EV charging on both sides of the pond

Start with the similarities, because they are what defeat the premise. The two markets are roughly comparable in population, vehicles and number of utilities. Europe had around eight million plug-in vehicles to the US’s four and a half million, with both now more than half fully battery electric rather than plug-in hybrid. Home charging is the dominant mode in both. The most striking finding is behavioral: across millions of charging sessions, Woolley says the moment people plug in is nearly the same everywhere, a spike between six and eight in the evening, with unplugging even more tightly clustered at seven to eight in the morning, varying by about an hour between Texas, Spain, the UK and California. Which means the core problem is identical on both sides, since unmanaged charging lands exactly on the evening peak. The genuine differences sit in public infrastructure rather than in people: US charging networks are concentrated enough that a driver can get a long way on Electrify America, EVgo or Tesla alone, while continental Europe is fragmented, with hundreds of networks in Germany, which is why roaming aggregators exist there and not in the US. The UK, Woolley says, looks more like the US on this.

If the behavior is the same, the question becomes who is allowed to pay for changing it, and that is set by market structure. Managed charging throws off value at several points of the chain at once: distribution, transmission, system operation, retail. Most European markets are unbundled, meaning retail and generation are separated from the network, and network companies are not merely uninterested in talking to consumers but instructed not to. Most US utilities are vertically integrated, with Texas the exception that resembles the UK. Kann put it to Woolley that integration must make it easier to capture the whole value, and Woolley agreed outright: with Con Edison in New York his company can create value for the distribution utility, for consumers, and for the system operator, and one party has line of sight to all of it. In an unbundled market you have to assemble that value from three counterparties separately. But he immediately named the countervailing advantage, which is why the comparison does not resolve into a winner. Competitive retailers live or die on the consumer relationship, and that pressure is what produced companies like Octopus and OVO and their device-specific tariffs.

The harder problem is that better structure does not buy you compliance. Woolley lays out a ladder: unmanaged charging, which some estimates say raises peak load by 50%; time-of-use rates, which solve one peak and create another, since everybody’s timer switches on at eleven at night; passive incentives, where you pay people and hope; and active control, where the charger is managed directly. Only the top rung avoids the timer peak, and only the top rung can follow conditions that shift day to day, which matters in a place like California where the time-of-use windows do not line up with when solar is actually on the grid. The catch is on the consumer side, and it runs in both directions. Complexity is itself a cost, so Woolley says he is personally against pushing dynamic rates on everyone despite hearing that proposal often. And passive incentives are unreliable in a way he illustrates with a case against his own interest: in California, where time-of-use rates were pushed onto customers, some simply did not change their behavior and now pay punitive rates for the same charging. Kann asked twice what compliance rate a carrot actually buys and did not get a number.

What Woolley claims to know instead is that timing beats price. The cheapest moment to enroll someone is when they buy the car, because that is the moment they have an unsolved problem and no incumbent habit; the incentive needed then is smaller than the one needed later to move someone off a system they already use. The UK’s Smart Charging Regulations take that to its conclusion by requiring every new home charger to be smart and grid-controllable, with an opt-out. On vehicle-to-grid, both men separate two things that usually get bundled. Vehicle-to-home for backup power they treat as close to obvious, particularly in North America, where extreme weather is worse than in Britain and where Woolley was struck by people buying diesel generators at hardware stores. Selling power back to the grid daily is the open question, and Woolley leaves it open: it needs regulatory change and batteries rated for many more cycles, and while he expects both, he says plainly he does not know. Kann’s agreement comes with its own hedge, that the logical thing eventually happens in this industry but rarely quickly.