With electric vehicles making an increasing impact at the forefront of the energy transition, it makes sense to consider the impact of electric vehicle fleets and the value chain of fleet EV charging that businesses can take advantage of. In advance of the team’s upcoming webinar, we spoke to Delta-ee electric vehicle expert Alex Lewis-Jones to learn more about this research.

How do you define a fleet?

Earlier this year, my colleague Philippa Hardy wrote about the launch of OVO Energy’s Vehicle-2-Grid charger. This Vehicle-2-Grid (V2G) charger is set to be used in project Sciurus, one of eight Innovate UK V2G demonstration projects launched this year. From this summer, the projects will begin distributing thousands of these units across the UK, as the largest ever deployment of V2G technology across Europe.

While exciting and poised to revolutionise electricity markets, V2G remains at this demonstration phase rather than being fully ‘commercialised’. We recently reviewed the current status of this V2G market and in this blog we share some key findings.

BP has announced the purchase of the UK’s largest charge point supplier and operator, Chargemaster. It is the latest in a string of acquisitions in the battle for the Electric Vehicle (EV) customer and BP appears to follow in the footsteps of Shell, its key oil major rival. What then does the EV business mean for the business model of an oil major?

Diversification

In the energy sector, we hear a lot of discussion about “the customer”. On the one hand this is great to hear; a sign that an industry that hasn’t traditionally been customer centric is now gradually becoming more so. But it’s also a horrible generalisation – one that we have also been guilty of.

Of course, there is no such thing as the customer, especially when it comes to electric vehicles. There are myriad different customer ‘types’, differing in a multitude of ways, from hard characteristics such as their driving habits or whether they have off road parking, to soft characteristics such as attitudes, values and preferences.

For utilities, the rise of EVs presents as much opportunity as it does threat, as a recent blog from my colleague Jon Slowe has described, so let’s unpick the opportunity, and discuss how new-entrant energy supplier Octopus Energy is positioning itself to capture part of the prize.

Octopus Energy is a good example of an innovative, agile player that is moving quickly. With less and less doubt about the future value at stake, a key question is how companies can go about capturing this value and avoid being left behind?

Last week several of the Delta-ee team attended E-World in Essen, the annual German energy industry Congress & trade fair, and we would like to share some of our takeaways from the event.