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The start point for the best source of fleet information |
Urban legend has it that the end credits of Eastenders are peak time for the UK's National Grid. Quite a lot of people leave the telly running, wander into the kitchen, and flick on the light and the kettle. The strain intensifies at the end of something like the world cup final, but that does not happen four times a week. Either way, neither is the best time to charge an electric car, either from a cost or a CO2 perspective.
Renewables accounted for 43.1% of the country's electricity in 2020, according to the National Grid, while nuclear was 16% and fossil fuels made up the rest, but that is by no means a permanent state of affairs. Renewables are at their strongest when the conditions are right - sunny and windy - and fossil fuels are increasingly dialled in when demand goes up, so that is when energy gets dirtier and more expensive.
It is no secret that power is cheaper overnight and, again, that is because the mix of renewables is greater. Demand drops when most of the population goes to bed, and fossil fuels shrink to a dimly burning wick.
This is fundamentally Ohme's game. The company makes smart charging gear, primarily for domestic use, and specialises in exploiting the cheapest and the lowest CO2 windows. Plug into one of its chargers overnight, and it knows when to start and stop drawing power, so you wind up with a full battery for the lowest possible outlay of funds and emissions.
Founded in 2017, the company has recently dug into the fleet sector good and proper. This year, it become the main charge point supplier for Motability and Zen Auto - Zenith's personal leasing arm - while former Nissan and Seat fleet boss Peter McDonald joined as mobility director in September 2021.
Here is his take on how the charger works: "[It] has a 4G shift built in, so it goes into the grid [and] the customer downloads an app when they first take and fit the product. The driver tells us what the car is - we can API (Application Programming Interface: intermediary software that allows two applications to talk to each other) to some of them - and that's important, because it allows us to understand the size of the battery and its state of charge. We know, for example, 'that's a 40kWh battery, and it's 50% charged'.
"We can also interact with things like pre-conditioning, so if the driver wants their car to be 20 degrees centigrade at a particular time, we can activate that and incorporate it into the charging schedule."
Users are also asked for a commute schedule (it can be updated or overridden) and the idea is that the company knows what time the car needs to be charged each day - say, 7am - before the driver usually hops in.
The only other obligation of the customer is to disclose their energy supplier and, as McDonald explains, "we work with any energy provider; it doesn't matter who it is. We have a peak list that effectively tells us what the tariff is, because tariffs can be a bit different, and there might be certain hours that are cheaper than others.
"It could be that the cheaper hours on someone's contract are 12 to 4am. With the knowledge of the [car's] state of charge, we can then say, 'is the car going to be charged in these four hours or not?' and, if we need to, we might start the charge a bit earlier, but we will maximise what it does in those four hours."
He reckons the CO2 savings from using such a charger amount to around 70% compared with a standard item.
"The rough math we use is something like this: you drive a [Volkswagen] Tiguan for a year, you generate about three tonnes of CO2 in petrol emissions. If you switch to an ID.4 and you charge it at the grid's peak, you generate a bit over a tonne of CO2. We've got drivers on our platform that generate as little as 200 or 300kg of CO2."
McDonald freely admits that drivers could identify optimum charging times themselves by using the National Grid app, but they would have to pay pretty close attention for quite a lot of the time to get anything like similar results. He also claims there is a benefit to leaving a vehicle hooked up to one the company's chargers for longer - say, days at a time for those who work predominantly at home - because it broadens the window from which the charger can draw cheaper and cleaner power.
The company's flagship charger is known as the Home Pro, which retails at £949 including installation. It said it can be found for less from certain vendors, and it is reasonable to assume that fleets ordering in bulk could expect a discount. Some distributors offer packages that spread the cost over a period of up to four years, while Jersey Electric has a deal that bundles the price of the charger and a portion of the electricity payments into one monthly fee, based on predicted mileage. As the name suggests, it is only available in Jersey for now, but an Ohme spokesperson told Business Car it is expecting other mainland UK providers to follow suit.
It also sells a slightly cheaper charger called Home, which costs £899 but is a little less sophisticated than the Pro model in terms of the level of control it affords the user.
Specifically on the fleet side of things, Ohme has a management platform designed to reimburse drivers for charging at home and elsewhere. It also illustrates the split of costs between domestic, workplace and public charge points, can distinguish between business and personal usage and display cumulative CO2 data, which users can offset against their sustainability targets.
"What fleets will want is some reporting insight on the cost of their energy and the ability to reimburse drivers," says McDonald, who adds that the system will absorb and display information from chargers located at employees' homes as well as on-site ones.
"The platform allows fleets to connect chargers together, so if you're a fleet manager, you could effectively take my charger, your charger, and all the other chargers that connect to that fleet, and you'd have the ability to measure the kilowatt hours, the cost, and the CO2. The fleet might end up doing things like tracking business and private mileage. [and] we can measure that and reimburse the driver for them."
The firm is also courting businesses with lower cost charging systems that are easier to install, because it does not believe that every fleet - particularly van or job-need operations - will pay close to four figures to install a charger at each employee's home.
"Commando sockets are big industrial power sockets - you often see them in warehouses or at camp sites - you can pay to have one of those fitted to the extremity of your house, and it costs around £300 [for the socket installation - not the charger]," explains McDonald.
"They can carry 7kW, so that's the same as a wall charger, and the cable has got all the same smart stuff as the wall charger. It helps you save CO2 and energy costs, and it provides you with the fleet platforms."
The cable product, which plugs into the commando socket, is known as Ohme Go, and it costs £449. At the time of writing, the company was running an offer for Octopus Energy customers, who could buy it for £299. It is also portable, and the kind of thing that could be returned to the business or bundled in with the lease deal.
"The big benefit for those fleets is the cable can go with the car or van, so it can be leased, and it will be in the residual value after three years," adds McDonald, "it's quite hard to claim a wall charger, so if that member of staff [with a cable charger] moves house, the cable is not lost. Yes, you've had to pay for that commando socket to be installed, but it ends up being hugely cheaper and a lot more mobile, and we think those operational fleets will be looking for more flexible, lower cost solutions."
Along with the commando cable, the firm also offers Type 2 and three-pin plug connectors, to render older chargers and vehicles with smaller batteries compatible with its services, and McDonald does not think the appeal of cheap and cheerful cable chargers is limited to utilitarian applications, as they may suit staff on fixed-term contracts.
"Lots of fleets we're working with have a sales force, and they might be employees that don't have a long tenure in the business. If you're a fleet manager and someone is only going to be staying for six months, how do you justify close to £1,000 for a wall charger for them? I guess they will be thinking either 'don't take EVs' or they will be looking for a more flexible solution."
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