EV Charging Un-Network... or the decentralization and stratification of EV charging infrastructure

-

an electric car next to a portable charger

As a Futurist I like to think about scenarios that could happen, not would or will happen. This is not about predicting the future but playing with what we know today and thinking about how these basic assumptions might be challenged in the future.

In this earlier post I described a hypothesis where an aggregator could enter the market to help with the fragmentation, as of May 2023 some 13 different EV charging networks, and what this means for user experience.

In this post I will challenge the assumption that we have inherited from fossil-based fuels:

    "car users go to the refill location, for petrol the petrol station, for EV the charging point"

You can see the numbers of charging points available in Thailand today and these are by no means evenly distributed. There are other forms of friction in the experience. A few I mentioned include:
  • What to do during the additional time needed to charge an EV compared to the drive-up to the pump experience.
  • When charging in a shopping centre or office the need to move your car once charged, and the difficulty in finding an alternative place to park.
Playing with that second point and thinking about the situations where this becomes an issue to inspire scenarios. This can also be applied to Condo living, and given the prevalence for EV ownership in younger generations and the fact that these tend to be the same people entering the property market with Condos what are the options?

Let's unpack the idea of Portable Charging as a Service (PCaaS). This is a variation on the more traditional Charging as a Service (CaaS) which is a subscription based model to power. Essentially, PCaaS tests that basic assumption and brings the charging infrastructure to you. This is clearly useful in scenarios like:

  • Your home charger has not got you what you needed, maybe you forgot to plug in, maybe your 6A home charger is broken, maybe you had a power cut, whatever the reason you haven't got enough juice;
  • You're on a drive and you've come up short of your EV charging point destination. You just need a top-up to get you that last bit and you don't want to be towed and get on the low-loader-of-shame (if you've ever driven a recent model Volvo you know what I mean :) )
This is not a new idea, merely an upgrade to the more traditional roadside recovery services you might expect to use today. In fact the UK's RAC has been doing this for a few years already (see the write up on electrive.com here).

This is an important step for fleet managers. looking at the signal from Sixt on what they have been trialing as part of the electrification of they hire-car fleet (as an aside and as a footnote to the comment on washing the car at the same time, here in Thailand there are several Geowash franchises up and running as well as 2-wheeler based solutions that will come to your house and wash your car for you). The other obvious place is in garages and tire fitters where a robust, but portable, EV charging station provides flexibility in bay usage.

Coming back around then to a bridging solution. Whilst all new shopping centres and condos may require "built for EV" design principle the retrofit effort to lay in EV charging infrastructure on the urban canvas today is no small undertaking.

Adoption of portable EV charging solutions offers an effective way to accelerate electrification goals without the capital expense of total rewiring. Building out a charging hub on a parking floor with a pod of portable chargers would go a long way to offsetting "EV drivers charging anxiety". 

Some examples:

Whilst in Thailand there is an ever growing number of networks I have yet to become aware of an un-network provider that offers this kind of service, who will be the first? do you know of one already? happy to hear about it in the comments below.





 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Looking Fourth... & The Blog

-
Image
  & The Blog... Looking Fourth Why is this blog called Looking Fourth? This is a supplement to my personal side project, The 4th Horizon . For the last nine years I have been working with Microsoft in all things to do with digital strategy and digital transformation. What became apparent is that the majority of customers, large and established businesses, were struggling with the practicality of trying to identify, prioritise and execute transformation projects grounded in technology. A small team combined and adapted concepts like McKinsey Three Horizon Model x and Geoffrey Moore's horizons as laid out in his work "Zone to Win" x . Every model and framework has strengths and constraints are they are more or less relevant depending on the context. "All models are wrong, but some are useful"     George Box, 1976                           So, whilst both horizon models have merit...
Read more

Complexification to Simplification: Using visual tools to describe the problem space

-
Image
    & The Blog... A Picture Paints a 1,000 Words Why are visualisations such a powerful part of transformation and change management? in part it's because a single image can convey a lot of information in a much more compressed format than writing everything down. I think we can all agree on that. I also think that it's because many people have a better connection with something they can see than something they can read. In part it's because for many of us it's easier for us to create our own mental image and our part in it, as well as interpreting it in our own way. As a systems thinker I don't constrain myself to one or two methods. I range across the spectrum of systems methodologies as build a multi-method approach that makes sense for the transformation and where we are in the phase of that change activity. I'm a big fan of Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (or SSM). A very important part of this method is the Rich Picture. Over in the  The...
Read more

Electrification Aggregation.... or the role of an intermediary in removing friction in EV charging in Thailand

-
Image
It's been great to watch the increase in Battery (BEV) and Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV), as car owners we chose to move to PHEV around 18 months ago.  The rationale for PHEV versus BEV was driven by an observation of the distribution of EV charging stations and our own behaviours in terms of location. If you live in Bangkok and very rarely leave, a BEV is a truly viable option, for us less so (for now). You might call it hype, you might think about innovation distribution, or some other frame of reference that helps you find the right box to frame your observations on the state of the EV charging in Thailand today. At the time of writing this in May 2023 there are 13, yes thirteen, different EV networks. Each has their own app, and each requires yet another username and password to be remembered. It shows the latent potential that so many organisations are choosing to invest in network build out, this is not a small capital expenditure process. To me as a user it's ju...
Read more