Smart Charging and Virtual Power Plants: EVs, Data, and Clean Energy

William Goldsmith (00:02)
We’re here. We’ve got a big mission. We’re trying to accelerate the decarbonisation of transport and energy and make charging greener, cheaper, simpler for everyone. So with that big ambition, we need to be ambitious in the different things we do.

Adam Sroka (00:38)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I’m delighted today to be joined by William Goldsmith, Director of Market Intelligence for ev.energy William, thanks for joining us. Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became Director of Market Intelligence?

William Goldsmith (00:54)
Hi, Adam. Yeah, great to be here and speaking with you about electric vehicle charging and virtual power plants today. I started out in the energy sector, actually, I think in one of the coolest places that you can begin a career in this space. And that was actually in the National Electricity Control Centre. At the time, part of National Grid, now its own sort of publicly

own sort of separate entity in the form of the National System Operator. But yeah, it was a fantastic place to really learn, understand and appreciate what goes into managing our energy system and keeping the lights on by balancing supply and demand literally on a second by second basis.

Adam Sroka (01:44)
That is in at the deep end, I imagine. How many people is that? Like, what’s the setup there? How many folks are in that? Because I imagine it’s like, in my head, it’s thousands of people and dials and switches.

William Goldsmith (01:54)
Yeah, so it’s obviously like part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. So there’s a little bit of secrecy around things like the location. There’s the main control room and then also like backup control rooms as well in different places. There’s a lot of support that goes into kind of running and operating the electricity system. So there’s a whole kind of team, different teams of people doing

energy, demand forecasting, network planning, that kind of thing that are more sort of 9 to 5 roles, Monday to Friday. And then the control room itself is on a shift basis. So that’s got to run 24-7, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, Christmas day, New Year’s day. So then you’ve got shifts and teams, different shift teams, manning the thing around the clock.

Adam Sroka (02:53)
Interesting, yeah. Anyone I know that’s worked there or tangential to it does have such a good deep knowledge of how things work. It must have set you up really well for the journey you’ve been on at EV. And so ev.energy is a bit of a startup success story as well, right? You’ve gone from UK-based startup to a bit of a global offering. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and some of the exciting stuff that’s going on?

William Goldsmith (03:20)
Yeah, so I sort of transitioned from what initially was a very sort of hands-on operation role into a strategic role at National Grid in group strategy, looking at the implications of what electrification of heat and transport was going to do to the energy system. And that was where I actually met Nick, who at the time was also working with National Grid, who’s the CEO and co-founder of ev.energy.

Adam Sroka (03:37)
Hmm.

William Goldsmith (03:50)
And I think what became like super clear and apparent then is that electric vehicles and transport electrification is going to have a huge impact on the energy system. But equally that there were two different narratives or directions the story can take. Either electric vehicles become a huge challenge and problem for the grid. So just if they’re left unmanaged, people come home, plug in when you get home from work. And around 6 o’clock, everyone starts charging

Adam Sroka (03:59)
Mm-hmm.

William Goldsmith (04:20)
which adds to your peak demand. And then what does that mean? That means billions of additional pounds or dollars in infrastructure investment. And it actually makes it really hard to decarbonise. So on the flip side, There’s also this huge opportunity where you’ve got batteries on wheels effectively sat on your driveway. The capacity alone, even today, there is 10 times as much storage capacity

sat on people’s driveways in cars than there is in all of the grid scale storage combined. So it’s this huge potential to actually be used as a huge asset for the grid. And then the big challenge and what ev.energy is tapping into in our mission to solve is how do you unlock that? How do you simplify charging, engage EV drivers, and turn electric vehicles into a virtual power plant?

Adam Sroka (05:14)
No mean feat though, right? Because like it’s not as simple as a grid scale asset that’s just going to sit there and mostly do as it’s told all the time. Yeah. You’ve got to contend with quite a lot of different stuff when you’re dealing with people’s vehicles.

William Goldsmith (05:27)
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of different parts to that. Firstly, is actually just these are people, you’re right, like the word consumer gets used in industry a lot, but actually consumers are just people and they’ve bought that car predominantly. Well, they bought that car to get from A to B, right? It’s a mode of transport. And so the energy flexibility side of it

Adam Sroka (05:36)
Mm.

William Goldsmith (05:53)
is really kind of secondary. So we really need to fit around that. And that’s why it’s so important to really design and build out the user experience when it comes to charging, particularly kind of smart or managed charging. Build trust with customers so that they actually understand that their needs are going to be prioritised and put first, so that you’re actually making or designing a service that

is helping them and making it simpler to charge, and then at the same time kind of showing the value and developing compelling propositions that also is making it cheaper as well as greener and delivering carbon savings as well by using cheap renewable energy.

Adam Sroka (06:33)
And so I like all the work I’ve done in this space has been mostly GB-centric. But how portable is the kind of learnings from what we do here to other markets and other territories because you’re in like global play now.

William Goldsmith (06:47)
Yeah, so we’ve got projects. We work with utilities all across North America and Europe. I’ve done a few other projects in Australia and other markets as well. But yeah, our two main markets today are the US, the UK, and now we’re starting to do more across Europe in places like the Netherlands. There’s a lot of similarities, right? So like, if you boil it down to the physics,

Electrons and power systems work the same everywhere. There’s no real change. What you find changes with geography is market structures and regulations, which impact how we deploy our solution and how we work with different clients and partners. And actually, there’s also some, I guess, differences in terms of consumer mindset

and differences between an EV driver in California versus Texas versus London.

on the market side, think the key differences are that in, in the UK, and now most of Europe, a lot of work has gone into unbundling the value chain in energy. And in simple terms, what that means is the sort of five different functions of an energy system. So you’ve got the system operator like the controller, and we spoke about the beginning.

You’ve then got the power that the generators, the people owning the power stations or wind farms generating the energy. You’ve then got a transmission system typically, which is the big pylons that kind of do, which is like the motorways. And then you’ve got distribution, which takes that, which is like your A-roads and B-roads that kind of take the energy to your home.

And then finally, you’ve also got the energy supplier or retailer who has that relationship in terms of billing you for energy and selling your rates and tariff. So I guess the core difference is in the UK and most of Europe, those are kind of all separated out into different companies performing an individual role. And particularly on the energy supply or retail space, it’s competitive.

And that basically just means that you get to choose who your energy supplier is and different suppliers can compete for the same customers. In most of the US and North America, utilities are still more integrated. So actually you might have a separate system operator, but the generation, transmission, distribution and supply all falls within a single utility or an integrated utility.

Adam Sroka (09:40)
Yeah, and I guess they’re quite local and disparate as well, because sections of states and things that are because it’s such an enormous landmass, right?

William Goldsmith (09:50)
Yeah, like how we operate in the US as well with the regulation, a lot of energy policy is set at the state level rather than the federal level. Every state has its own state energy office, which is the equivalent to in the UK, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. And so, yeah, each state we treat almost like we treat a different country in Europe.

Adam Sroka (10:13)
Do you have a favourite to work with?

William Goldsmith (10:16)
I get asked this question sometimes. We’ve got lots of amazing clients and customers that I enjoy working with a lot. In particular, if I’ve got to call out one, we work with a lot of community choice aggregators in California, which are kind of new sort of hybrid quasi basically like an energy retailer.

They don’t compete for customers in slight the same way. They win contracts to serve sort of communities and cities. And what’s kind of really interesting about them is they’re super aligned with our mission at ev.energy. And they’re also normally quite kind of small lean organisations that are set up as not-for-profits really to help drive cheaper and greener energy for their customers. So yeah, they’ve been a particularly kind of interesting and fun client to work

Adam Sroka (10:48)
That’s cool.

And just for the soundbite could you give the two sentence, three sentence mission description for ev.energy?

William Goldsmith (11:19)
Yeah, so ev.energy, we’re connecting everyone to cheaper, greener and simpler electric vehicle charging. And really doing that by the vision there is we’re managing the world’s EV charging everywhere. So that’s about connecting the EV ecosystem. So it’s engaging EV drivers, getting them to connect their cars and chargers to the platform, which involves a lot of partnerships with different

OEMs and hardware manufacturers. And then what we’re doing on the platform is aggregating that controllable or flexible load into a virtual power plant and then working with utilities to manage that. Ultimately to flex demand to align with renewable generation, which is cheaper and greener energy and really bring down bills for everyone because we’re reducing the peak system demand. So really reducing the overall amount of investment that’s needed

in upgrading infrastructure.

Adam Sroka (12:18)
That’s very cool. And so I’d love to, yeah, let’s fire into VPPs a bit, because it’s a favourite topic of mine. And we’ve touched on some of this stuff, but I guess for the unfamiliar, like how do EVs fit into the VPP landscape?

William Goldsmith (12:31)
So yeah, electric vehicles are kind of quite an interesting, you can sometimes like phrase like as an asset class. So when we look at virtual power plants, these have been really developing up over the last sort of decade or more. And initially really starting with commercial and industrial applications and load.

Adam Sroka (12:39)
Hmm.

William Goldsmith (12:55)
So lots of work done, really large scale supermarkets with sort of massive refrigeration loads has been projects on helping optimise and control loads for large supermarket chains, for factories on the kind of commercial industrial side. And then more and more there’s like grid scale storage, but connecting in at the distribution system. So we’re getting more and more battery developers and operators plugging in. Electric vehicles on the whole, mostly

We work with kind of commercial and fleet customers, but actually a huge amount of electric vehicles are take home and residential that charge at home and on people’s driveways. So that sort of falls into the category more of residential flexibility. And for context, an electric vehicle just charging it up uses almost the same energy as the average home.

So you’re almost like doubling the electricity consumption of the home, which is huge. So it’s by far one of the largest and most flexible home energy asset. And yeah, that creates a huge amount of opportunity to tap into. And it’s a real game changer really when it comes to distributed flexibility.

Adam Sroka (14:18)
And how does that play out as like, I have an EV, I have an EV charger at home. How do I see, I sign up to EV, right? How do I see the outcome of all that? Like me as just a homeowner, not technical. What does it mean for me?

William Goldsmith (14:32)
Yeah, so firstly, like as a homeowner, if you’re able to charge at home, that really makes life a lot easier. I have an electric vehicle, but live in an apartment and have to charge on street, which is more hassle. You kind of have to pay the rate that the provider sets up and provides. But with home charging, what’s great is you can really cut. Firstly, it’s simpler. So you just

come home and you can just plug in your car like when you go to bed, you’re probably just plugging in your phone like on your bedside table just by habit. And then you wake up the next morning and it’s charged. So it’s the same thing. You can basically avoid ever having to go to a gas station. Occasionally you might do an extra long road trip where you need to use public charging infrastructure, which is slowly improving a lot more work to do that. But it’s all right, it exists. But we see like over 80%

Adam Sroka (15:23)
Alright, man.

William Goldsmith (15:29)
of EV drivers charge at home and that’s where they do the majority of their charging. What that means is you’re typically plugged in if you plug in at 6, unplug at 8, you’re plugged in for 14 hours. But for most people and the daily commute or the driving you’re doing, at maximum you’re going to only need to do sort of 1 to 3 hours of charging, particularly if you’ve got a charge point. And so what that means is

When you do those 1 to 3 hours of charging, it makes a huge difference because the price of energy, although depending on your tariff might be fixed rate or you might have off peak hours overnight, in real time, the price of energy actually changes every hour, every half an hour of the day based on differences in supply and demand and how much renewable energy is on the system. So what ev.energy does is

Firstly, work with you. So you tell us when you need your car charged by and what energy tariff you’re on. So we know what electricity costs you at different times. So we’ll then optimise to make sure your car’s number 1: charged on time and we maximise savings on your energy bill. And then with the additional flexibility in the schedule, we work with a local distribution network, the energy supplier.

even the national grid to provide services back to the grid. But in aggregates was a whole community of drivers. And through that, we’re then able to pay back rewards and share those savings as cash incentives back to EV drivers.

Adam Sroka (17:16)
And so that’s just like, what, a direct debit into my bank account or like, is that you post me £20 notes? Like, how do I see those rewards?

William Goldsmith (17:24)
Yes, so different ways. In the UK at the moment, we’ve kind of got a voucher scheme set up. It’s Amazon vouchers, which is kind of cash equivalent in a lot of today’s modern world. But more in the US, we’re actually transitioning more to actually being able to just pay off part of your energy bill. So if you connect your energy account, we’ll automatically just take that out. So reduces your bill shock and we’ll pay off your bill directly.

Or with a lot of our programs in the US, we use PayPal or Venmo, which is a way of just directly transferring money into people’s accounts.

Adam Sroka (18:00)
It’s really cool to give people the options and my experience with our home charger setup now you get it all done and it is a hell of a lot cheaper than the like fossil fuel vehicles that we were driving but actually the money saved on not buying rubbish at the petrol station every time I go and try to like fill my car up that’s probably been the biggest saving for me and it’s quite funny like yeah just a can of this and whatever and all of a sudden you’ve spent another five quid every time

William Goldsmith (18:18)
Yes, the snickers of the Mars bar that gets you on the…

Adam Sroka (18:28)
top up. No, it’s been and my experience of the long car journeys and that like the range on these vehicles are increasing. Long journeys have become less of a hassle. I can get to London in a couple of charges now from Edinburgh quite easy. Doesn’t make it that painful. It’s kind of time I would have been stopping anyway. I can totally see the direction of travel. I’m interested to know what happens over the next decade with people like like what is it 30% of people that don’t have on street charging capability in the UK just because of the nature of

our housing stock and I’m interested to see where that goes. But one thing, a question I have for you was what are you looking at bi-directional services and what are the kind of barriers to, yeah, what are the biggest barriers you see in this story unfolding?

William Goldsmith (19:13)
Yes, there’s still huge amounts of innovation going on and happening in the space. And what’s really exciting about working at ev.energy is we’ve been going as a business, started as a young startup 6 years ago, so the 6 years ago now. And we’ve really been helping to sort of pioneer a way forward and help move and accelerate the industry, which is, yeah, just been a…

fantastic and a great place to be. When we talk about smart charging or managed charging, there’s different stages or levels that becoming experts in this space, we’ve tried to understand and develop and create this framework for the industry. So you start off with grid-friendly charging or

passive behavioural charging programs. And this is where we work with the utility, provide customer incentives to charge or not charge at certain times of day, but then the customer is sort of still setting a timer in their car rather than us like actively scheduling the vehicle. And this is great. It can really help shift peak load and can reduce costs

and deliver savings for customers, particularly where in the integration space, not all vehicles or chargers have the smart capabilities yet to really be part of an automated system. But what’s transitioning more and more to in sort of level two, stage two, is active managed charging. And that’s where we’re actively talking to your car and or charge points, creating

a unique schedule for your car every day that it’s plugged in based on your charging requirements and then what’s going on on the grid. And with that automated load control, it really opens up huge possibilities when we aggregate and scale this into a virtual power plant. So we’ve got over 200,000 electric vehicles now connected on our platform. So it’s tens, hundreds of megawatts of load.

That’s larger than a gas powered power station that we’re able to use to help balance the grid. Moving on from that, there’s kind two more stages to talk about. We talk about cooperative charging kind of around the smart home. So there’s a huge overlap between electric vehicle drivers, certainly early adopters and people with home solar.

Adam Sroka (21:45)
Mm-hmm.

William Goldsmith (22:03)
And so it’s like, okay, I’ve got an EV and you’re going to charge that at the right time. Great. But like what, how does that interact with my solar? And I’ve got like cheap energy at night with an off peak rate, but then in the day, my energy is also cheap because of solar. Should I charge in the day or at night? So this is a big kind of challenge that we’ve seen people have and developed solar smart charging really as the solution to that, which for without any additional hardware.

We forecast the solar output on your roof and have integrations now with like solar inverters to do real time load matching. So we’ll optimise your EV charging to soak up your like basically zero cost, zero carbon solar power during the day. And then if it’s not fully charged, your car needs a top up, we’ll then pause maybe in the evening period and then top up with the cheapest greenest grid power overnight. So that’s like smart coordinated.

And then you started asking about bi-directional V2X. So then bi-directional is when energy, as well as flowing into your car and controlling and scheduling, when that happens, you can actually push energy back to power your home, but also onto the grid. It’s got huge potential. We delivered a really exciting project in the UK last year, V2X Flex, working with a range of hardware providers and OEMs.

And yeah, we’re looking to launch more bi-directional pilots this year across the US and the UK. It’s got huge potential, but there’s still a few barriers to it. And I think the key thing is bi-directional charging also won’t necessarily be the best solution for everyone. Kind of helpful if you’ve got a driveway, probably some additional upfront costs. So if you’ve got some cash to invest and then you can get additional savings.

Adam Sroka (23:48)
Mm.

William Goldsmith (23:56)
So it’s really sort of a spectrum of solutions all the way from behavioural programs, active load control, smart coordinated, looking at other home energy assets with solar and battery, and then the bi-directional. And so what we’re doing is our technology enables that whole kind of range of smart charging services so that we’re able to provide solutions for different customer groups.

Adam Sroka (23:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it feels like a space that’s been emerging. I worked on a pilot doing Buster Grid probably five years ago now, 6 years ago now, and it was hard. Like it was hard back then and didn’t really move very far.

It’s nice to see that it’s moved a bit further forward.

I just, my head gets into spirals thinking about the complexity of the things you’ve got to like manage and forecast and understand and the rules and situations you’ve got to play in. I’m keen to see how it plays out and what the kind of standards end up being. And it feels like a lot of these services then like even back to the kind of stage two, stage three stuff you were talking about really heavily rely on being good at forecasting and knowing like what the price is going to be, where the vehicle is going to be, state of charge management.

How important to ev.energy is that kind of data and forecasting piece?

William Goldsmith (25:16)
Data is a massive part of our business. Basically sort of as an IoT company, in some respects, we’re connecting all of these different devices and aggregating up all of that data in order to understand the requirements and what’s going on and then pushing data and messages back to them. And then also really importantly, being able to display different data to different

people so the energy utility kind of needs to see and understand one thing, but the EV driver, that’s maybe like a fleet operator. So yeah, it’s a huge part of what we do and also around building sort of trust and transparency. One of the largest challenges I think in this space is the data standards are not well developed.

And also the data platforms, particularly OEMs do a lot of different stuff, different charge points. You’ve got things like the open charge point protocol, but people interpret it differently. So that means that from, the kind of hundreds of different devices, vehicles and chargers that we connect on the platform. We, each of them kind of senses data slightly differently, in a different way, slightly different quality. And so a large part of what our platform, how it adds value

is aggregating, cleansing, and transforming that data into trusted and actionable insights and actions.

Adam Sroka (26:53)
And are you doing any clever stuff with AI and machine learning that you can share?

William Goldsmith (26:58)
yeah, it’s just getting started. I think like a lot of industries, I think we’re seeing that there’s massive potential for AI across our business and we’re kind of already starting to launch like internally kind of trial out lots of different AI tools and software. So a lot of that is just how can we improve sort of productivity

across different teams in the organisation. But then I think more and more when you apply AI to virtual power plants, there’s a lot of opportunity, but some challenges and reservations. So first you mentioned kind of forecasting and where AI today can be used very effectively

is firstly sort of helping support data analysis and also to improve forecasting models or actually look at the range where you’ve got like maybe four different forecasting models and each performs slightly better in a different situation. You can have an AI model that sits over the top of that and optimises your four models and weights them because it can read the situation and learn which models do well in certain scenarios. There’s some

really interesting applications already developing across that. I think when it comes to actual control systems, there’s still reservations. Whereas in certain types of generative AI, you still get hallucination happening or things that you can’t then go back and explain how the answer was developed. And when you’re working in the energy sector, a highly regulated and safety conscious industry,

It’s really, really important to be able to explain exactly what will happen in different situations and have that audit trail around decision making. So, yeah, we’re at this really interesting intersection stage where we’re starting to use these tools, but I think importantly with some guardrails behind them. So we’re not using it with any sort of personal PPI, personal identifiable information or customer data.

We’re not using it in our control systems, but we’re certainly exploring all of those things. And yeah, I think there’s a lot of potential.

Adam Sroka (29:29)
Yeah, I think that really reflects some of the stuff that we see in the industry. There’s a lot of people that are aware of these AI systems and the potential they can add and the value they bring. And I think the current AI hype cycle has done a lot to drive that. We’re seeing the market mature, but even years ago, we built some traditional ML stuff that was explainable

and we were trying to build them into parts of the product in the energy sector. And customers weren’t that keen on it. They wanted rules-based systems, things that they really could get their hands on and really understand quite simply. Like I said, I think the AI hype cycle has moved that on and we’re seeing the market mature on that front. But no one’s keen to hook up their like big £100m grid scale asset to something that’s based on ChatGPT or whatever just yet.

Interesting to hear that you’re exploring some of these use cases internally and it’s starting to move forward. I think we’re seeing that a lot across the industry and it is the best place to start getting the feel for how these things operate. Wanted to ask, was there an active effort at ev.energy to develop a positive culture towards technology and data and AI, or has it just kind of happened naturally?

William Goldsmith (30:43)
Definitely I would say an active effort. Culture is something that requires work and intention. And it’s something that you need to kind of continue working on as well, particularly when you’ve got a growing scaling business and you’re increasing headcount and kind of bringing new people into that culture. So it links back a bit to some of the values that ev.energy has as a company.

And some of those values are like ambition. We’re here. We’ve got a big mission. We’re trying to accelerate the decarbonisation of transport and energy and make charging greener, cheaper, simpler for everyone. So with that big ambition, we need to be ambitious in the different things we do.

There’s also the power of action.

So the best way, like there’s so much unknown in a lot of these cases, the best thing to do is learn by doing and actually take what is that next step that we can do to progress, improve the solution and help kind of move the industry forwards. But the third one I’m going to talk about, which kind of frames this a bit more is really the value of trust and transparency. So it’s hugely important to ev.energy, who we are and what we do.

Both when we talk about like the EV driver side where you’re trusting us to connect to your car or charger and to schedule charging for you. That requires trust. And also on the utility side, utilities need to trust that we’re going to be doing the right thing by their customers. They need to trust our software and solution in terms of its reliability.

And if we say we’re going to deliver sort of like 10 megawatts or 100 megawatts of like demand reduction on the grid at this hour of the day, that we turn up and deliver that. So what we’ve actually found that one of the best ways to build trust is through transparency. So we’re incredibly transparent about what we do. And actually if people can see and understand what’s happening and how it’s happening, it’s a great way to build trust. So through that,

data becomes really important, but data visualisation and also the ability really for people to be able to self-serve, view a query and kind of dig into the data themselves to answer questions. So we’ve done huge amounts of work that mean instead of having to go to software developer to ask a data question for them to query the database with code.

We’ve now got like separate data lakes and business intelligence, like a whole analytics platform set and tools, which enables internal teams within the business to go in and view and query different data sets, but in a way that’s sanitised and safe for protecting the customer data. And then we’ve also built views out for all of our utility partners. So they can go in, see their program enrollment, see all of their customers, all of the

connected devices on the platform, see the virtual power plant, how it’s responding to the demand response events. So once we have that transparency, we can then get into like active dialogue and discussions with them about how our solution is delivering value. And yeah, also problem solve with them about how they want to improve it and take it to the next level.

Adam Sroka (34:17)
It’s really refreshing to hear. So transparency is like personally really important to me and it’s something we’re trying to do at Hypercube, but it’s quite painful and difficult, right? It’s not so easy to be super transparent, but I think you do see the benefits play out in the long run. It sounds like you’ve got a really mature data platform internally then like that’s the big dream of every organisation is to have the self-service analytics like reporting. So hats off to you for developing something that sounds like it’s working

both internally and externally to get the answers and the results you need because that’s no mean feat.

William Goldsmith (34:52)
No, it’s something we’ve worked on quite a lot, I think, over the past year. And another thing, particularly for startups or scaling businesses, is as you scale, you need a different solution at each stage and level. So when we look at our whole technology stack, initially, like the first product we built when we were team of five people, with kind of a few customers.

Is like, okay, we need a platform that’s in a technology stack that’s going to work to optimise like 100 vehicles. Very, very quickly that gets superseded. Okay, now we need to do 1000, like 10,000 vehicles. And we’re now scaling up to the scale of like a million and beyond. Each stage of maturity of your business, you need to kind of redefine, retool and do a little bit of upgrading on your systems and architecture.

Adam Sroka (35:47)
Being on a similar journey, yeah, I know the pain of build something really well, but know that you’re going to chuck it away because like you can’t build something pants, but you also can’t build for like the distant future. So that constant re-platforming and iterative development of your own setup is yeah, for every techie I think in the audience will know the pain of going through that cycle of like, but this is really good, but not quite right for the next stage of growth. It’s, look, it sounds like a really exciting journey that you’ve been on at EV.

So happy that you joined us today to talk about some of the stuff you’re up to.

William Goldsmith (36:19)
Yeah, well, guess we’re doing loads of exciting things at ev.energy projects across the US and Europe. So, yeah, we’ve got different white papers and reports you can access on bidirectional charging, also a whole thing around asset metering, which is a big area relating to data. So, yeah, a lot of that’s on our website. So, if you’ve got more questions, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn

or reach out via the website and we’ll be happy to talk.

Adam Sroka (36:50)
And the website address is ev.energy, isn’t it? Because it’s a dot energy, top level domain. ev.energy. Amazing. Look, William, thank you very, much for coming on today. It’s been great to speak to you. And I wish you all the best on your global domination efforts for ev.energy.

William Goldsmith (36:53)
Yes.

Thanks Adam.

Adam Sroka (37:13)
Really enjoyable chat there with William Goldsmith from ev.energy.

Quite interesting hearing like a UK startup success story that’s gone to global expansion and experiencing a lot of the pains of like dealing with other markets. And there was a really interesting chat about just internal systems and having to keep rebuilding and kind of replatforming almost as you go to deal with your own scale. It’s something that we’ve experienced both internally and I’ve seen like some of our customers go through. ev.energy on an amazing journey, 200,000 vehicles and

building a virtual power plant to enable customers to make savings and actually earn cash rewards off the back of their own kit that they’re investing in at home. It’s not a solved space. There’s a lot of complexity to it. Virtual power plants, as you all know, like quite a fun, interesting topic for me. So hearing about different ways to tackle it and what you can do with EV setups that are really mature, really, really exciting. feel like ev.energy are on a journey. They’ve done a lot of their own internal stuff as well. There’s an interesting bit where he

talks about internal setup for insights analytics.

Overall, great episode. I enjoyed having William on.