Jet Charge’s Geof Alexander came to the EV charging industry from the fast growing fintech industry but he’s found this sector can give fintech a run for its money in terms of rapid change. His presentation was a whirlwind tour of the promises on offer to decarbonise transport and the impact this could have on the grid’s transition.
The Melbourne based company has been growing significantly in the past five years and now had around 170 staff.
“We cover everything from residential to large bus and truck installations,” Alexander told the audience.
The exposure to a big range of work had given the company “a lot of expertise” to assess what was is needed on various sites, which typically vary significantly.
It’s been involved in a lot of different areas from fleets, to charging infrastructure for buildings, including the trial of 60 EV trucks outlined separately by Team Global Express’s ESG project manager Summer Steward.
“The TGE experience was a really big project for us and it used a lot of our different capabilities and functions,” he told the audience.
But it’s not a public charge point operator. “You won’t see us competing with Everty,” he said, nodding to the company’s founder Carola Jonas who was also in the audience.
The company’s brand might appear on many charging stations “but that’s often because we’ve either manufactured them or we maintain them.”
It distributes hardware and manufactures its own AC charger, ChargeMate, which makes up around 3000 of the 12,000 chargers it’s installed to date. But it’s largely agnostic about what products to use.
“We’ve built our own software stack which gives us a lot of flexibility to control what we do when we do complex projects.”
On top of that is the company’s values to be an advocate for the industry.
“Tim [Washington] and Ellen [Liang, a co-founder along with Jay Robinson] are everywhere when EVs are mentioned.
“So it’s really important for us that we are out there advocating for this change.”
Among the company’s major objectives is load management in a building, “and that’s our core product.”
“We do sell it into residential but what we’ve seen on that front is the market is getting very competitive and commoditised around AC charging.”
There’s a lot of low-cost competition from China.
We need better streamlined EV access
A big need he said was to streamline the experience for EV owners. One big change on the way is the need for credit card facilities for charging.
“There is a requirement now for all government funded public charging to have a credit card payment option, because at the moment, if you’re an EV driver, you probably have a folder on your phone which has 10 or so different apps that you need to use to authenticate to pay for different charging sessions.”
“The strongest part, and one of the biggest challenges with EV charging at the moment, is reliability and uptime. So if you are going to a site, you’ve got the kids screaming in the back, you want to know that it works.”
The UK had already mandated this. “In Australia, that’s the case for government funded chargers, but it will start to roll out more broadly.”
This makes the software stack all the more important for the company Alexander said, “to connect it all together.”
“The strongest part, and one of the biggest challenges with EV charging at the moment, is reliability and uptime. So if you are going to a site, you’ve got the kids screaming in the back, you want to know that it works.”
And that’s a challenge at the moment given the current level of maturity of the industry and the mix of technology and standards.
The EV superhighway
Among one of the company’s biggest achievements its part in in building the EV superhighway, a globally recognised achievement that means an EV driver can go from Perth to Kununurra.
It was a big project for the company, requiring a “real mix of hardware and software installation, he said.
Charging at home – and what happened at Woolies North Parramatta
Back at a more domestic level Alexander said that 80 per cent of charging today occurs in the home, and it’s likely to stay that way.
Public charging will be similar to filling an ICE (internal combustion engine) car and it can be either fast or slow.
At Woolworths at North Parramatta though the charging station for the first few weeks was the busiest “probably in the southern hemisphere.”
Given it isn’t the wealthiest area in Sydney it was perplexing – until the research came through.
“A lot of the adopters of EVs are those who have longer commutes – they can get the benefits.
“But there’s a lot of apartments in the area and installing EV charging in these is challenging, but while the AC charging was free and the DC charging was at a price, it was the DC charging where a lot of the volume’ was coming through.”
It was an interesting learning opportunity for Woolworths, to better understand the human behaviour angle for these kinds of facilities, Alexander said.
Home is where demand response can kick in
Home charging is where we can start to do demand response, Alexander said.
“You can adjust the time of use of where those vehicles are charging so that that home space gives you the longest dwell time for those vehicles.”
Bi-directional charging is coming
The answers on this “hot topic” are still in the mix, Alexander said, but what’s clear is that “bi-directional charging is coming.
“The idea that you have these giant batteries sitting around on wheels being used for a fraction of their capacity is a huge asset the grid.”
Batteries in EVs are getting much bigger and some EVs are now at 65 to 70 kilowatts.
In the US the Ford F150 pickup truck has a 98 to 131 kw battery and Ford advertises to its customers that this should be enough to power their home for about three days.
“So that’s a huge amount of potential that is just sitting there waiting to be unlocked.”
Australian trials
In Australia there has been a number of trials, “a lot sponsored by the ARENA (Australian Renewable Energy Agency).
“We’ve participated in a couple of those where we’ve taken the hardware, connected it, got it to the grid, measured the results and being able to control those charges as needed.”
One good breakthrough is the government’s announcement in July that wants to have standards in place around charging infrastructure.
That’s particularly good news for a company such as his that wants to invest in more R&D, but so too the manufacturers and network connections that need to align with better streamlined developments.
And that’s still a challenge.
“It’s a really hard synchronisation problem.”
Customer behaviour and incentives
The next part to understand is customer behaviour.
“If you incentivise people with time of use tariffs, do they change their behaviour?
“In the event you might be able to take control of the charger and switch up or down as needed those behaviours are going to be really important in the transition.”
Alexander said there is no overestimating the enthusiasm of consumers who are “very interested” in the tech side of the offering. People like his uncle Bob who is an engineer and has written “10,000 lines of Python code” to control his house, the solar and feed in tariffs.
“The industry is made up of Bobs” he said, but the challenge is to scale up the market to the next level.
Questions and answers
Alison Scotland asked if the foundations are set to have the holistic conversations clearly needed for the task.
Forums such as this were “obviously a big, big part of that”. Companies like AGL are trying to work hard around business models and where they fit into the end game.
“I do think that we’re having the right forums and the right discussions. It’s just trying to change habits and habits are hard to break. Ultimately, the way we use energy has to change. We’ve grown up – and my generation and generations before me – have been incredibly lucky to benefit from what has been some one of the biggest impacts to the quality of life of individuals, and that is cheap, reliable electricity, and that’s underpinned by fossil fuels.
“We know that has a negative externality, and we need to move away from that.
Owners can benefit from high prices
In Melbourne when a storm knocked out power lines at one vehicle to grid trial of 16 vehicles, those EVs managed to send 107 kilowatts of power to support the grid at a time when prices spiked.
“So those lucky owners managed to take what was a very, very high electricity price and turn it to their advantage so quickly.”
There’s more than one solution – how about charging as a service?
Another important issue to consider is there is no single solution. For instance, one customer wanted four chargers put into a building. The cost was around $50,000. “Too high”, was the response. So the company suggested to put three chargers in parking spaces that were right next to the switchboard, avoiding trenching and other expenses. Cost? $18,000.
But even better is if the charge provider can do a charging as a service option. Which means the infrastructure and any technology upgrades would be taken care of and the customer pays a fee – around $178 a month.
But where to put the charger?
Next question to answer is where to install the charging service? Employees work a lot from home so maybe the answer is to install the device there, Alexander said.
“EVs are going to be moving around, and charging should be based where they are spending their dwell time.”
But the level of bi-directional charging for EVs was still very low.
What about charging your car at night when the grid is powered by brown coal?
About half the people who want charging already have solar on the roof, Alexander said.
The next most important element is an app that allows smart scheduling to charge the EV only when the solar is at peak performance.
Alan Fok from Charter Hall wanted to know what the biggest challenges were with the Team Global Express trial for 60 EV trucks
One was the absence of standards in how trucks communicated with chargers Alexander said. This resulted in some vehicles switching off and not accepting a charge as expected.
It’s an issue that Alexander said was “pretty consistent” across trucks and light vehicles, so this required modifications to power system to ensure the company’s firmware “actually talks to the trucks”.
Ifan Jones from the City of Sydney wanted to understand what the key issues were for installing EV charging in apartment buildings.
Alexander said the biggest challenge was human, the “micro politics” involved and the issue of fairness – such as around the expensive backbone that needed to be installed and who would use it.