Gridserve has relaunched the Electric Highway charging network it recently acquired from Ecotricity under its own branding after beginning a programme to upgrade the network with more advanced and powerful chargers.
It has also announced plans to spend more than £100 million installing banks of ultrafast chargers at 50 of the locations.
Gridserve took a 25 per cent stake in the network in March before buying the rest from Ecotricity in June. In the six weeks since then, the company has replaced more than 80 of the old chargers at over 50 locations – a rate of around two sites per day. It plans to replace the entire network of almost 300 chargers by September.
“There are more than 150 locations across the Electric Highway network; 132 of them are at service stations and our priority has been to just get those replaced as quickly as it is possible to do so, with good, reliable new kit that also includes contactless payment and all of the latest technology,” Gridserve chief executive Toddington Harper told Utility Week.
“People who are EV drivers who have used Ecotricity’s chargers will know they’re not the most reliable. They’re ten years old or so. I mean they were great years ago, or rather they were the best that were available, but they’re just nowhere near good enough for what we need today. Mission one is just to fix that quickly.”
Harper said the new chargers are currently able to charge at a rate of around 60kW – a 20 per cent increase over the old 50kW chargers – although the chargers themselves are technically capable of providing more power: “The challenge is the grid capacity that’s available so we’re looking to bring in additional technologies to spread the amount of power that’s available between and within the chargers to be able to provide everything that’s needed to charge every vehicle as easily as possible.”
He said the new chargers, of which there are one to three at each location, are also capable of charging two vehicles at the same time: “That technology isn’t yet turned on because we’re waiting for a software update but it’s ready and it will be turned on shortly. That not only means that we’ve put new chargers in but we’ve doubled the amount of simultaneous charging sessions per location.”
Gridserve relaunched the network from Toddington Services, one of the latest sites to have the new chargers installed. Harper was named after the motorway service station, which his late father was involved in building almost 60 years ago.
The company is additionally planning to install “Electric Hubs” at 50 of the locations, each featuring six to twelve ultrafast 350kW chargers. The first opened in Rugby in April and the firm is aiming open at least ten more by the end of this year, starting with sites in Reading, Thurrock, Exeter and Cornwall.
The Electric Hub in Rugby was built alongside one of Tesla’s Supercharger stations. “Those Tesla chargers are great if you happened to have a Tesla,” said Harper, “but if you don’t have a Tesla, it’s not available to you, and what we’re building is something that is very similar to that but is available to anybody, including Tesla drivers as well.
“We’re really trying to boost and bolster capacity as much as we can in the earliest possible timeframes, which is challenging because there’s a lot of grid connection complexities to work through, because often times these sites are in quite remote locations. They weren’t designed for the amount of power that we need.
“That’s why they take a bit longer because we’re putting in new grid infrastructure in addition to the chargers themselves. Ecotricity were working on that for a lot longer than we have been. They started that process a good while ago so we’re taking that forward and that’s why we’re able to accelerate this quite dramatically, because it was already had a pretty good foundation.”
Back in December, Gridserve opened the first of the 100 “Electric Forecourts” it is planning to build across the UK at Braintree in Essex.
Harper said the Coronavirus pandemic has presented some major challenges but things are going well: “The majority of the time has been in a lockdown scenario, where most of the facilities on the site weren’t open either, but the good news is that along the with the rest of the country we’re gradually opening more and more elements to it, and we’re seeing very encouraging results month on month.”
He continued: “It’s a difficult time but soon we are looking forward to a period where we can invite everybody over with open arms and really start engaging as much as possible with the local community.
“In the absence of being able to do that fully, the results we’ve had so far are extremely encouraging. People seem very happy. If you look at the sort of reviews we get online, Google Maps in particular, they’re constantly five stars which is brilliant.”
Harper said: “We’re finding there are quite a lot of people who have bought or leased electric cars in the vicinity, and really interestingly with people who can’t charge at home as well.”
“As a result of that we get a fairly regular flow of customers, which is pretty helpful for us too,” he added.
Under its partnership with its financial backer, Hitachi Capital, Gridserve has been offering electric vehicle leasing from the site, which can include access to its charging network as part of the service. Harper didn’t give an exact figure for the number of leases it has sold so far but said: “We’re going to plant 100 trees for every vehicle that we lease and we’re in the process of planting our first 10,000 trees.”
He said: “We’ve had a pretty vertical learning curve it’s fair to say over the last nine or so around electric vehicle leasing but we’re now getting into the groove. We know what we’re doing, we’ve got a really good team, we’re doing leasing deals and every month we do more.”
Harper said they have begun building the next four Electric Forecourts in Norwich, Gatwick Airport, Gateshead and Uckfield: “When you build an electric forecourt – as far as I am aware we’re still the only ones to have built one – you learn a lot and we have learnt a lot, and there’s lots of things we will optimise and improve for the next sites.”