it's one point per one pound of charging. Now as they've got those nice fast ultra rapid chem power charges, if you're doing the big shop you might be able to put 40 pounds or 50 pounds of energy

into your car while there. That's 40 or 50 nectar points. Not nothing, but nothing to be sneezed at.

supermarket charging can actually be cheap. One little known fact with supermarket charging, especially if it's seven kilowatt rather than the high powered stuff that companies like Smart Charge provide, is it can actually be quite cheap to use the charging facilities. At a local Aldineer, my parents, POD, formerly PODPoint, are providing seven kilowatt charging at 25 pence a kilowatt hour. Now just to put that in context, that's cheaper than a charge at my house.

if I'm not using the overnight rate, because I'm about 29p.kWh. Checking that map though, it does seem that that's restricted to Aldi supermarkets in Yorkshire, but it doesn't mean that there aren't others with tariffs such as 30p.kWh elsewhere in the country. So let's have a quick look at the cons then. And this is where we come into the concept of dwell time. Now dwell time was always going to be an issue with supermarket charging. Ideally, you need to charge it in there that will allow you to take the maximum amount of energy.

with a variable dwell time. Now dwell time is the amount of time a customer will spend at a particular location while charging. As an example, if you're at a hotel staying overnight, your dwell time can be eight, 10, 12 hours. A relatively slow speed charger is more than enough with that sort of dwell time. But something like a McDonald's, for example, has a relatively short dwell time. If you've got a park up plug-in go for your food,

wait for the order, eat the food and then leave, you're probably gonna be there for a maximum of 30 minutes, unless if it's me by myself, for example. So a seven kilowatt charger is gonna give you about three kilowatt hours in that length of time. On an efficient EV, that will get you 12 miles of range. It's not nothing, but it's not gonna make a drastic difference unless you're 15 miles from your destination with just five miles left on the go.

This means that the ideal charges need to be in place to deal with the appropriate dwell time. If we look at a supermarket, I reckon the average dwell time is about 30-45 minutes. Some people such as me, I like to be in and out quickly, no messing, one basket, self checkout. Some people do the big shop for the month, take an hour to do that and have to wait even longer for the queue at the checkout. So I'm going with 30-45 minutes as an average. Now,

The other problem with, and we've mentioned it earlier with supermarket charging is it can be abused. And we've already talked about people who decided, particularly back when the prices were cheap, to plug in at a supermarket charger all night rather than pay for their home charging. There's all sorts of abuse that's related to that. And of course, the color to that or the opposite to that is that it can be expensive, as we've already said. Jeannie Point at the Morrisons.

are priced up around 90 pence a kilowatt hour, which is extortionate. And when we spoke to SmartCharger back in season 12, they told us that they thought the power they were supplying for charging, which is 350 kilowatts, was enough for their dwell time. And SmartCharger certainly seemed to capture the EV driver's imagination with their instantly recognizable chargers at the major sites, some of which are actually co-located with their on-site fuel station. So there's one not far from here, Bracknell, for example, that has that. We also mentioned Morrison's earlier on.

charging, but at the start of: 2024

and replace them with some similar low power, fairly slimline MFG 50 kilowatt units. In places where the power is higher, they've installed the standard MFG EV hub with the canopy, the blue and white coloring, tire pumps, air hoses, water, things like that. There are two Morissons near me. One has the simple 50 kilowatt unit and the other has the whole canopy, Alpatronic chargers, et cetera. So it's quite a tale of two halves.

So that's supermarket charging. It is, as I said, a tale of two halves. Some have gone for charging in a big way and installed ultra rapid hubs and lots of units. The price themselves a little higher than others, but customers seem to be, I'll say happy. Let's say going along with it, shall we? Others are stuck with longer dwell time AC charging, often, but not always, at cheaper rates. Now for many people, it's the look of the draw.

If you're in some places you can get AC charging for 25p/ kWh, which is phenomenally cheap for public charging. In others it might be 75p/ kWh for ultra-rapid DC charging. So what's your experience of charging at supermarkets? Let me know info at evmusings.com. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's

Gary Comerford (: 13:09

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. On the socials I'm on bluesky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at evmusings where I post those little short videos in the odd podcast extract regularly. Why not follow me there?

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Gary Comerford (: 14:34

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 at evmusings.bsky.social with the words, "Do you get points with that? #ifyouknowyouknow, nothing else. Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. You know he rarely shops at supermarkets, has everything delivered. Thanks for listening, bye bye now.