Waiting for the charge on electric vehicles?

My brother is looking at my rust-pitted camper van with barely disguised disgust. “Are you getting a new car?” he asks, with a tone that instantly takes me back 30 years, and not in a good way. “You should get an electric,” he adds. I squirm and mutter: “I’m not sure it’s the right time.” It is early August. A hundred miles away, by an alarming coincidence, the prime minister’s former spokesperson was saying the same thing. The time was not yet right, she said, for her to buy an electric vehicle. She cited the same concerns that I mumbled at my sibling: the lack of charge points, range anxiety, the cost. On balance, she said, she’d rather stick with her third-hand VW Golf. It is not an uncommon view. A survey commissioned by Nissan earlier this year showed that while 70% of us with gas-guzzling planet-killers would consider going electric with their next car, 30% would not. What made her views controversial is the fact that it was Allegra Stratton, and she had just been appointed the official spokesperson for COP26. “Yeah, that wasn’t great,” says James McKemey, head of insights at EV charging outfit PodPoint. “She got rather panned for that.” The feeling was that Stratton should know better. According to my brother, I should know better too. He works for an EV charging company called Osprey Charging. He’s something technical. I distinctly remember him telling me this during a Christmas FaceTime. So, tasked with writing about the industry, I call him up for a little guidance. It turns out he is standing in Farnborough airfield with thousands of other EV enthusiasts at the FullyCharged Live! show, presented by the guy who played Kryten from Red Dwarf. “I’m not doing your homework for you. This isn’t school.” His boss is a lot more quotable. “In less than nine years’ time, buying a new petrol or diesel car will be impossible,” Osprey’s chief executive, Ian Johnston, says. “So it’s crucial that public charging infrastructure stays ahead of the curve.” There have been electric vehicles for longer than you might think. Since the 1830s, in fact. The first production EV was built in Wolverhampton in 1884. In 1900 there were nearly twice as many electric cars as those gulping gas. Indeed, Henry Ford bought one for his wife. It was only the fact that oil was cheap that led to the rise of the internal combustion engine. Now we are witnessing the second rise of the EV. In the past month nearly 600 new chargers were added to the public electric vehicle charging network, capable, in theory, of charging 900 cars at a time. The UK now has, according to ZapMap’s data, around 44,000 public connectors sprouting out of 25,000 devices in more than 16,000 locations. That’s about one connector for every 14 cars. Which is great. For now. How many chargers are needed? But by 2030 the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned. By then the number of electric and hybrid vehicles on our roads is expected to rise from around 600,000 today – roughly 300,000 of each – to 18m. In 2035, those hybrids will be banned as well. By 2040, according to the National Grid, there will be 36m EVs in the UK. By 2050 the transition will be complete, and all of the UK’s estimated 49m vehicles are expected to be electric. It is universally agreed that to match the demand the UK needs to be installing far more chargers. What is not agreed is how many. The CMA says we need a minimum of 250,000 public chargers, a tenfold increase on the current supply. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders says we need more than 2m chargers. That would require us to install not 600 a month, but 700 a day. Talk about range anxiety. It seems like an impossible distance to cover. But each day there are new announcements of more infrastructure, more investment. BP currently has the UK’s biggest charging network. In February, Shell bought Ubitricity and now wants to install 50,000 on-street EV chargers over the next four years, which would hand the energy company a third of the public charging market by 2025. Ubitricity is already rolling out charge points on Shell’s forecourts and at other locations, such as supermarkets. But the 50,000 on-street chargers will be discreetly stuffed into street furniture such as lamp posts or bollards. The only problem, it says, is finding enough places to put them. The Ordnance Survey is currently using a novel approach to find a solution to that issue, running a “hackathon”, which allows the public access to its premium data in the hopes that more sites will be uncovered. But still the roll-out is in the hands of local authorities. And while they are being offered 75% of the installation costs by a £300m government grant, finding the right sites, and the remaining 25% of the money, has meant that cash-strapped and time-poor councils have been slow to sign up. “You need a hero at a council who wants to lead on this,” says PodPoint’s McKemey. “Otherwise it just isn’t going to happen.” The owners of large estates – such as Cadogan in London – are pushing ahead with their own plans to line the streets with chargers. And other innovators, such as Andrew Jones at LondonMetric, are buying up acres of streetside property to put EV chargers on. Postcode lottery But the roll-out of on-street chargers has been “slow and is very patchy”, according to the Competition and Markets Authority. In a report published in July, it warned that access can be a “postcode lottery”. The total number of public chargepoints per head in Yorkshire, for example, is a quarter of those in London. The House of Commons’ public accounts committee has blamed the government for this, saying that despite a number of incentives and targets, there was still “no clear plan”. Meanwhile, the deadline keeps getting closer. But McKemey says we are a lot closer to building a viable network than we might think. The figures people quote for the number of chargers plugged in are for the public network, he says. That 2m figure is for the total network. “If we include home and work chargers, the figure is much, much higher than 44,000.” Podpoint, which is 23% owned by L&G, is building up both sides of the network. Its tie-ins with Tesco, Volkswagen and Lidl have put hundreds of chargepoints on to ZapMaps’ map. But arguably its main business is to create the hidden, private network and McKemey says it is installing thousands of chargepoints a month. “We overvalue the public network,” he says. “Home and work chargers will do most of the charging.” Most of us fill up at a petrol station when the tank gets low. And we do this because each time we start the car in the morning, the tank is a little, or a lot, less full. But what if it wasn’t? With an EV, if you have a drive or a garage, you come back home and plug it in. Your domestic supply tops it up while you sleep and in the morning it still has 300 miles of range. If you can also plug it in when you get to the office, you will leave work with 300 miles of range. So much for range anxiety. Building regulations Building regulations will soon require smart EV charging points at every new development, whether residential or commercial. I look out of the window at the street where I have parked my fossil fuel fossil. I imagine a sleek and shiny EV instead. Right now it would be merrily charging away. If I had a drive. Or a clever lamppost. And there is the problem. Nearly a third of drivers, rising to 60% in cities, have no access to off-street parking. They simply cannot charge at home. I point this out to my brother. No drive, no point, I say. I’d have to go somewhere to charge it. “But that’s exactly what you do now!” he points out. Right now there are a scattering of EV chargers at petrol stations and motorway services across the country. Some are great big shiny hubs, like the one Gridserve opened near Braintree in Essex at the end of last year. The hubs have been dismissed by some as expensive vanity projects which promise more charge than they can actually draw from the grid. But there may be method in it. Currently the National Grid has more than enough capacity to charge EVs, but it is all spread out. However, that could change. Estimates by National Grid indicate that EV charging could add 3 to 8GW to peak demand by 2030. By 2040 that could increase to between 13 and 20GW. Energy experts are predicting that distribution network operators could start curtailing the roll-out of residential EV charger installations. Instead they are likely to favour more on-route hubs, with rapid chargers and a nearby substation with extra capacity. Osprey said in September that it would spend £75m creating more than 150 hubs across the UK, with the first on site in Wolverhampton. They will sit on busy A-road junctions and adjacent to motorways, offering 1,500 ultra-rapid chargers. And they will be fitted with a clever piece of tech that stops the whole system from getting overloaded and gives each car the power it needs. This summer, Motor Fuel Group opened its first electric-only forecourt, at Stretford between Manchester and Chester. The site has eight ultra-rapid charging points, which can give enough juice in 10 minutes to last an enabled electric vehicle 100 miles. But as well as opening new hubs, it wants to convert old ones. MFG owns 925 petrol stations and forecourts across the country. “And the majority, the vast majority of our network is freehold ownership,” says MFG’s director of EVs and strategic projects, Ed Chadwick. “So we are in a prime position.” MFG has committed £400m to convert all of its pumps across its portfolio to electric. And it is spending £40m this year alone. “As a baseline, we intend to have 500 sites by 2030,” says Chadwick. “But depending on the pace of change, given that single ownership, we can speed that up as necessary.” For those anxious about going EV, knowing where to charge is a problem. Where MFG has an advantage is that people already come to its sites to fuel their vehicles, they are just using a different fuel. “By doing it this way, behaviourally there isn’t going to be a huge change for customers,” says Chadwick. But the petrol stations have not gone electric yet. Constrained by old-fashioned thinking I call my brother back. Look, I can’t charge at home, or work, or at the petrol – sorry, electric – station. So I get what Stratton means. That’s because you are constrained by old-fashioned thinking, he shouts. But using different, less print-friendly words. Come to think of it, he doesn’t have any way to charge at home. Neither does PodPoint’s McKemey. He can’t charge at work either, despite working for an EV charging company. “I use destination charging,” says McKemey. “Or rather, my wife does.” She charges the car at her gym.  So is going to a fuel station to charge your car “old-fashioned thinking”? Possibly, because what we should be doing is recharging everywhere we go. Go to the shop, charge your car. Go to a restaurant, charge your car. Go to a football match, a wedding, the cinema or your daughter’s sports day – charge your car. The threat and the opportunity For real estate, this is both the threat and the opportunity. If you don’t have somewhere for people to charge in this brave new world, your asset will simply cease to be somewhere people drive to. In other words, everywhere that you want people to spend time, build a charger. And it will be money well spent. Transport for London estimates that, on average, EV chargers pay for themselves within five to seven years. Elon Musk is, of course, looking at it the other way. Instead of putting his chargers in fast food outlets, he is planning to create a fast-food chain to build around his Tesla chargers. Great, I say. Cracked it. Every property company that wants to future-proof their business just needs to get as many of the really big 350kw chargers as it can. Fastest chargers equals best location, equals best value uplift. Right? Wrong. One main limitation to the forecourt model is that drivers are only refuelling their vehicles for 2-3 minutes on average. That doesn’t leave much time to shop. And yet we still manage to spend more than £5bn a year on the forecourt, not including the fuel we went there for. But for electric vehicles? The charge time is currently around 15-20 minutes, even on the ultra-rapid chargers. But one study by ChargePoint found that electric vehicle chargers could increase dwell time by as much as 50 minutes. Because people want to stick around. It’s all about matching the charger to the optimal dwell time, maximising the offer you give to the customer, giving them reasons to stay, reasons to spend, reasons to come back. No one form of charging network can hope to support all the EVs, not to mention the electric commercial vehicles, that Britain will have by 2040. Instead, says MFG’s Chadwick, it will be “a fusion of charging while at home and at work, at the supermarket or cinema, at a restaurant or on the roadside or on route”. What is clear is that we need more of all of them. A need for speed The rate at which the infrastructure is being funded and plugged in is impressive, but nowhere near fast enough. McKemey recalls the early days of the business. “It had the aesthetic of a failed Dragons’ Den pitch. We’d show up lugging a charger unit into a council office.” But now the funding is starting to appeal to bigger funds that want safer investments. “All you have to do is get more electric vehicles on the road and then those guys will say ‘OK I‘m in’.” In other words, it is a classic chicken-and-egg situation. Investors are holding back from pouring money into providing more chargers until they see more people switching to EVs. And people are reluctant to buy an EV until they see more infrastructure. My phone rings. “So are you going to buy an EV?” my brother asks. “I’m not sure it’s the right time,” I reply. There is a sigh, followed by an ellipsis of bleeps. Maybe he’s run out of battery. To send feedback, e-mail piers.wehner@eg.co.uk or tweet @PiersWehner or @EGPropertyNews Image © Gill Allen/Shutterstock; Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock