How to build an electric highway - Interview with Simon Crowfoot

Automotive IQ recently spoke with Simon Crowfoot, Board Director of Ecotricity, about the current state of Europe’s infrastructure for electric vehicles and how regulation and legislation affect today’s commercial market players. Mr. Crowfoot, how would you describe the market situation in the UK for investors in EV charging infrastructure? Today’s business model is very challenging and therefore it is going to be very capital intensive over the next few years. It’s difficult for private investors to make any money out of car charging because the infrastructure is very expensive. Although the way the industry is funded has transformed, in that it’s now more balanced between government and private investment, government is still going to have to carry on investing. The capital requirement is going to be significant and way ahead of any profit return. If the government does not continue to invest, the whole structure will grind to a halt. Your government repeatedly announced substantial commitment to offset the cost of installing infrastructure for recharging electric vehicles. How successful are they? The government engagement tends to lag behind what’s required. The very process of getting investment proposals through the governmental process means that by the time they get agreed, they tend to be a little bit out of date in relation to what’s required. Let me give you a very simple example. We’ve already installed infrastructure on all the motorway networks in the UK, but we’re now coming up against the challenge of having sufficient grid power for scaling that, which is insufficient grid power. The government is considering what role it should play, and it may take some time to reach a conclusion. In fact, it may not be until after the need, which is there now, has changed. But this is just a part of the way governments operate. They need to see statistical evidence and proof points in order to commit funding, but by the time you have those, the funding would ideally have been available much earlier. [inlinead] Yes, government still needs to be involved, but although the nature of how they fund has evolved a number of times, it is going to need to continue to evolve, because the infrastructure is evolving as all the players learn from one another. In July 2011, you installed the first electric vehicle charge point. This marked the beginning of your Electric Highway – the UK's first national motorway network of charge points for electric cars. What are your biggest challenges in further developing that network? The UK motorway network already has recharging stations every 15-20 miles, installed by us. The next challenge is how you scale that. How do you install 50 at every location? It’s not about putting the network in place; it’s about ensuring that it grows in line with expectations. It’s a circle. We’ve put it in, it’s very successful and is being used much more intensively than we forecast. Therefore we now have to look at scaling it more quickly than we had planned. Now we have the statistical proof to show that it works. There is clearly a direct relationship between the amount of rapid charging available on the motorways and the number of EV cars that get sold. We didn’t expect to have this problem this quickly. Two years ago, there were no rapid chargers on the UK motorways. Now there are rapid chargers at every single motorway station, and the new problem is that we need more and more of them. The challenges are, how many we need, what capacity we need to plan for, and the cost of increasing and updating the infrastructure. We had planned for the forecast capacity, and that wasn’t enough. We have found that there is not a direct linear relationship between the sales of vehicles and the usage of rapid chargers. The usage is much, much steeper than the sales of the vehicles. Efforts to standardize fast charging protocols for electric and battery electric vehicles are still ongoing all over Europe.Where do you see the need for standardization and harmonization? If we were going to have a harmonised charging protocol, then all the manufacturers in Europe would need to agree on a single protocol, but they don’t. In France, manufacturers are doing one thing, Japanese and Germans manufacturers are doing another thing and Tesla is doing something else. So we have in effect four or five charging standards that we have to deliver, because the market can’t agree, and the EU can’t force them to. From my perspective it is very doubtful that we will see harmonisation occur over time, because I think that as quickly as we work out how to make that happen, new star charging standards and technologies will come along. They will be higher powered, quicker, and if they do not replace existing systems entirely, they will simply have to be added to them. I’ve got effectively four standards on the motorways: medium AC, fast AC, CHAdeMO and CCS. I have to accommodate all of those for all of the drivers from a technical and cost perspective. But it is the car manufacturers who have led us to this place. What do you believe to happen with different standards over the next years? One of today’s manufacturers - I don’t know who - will be working on a new standard: a faster standard and bigger batteries, and that will become the norm. So, we will have to deal with continuing to operate and growing both the legacy network, the one that currently exists, and the new technology as it arrives. That’s because we will have to support the existing community of cars as well as what comes in the future. That’s our job. Some people have concerns the driving range of electric vehicles won't be enough to meet their needs, a problem known asrange anxiety. Electric vehicles including plug-in electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are limited by driving range – how do you approach this challenge? We built the electric highway primarily to do two things. The first was to ensure that cars were filled up with green energy, because we’re a green energy company. The second was to remove the question of range anxiety from a customer considering purchasing an electric car. It’s true, there’s a large technical barrier to mass adoption of pure EVs. Battery technology has to improve. Unless you can reduce the weight by 75%, improve capacity by the same amount, and charge them up to get two or three hundred miles in five minutes, it’s not really going to be a complete alternative to traditional transport. That said, I’m much more optimistic that the hybrid market will be completely transformative: it’s all about what’s fit for purpose. From your experience, how sustainable is the current market demand for electric vehicles? The electric cars out there other than the Tesla are completely designed for a specific role in people’s lives. They are small hatchback cars that are aimed at people who tend to commute a relatively short distance and can top their car up every night. Electric vehicles are not designed to be sales executive motorway cruisers, whereas a hybrid can be any kind of car, and there are some great hybrid cars. Hybrids are a great bridge for a lot of customers because they reduce the risk of needing to quickly learn and master the EV space. People buying a hybrid now may buy an EV next time around, so it’s a baby step into the world of EV. It’s especially good that now we’re seeing parity of car pricing. The Outlander is the best example, because the electric version is sold in the UK for exactly the same price as the diesel version, and most people are going for the plug-in hybrid. That’s going to teach an awful lot of people what the electric component of a car is all about. Simon Crowfoot is a board director for Ecotricity the Uks largest renewable energy company and MD of the Electric Highway. Ecotricity has constructed the largest rapid charge network in Europe powered by renewable energy. Previously he held Senior Director roles at Tesco, Sainsburys and DSG Group. Simon Crowfoot will speak the ‘1st Electromobility Charging Infrastructure Europe 2020’ about Building a successful national rapid charging network – The Electric Highway. Related Stories: Way ahead for Norway! How to build a charging infrastructure for electric vehicles - and succeed! Worldwide Incentives for Electric Vehicles

How to build an electric highway - Interview with Simon Crowfoot

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