Why Smart Charging Matters with ev.energy

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Transcript

Elena: Just to bring the listeners up to speed, would you tell us about your background and led you to what you’re working on today?

Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. I’m the head of North America at ev.energy. EV Energy is an EV charging software platform. And really what we do is sort of serve as like the connective tissue between electric vehicles and the power grid. And we work with utilities and grid operators and also EV drivers themselves, to make sure that electric vehicles are charged for the driver when they need it, but also done it in a grid friendly way that balances demand, integrates renewable energy, directs renewable energy to EV batteries and importantly saves drivers money, so EV energy has been around for five years and my tenure with evey energy is about five years as well, which has been great sort of seeing us grow from a very, very small startup. We actually started in London we initially launched in the UK market. We’re very active in the UK in Europe, but we also have a large presence in North America. And prior to that I was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. I was working in their energy practice. So I did a lot of work with utilities, energy companies all across sort of renewable and distributed generation.

Elena: Excellent. So this makes you the key person to have this conversation. So we are we’re gonna be checking all the boxes here. So let’s talk about vehicle grid integration. When you initially had messaged me about this idea for an episode, I thought, Yes, this is such a great idea, because I don’t really hear much talk about it. So we’d love for you to just step by step and walk us through how EV drivers, EV owners they can earn cash from their utility to help prevent blackouts. We know it’s blazing hot outside, right and let’s be real it is so hot. Right so, so how can evey drivers turn their charging into cash?

Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely a very topical moment to be discussing vehicle and grid integration, just given that much of the US is in the middle of a major heatwave right now. I mean, I woke up this morning to news that temperature is expected to hit 110 degrees in Phoenix today. There was a big article, I believe is in the New York Times that if there were a blackout in Phoenix today in this weather, as much as half the population can end up in the emergency room. So this is a very real topic, you know, where our power grids our nation’s power grids that were built like 100 years ago, you know, our creaking under the demand just for air conditioning, really with extreme heat. And now we’re electrify our transportation system and adding additional demand for electricity onto this power grid. That in some places was already quite unstable. So it’s definitely topical time to be discussing this. I think one of the pieces of good news that I’ve learned working at evey energy is that electric vehicles don’t need to be a liability for the power grid and when sort of intelligently manage, they actually can become an asset to the power grid and actually shore up the resilience of the power grid. So let me give you maybe like a few examples. So let’s actually just start with kind of the concept of smart charging. This is what we do at evey energy and the the concept of smart charging is if someone comes home and they want to charge their Eevee, you know, they might plug in around, I don’t know 6pm Or whenever they get home. Those are typically like peak hours for utility. That’s when everyone’s getting home. They’re using appliances. There’s a lot of demand. Not a great time to charge, but typically they don’t need their car. It’s like the next morning maybe 6am right so let’s it there’s like 12 hours often it’s closer to like 14 hours window in which you have to deliver this charge that the customer needs but typically, you know for a residential customer charging on 240 volts, which is like the standard kind of what we call Level Two charger in a person’s home or you know, a condo parking lot. Typically they only need about two to three hours of charge depending on how like depleted their battery is. And so what that means is that there’s this sort of opportunity for optimization over when we deliver that charge and so the very basic concept of smart charging is scheduling that two to three hours within the best time for the grid, right? And that might be overnight, you know, that might be between, you know, midnight and 3am. It might be between 3am and 6am or it might be you know, just starting at 6pm and just start charging immediately. We work with utilities and grid operators to get sort of live signals from them on power generation with congestion to basically calculate when that charging session should take place. So that’s the basic concept of smart charging. And maybe I can talk about sort of a couple of real life examples of where this is happening. One such example is actually where I am right now it’s in New York. We work with Con Edison and Orange and Rockland utilities their sister utility to deliver the smart Church in New York program. This is the nation’s largest smart charging program. In America. We’ve got over 10,000 electric vehicles enrolled in this program. And you know, really what they’re doing is they’re earning cash for avoiding charging during the peak hours. And so what that means is they’re getting money for charging overnight which is better for Con Edison. And then there’s actually a summer bonus in the month of June in July where we are right now, where if they avoid charging during a specific window two to 6pm, which is really when the distribution network in New York City tends to be quite overloaded with air conditioning demand and other things. You know in the summer, they get additional money on top and so what we’re seeing is that the average Evie driver in this program is earning about four to $500 a year just for being a little bit flexible around when they charge their Eevee and they still get their Evie charged by the time they need it. So there’s really no inconvenience to the driver. It’s literally just cash back in their wallets. And this actually happens goes directly to their paypal or Venmo account. They don’t have to wait for it. They get the money pretty instantaneously, which is awesome, right? You know, think about it like $500 a year that’s like basically covering all of your chargeback costs so these are people who are getting charging essentially for free. Which you know when you already look at the lower cost of ownership of an electric vehicle that’s huge savings. I know you want to talk about mass market Evie adoption and the affordability factor but I think these kinds of things are really important to consider right as EVs become more affordable. We’re getting more people into electric vehicles in the first place. And as we make charging more affordable as well. It’s going to drive even more people into electric vehicles.

Elena: Logistical question for you, do I get like a ping on my phone where it says Elena, the best time to plug in your vehicle today is that midnight or does it do it automatically for me like walk me through the logistics of like I’m a part of this program? How do I know what time to charge? Because it sounds awesome. Like I’m ready for the 500 bucks to come to my Paypal.

Joseph: Yes. So we offer a couple of options. Typically within the EB energy mobile app for an EB driver. The first option is exactly what you described. You know, you’ll just sort of get a ping on your phone telling you the optimal time to charge and then it’s up to you to sort of plug in or set a schedule maybe you know, a timer or something like in your car some cars offer that the other thing is a set it and forget it option that we offer with EB energy. And so what you can do is actually you can just enter into the app, I need my battery I want to at 80% by 7am Tomorrow, and then you set it and forget it and we actually scheduled a charge for you and we’ll do it whenever right so maybe it’s the middle of the night right I’m 3am Like do you want to wake up go out of bed and like go into your garage and charger EBI through Of course not. Now just let Evie energy take care of it for you. And we’ll do that and so what we see is that most Evie drivers go with that set it and forget it option, because it is just so convenient.

Elena: And it’s so that your app is then connected to a level two charger at my home. How does EV Energy talk to my charging device?

Joseph: Great question. So EV Energy uses API’s so like wireless internet, essentially and we can talk to what we call both ends of the cable. We can talk to your charger, right? So if you have like a charge point, a juice box, it’s a wall box. We talked to all of those brands of chargers. We could do it that way. But we also find that everyone has got what we call an internet connected charger at home that can kind of like talk to a third party and so we’re also able to talk to the vehicle instead. Most electric vehicles come with a SIM card inside of them, like connects them to the internet that powers ation system streaming, you know other things and we actually use that internet connectivity to just send the charging schedule to the vehicle itself and that means that you don’t need any sort of special hardware to participate in the smart charging programs.

Elena: Amazing, amazing already thinking through how I would do this for myself and for my Chevy Bolt that I have in the driveway. So talk to me about bidirectional charging. What does that mean? Just break down all the things.

Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. So bidirectional charging is a relatively new technology where you know, instead of us just thinking about kind of importing electricity into the evey battery at the best times we’re also thinking about maybe discharging electricity and sending it back to the grid when it’s really needed. Now I think this is a concept you know, as we sort of talked to Evie drivers and we’ve run a bunch of studies as well and EV energy. I think a lot of EV drivers are kind of wary about at this point. And I think for very valid reasons. It is a very new technology. But the reason why it can become important is we have this problem in certain parts of the country where electricity is generated particularly like from solar during you know sort of daytime hours but it needs to be it either needs to be consumed immediately. Or stored somewhere. And we do have battery storage but it’s expensive and we can’t really play it fast enough. So unfortunately like a California some solar electricity actually goes to waste, like the grid operator actually has to cut off solar farms sometimes because there’s not enough demand to soak up that generation, which is a, you know, a real travesty, right for the planet and for the grid. And so what we’re piloting and other companies as well are piloting we’re doing in the UK, others we’re doing it in California is this concept of bi directional charging or V to G vehicle to grid and so the concept there is like let’s charge an Eevee battery to like 100% when the sun is shining charge it with 100% renewable energy store that renewable energy inside the evey battery. And then when the sun sets and it’s still hot during the summer and the California grid operator is looking at supply and demand and seeing oh my god, like we might have blackout we might have to do rolling blackouts as has happened in California in recent years. We could actually discharge Evie batteries and send some electricity back to the grid and what we call a virtual power plant. So instead of a big you know, power plant generating like lots of electricity and steam and other things. Lots of EV batteries all across the state, sending a little bit of electricity back into the grid to shore up its resilience and prevent a blackout. Now when we talk to evey drivers, I think the common thing is like half the people just say like no way like don’t mess with the battery. The other half is open to it but wants to make sure that they get compensated for it right because you’re you’re selling electricity, right and you shouldn’t be you should be compensated as a generator. And so that’s one of the things we’re working on is sort of figuring out okay, like what is the right amount you know, to pay driver holds, what’s the fair amount based on sort of electricity, wholesale market prices and the driver situation? To be completely honest, no one’s figured that out yet. It’s a very new technology, but it is coming and I would expect by the end of this decade, that bi directional charging and vehicle to grid is going to become fairly common. And you’re going to be seeing actually a lot of Evie drivers making money from their electric vehicles sending electricity back to the grid.

Elena: Alright, so this is gonna have to be my new side gig to sell my my energy back to the grid. It’s so fascinating because then it also reminds me of using your car as a generator to generate electricity for your house like say that there have been some crazy storms here in New Jersey and the power goes out. How can I use my EV to power my house? Right because that’s feasible now. Correct?

Joseph: Yep. That is a real thing. The Ford F150. Lightning is one of the new EVs has come to market that supports that. But that one we call vehicle to building or B2B. So it’s a little bit different. And it’s the same concepts, right? And when we talk to evey drivers, actually, the folks are a lot more comfortable with that. than necessarily sending it back to like an anonymous power grid. But absolutely, I mean, you know, all across the East Coast. You know, there are very powerful storms we’re entering hurricane season next month and blackouts are just a common occurrence and they could be majorly inconvenience if you lose power for hours or days and the great news is that we are seeing EVs like the F150 Lightning come to market that can actually just hook up into your home and basically serve as that backup generator. They have huge batteries. And instead of having to buy you know, like a diesel power generator, actually you just use your EV so you’re saving 1,000s of dollars in cost there.

Elena: So Joseph, thank you for the conversation. I would love for you to share how folks can get in touch with you if they’re interested in learning more about Evie energy and where they can find you on the internet.

Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. If you want to learn more about EV Energy, you can just go to our website ev.energy and you can learn more about our business. You can download the EV energy app it’s free to use for the public and there’s also a contact form.