Energy firms battle startups to provide power for Europe's electric cars

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The battle over how and where Europeans charge their electric cars is expanding from the continent’s cities to its motorways.

Power utilities, tech startups and oil firms are fighting to establish themselves as the dominant players in the fast-growing business of charging stations – but advances in electric vehicles mean where they build them is changing.

Refuelling conventional petrol and diesel cars on motorways has long been the domain of the oil companies, which typically have their own networks of filling stations.

Several are now talking about setting up high-power charging networks, creating major competition for limited space at motorway service areas.

“It is a bit of a land grab now to win this sector,” said Tim Payne, chief executive of British charging startup InstaVolt, which has raised £12m to install 3,000 charge points across Britain by 2020.

While the range of electric vehicles was less than 60 miles, Europe’s utilities were happy to help cities and companies install slow and inexpensive charging points at homes, offices and shops, often supported by state subsidies.

But Tesla, Porsche and BMW are now making battery-powered cars with enough range to drive across countries. Daimler and Volkswagen also announced plans on the eve of this week’s Frankfurt motor show to accelerate their shift to electric cars.

Charging infrastructure remains nowhere near where it needs to be. “Where is the network of charging points that will be required? Indeed where is the power and the grid?” Ralf Speth, boss of Jaguar Land Rover, asked last week

Experts including ChargePoint and Engie are, however, making plans to build pan-European networks of high-voltage fast-charging stations, which can refill a battery in less than half an hour instead of overnight.

In the UK, InstaVolt is renting land from filling station operators, bringing them additional revenue from the lease as well as the increased traffic to their shops at the sites. It earns a margin by selling power through the chargers.

InstaVolt struck a deal in May with ChargePoint, which itself is on a $125m (£92m) expansion spree in Europe, to install about 200 of the US group’s ultra-fast chargers close to popular roads across Britain.

Up for grabs

Morgan Stanley estimates that 1-3 million public charging points could be needed in Western Europe by 2030, adding that while utilities have natural skills in the new industry, it was too early to determine who will come out on top. “The winning business model is up for grabs,” it said.

Today, there are fewer than 100,000 public charging points available in Europe, with only about 6 per cent of them fast, according to the International Energy Agency.

Almost none of these are super-fast, a term usually used for charging stations with an output of at least 150 kilowatts. More than three times faster than current-generation chargers, they are now being targeted by those trying to become market leaders.

Contenders include Dutch EV-Box, one of Europe’s biggest makers of charging stations, which was snapped up by French utility Engie in March.

“We expect hundreds of millions of annual revenue from EV-Box in a few years,” Thierry Lepercq, head of innovation at Engie, said.

He sees Engie’s EV charging revenue growing by a factor of 20 in three to five years. Last year, EV-Box had sales of €16m (£14m).

EV-Box chief executive Kristof Vereenooghe said that unlike most of its competitors EV-Box has been profitable from the start, a claim that makes it stand out in an industry where gaining scale is considered more important for now.

That’s why German utility E.ON, too, announced a strategic partnership with Danish startup Clever and said it had the ambition to roll out several hundred ultra-fast charging stations along European motorways.

Clever, which is owned by a group of Danish utilities and runs charging networks in Denmark, Sweden and Germany, wants to extend its network to France, Britain and Italy with E.ON.

The firm, which unlike EV-Box and ChargePoint does not make its own hardware, is also still looking for other partners. “We want to connect cities so that you can easily drive across Europe in an electric vehicle,” Clever chief executive Casper Kirketerp-Moeller said.

Talk less, install more

Among the major oil firms, BP and Shell have either announced plans or launched pilot projects for EV charging. Few people, however, expect them to become serious contenders for a business that would effectively curb demand for their chief product: oil.

BP did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Shell said it did not make economic sense yet to equip petrol stations fully with EV charging points.

“People like Shell and Total talk a lot, but nothing happens. We are putting the grid connection in place,” said Michiel Langezaal, founder and chief executive of Fastned, which has 63 EV charging stations in the Netherlands.

Leasing plots of land, the group wants to raise €100m over the next two years to branch out into Germany, Belgium, France and Britain. So far it gets the stations from Swiss ABB but is also in talks with ChargePoint.

Unlike utilities and charging station startups, electric vehicle makers see fast-charging networks not as a profit centre, but as a loss-leader needed to persuade customers that electric vehicles can drive across continents.

That seems to work for some.

Tesla, for example, operates a proprietary charging network throughout Europe, mainly in hotels, but it is stretched thinly – in the Île-de-France region around Paris it has just a handful of “superchargers”.

This year, the group’s market valuation surpassed that of General Motors, making it the biggest US carmaker by that measure.

“Tesla has never been in the black, but had enormous growth,” said Elke Temme, who co-heads the e-mobility unit of Germany’s Innogy.

“Going forward, however, the business must pay off.”

Reuters