Series 9 – Episode 1 – The promise of electric vehicle charging technology

Indra is an electric vehicle technology company. It started off kind of like a consultancy, working with small and medium car makers on battery storage for EV conversion and other kind of projects around electrification of vehicles.

Around 2016, the company realised that clearly electrification was coming for vehicles and smart energy was definitely growing as a sector as well. So, it started looking at what was next.

The world of electric vehicle charging is exciting, but it can also be confusing with various terms floating around, such as Vehicle to Everything, Vehicle to Grid and Vehicle to Home. During this podcast, Schooling details what each of these terms means and the benefits they provide.

There are some challenges when it comes to EV charging technology though. Schooling said: “We’ve seen a lot of innovation trials…but we’re still a year or so away from being in the right place.

“We’ve got people that are proving savings, but they’ve got no way of seeing how they did that.”

Recent spikes in energy pricing have drawn into focus the cost and sustainability of our energy supply. Most people believe that switching to an EV is expensive, but EV charging can actually help homeowners save money and even generate an income.

Schooling notes: “With uni-directional charging it’s all about time of use. Do you utilise local renewables? Quite a number of hardware providers now will allow you to basically monitor local solar and then divert that if the car is at home.

“You can also look at energy tariffs and time of use tariffs. So, if you were to sign up with Octopus on a time of use, you can get seven and a half pence overnight versus about 34p in the day.”

Schooling goes on to speak about the two most common types of bidirectional charging – V2G and V2H – and the differences between them, as well as offering his thoughts on how he sees EV charging technology evolving in the future.

To hear more about EV charging technology and much more, you can listen to Electronic Specifier’s interview with Mike Schooling on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.