Ep. 18: Niall Riddell, CEO & Co-Founder of Paua, on Aggregating UK EV Charging Networks, Simplifying Fleet Billing, and the Promise of Plug and Charge

Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things, energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

Hello and welcome to today's episode with Neil Riddell, co-founder and CEO of Paua, the London-based startup that's redefining how businesses can charge electric fleets. After 15 years in large energy utilities, including the French behemoth EDF and an MBA that convinced him that to learn about business he had to create a business, Neil hung up his corporate boots in 2020 to launch Paua, that's P A UA, not Power. Since its official debut, Paua has become the UK's largest EV charging network aggregator, stitching together over 60,000 connectors

from more than 40 charge point operators into a single card and app solution, earning Start-up of the Year at the EVIES 2023 awards. Today, we'll dig into why public charging still costs more than diesel, how salary sacrifice schemes and BYD's Tesla look-alikes. Are reshaping UK fleets and the tantalizing promise of plug and charge to make charging as seamless as a Tesla on a supercharger. Let's get started.

Alright, Neil, how are you today? Thanks for making it to the podcast. I'm very well, thank you ever so much for inviting me along. Yes, and uh for the listeners who don't know you, um maybe you can give a short intro about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So hello, my name is Neil. I'm from a company called Paua. Some of you who are watching online will be going, why can't this guy spell? I'm Neil spelled N I A L L and Paua spelled P A U A. Uh

we provide an electric vehicle charging and payment solution here in the UK. Um, my background is I spent 15 years in large energy utilities, realized that if I really wanted to make a difference, I was gonna have to go and do it myself. Uh, so we set up Paua back in 2020, very much with the view of simplifying the journey for businesses with electric vehicles. Thanks for that. And so you were at EDF, I think one of the largest energy corporate before. How did you get

from EDF to, to the idea as well of the concrete idea of business opportunity? I this is this is quite a long complicated story, but let's do it. Um, so there's two or three pieces in here. Um, one of the pieces is, um, I, I'm an engineer by training. Um, I was very fortunate. I got sent to do an MBA back in 2009, 2010. Uh, by a former boss of mine, he said, you're gonna learn loads of stuff. And one of the things I learned about

was business, surprisingly. And I came away from my MBA realizing that if I really wanted to understand business, I was probably gonna have to build one myself. So there I was in 2010 going, I should probably be an entrepreneur. It took 10 years, but over that 10 years I sat and I looked at marketplaces and I looked at all the things I thought I needed to know to build a business. Uh, and as it happened, um, I wasn't particularly good at climbing up the greasy pole

of a large corporate. Um, and ended up inside the innovation team. And one of the things that we were looking at at EDF inside that innovation area was electric vehicles. Uh, so this was sort of 2017, 2018. Clearly a big trend, clearly a lot of interest, you know, some interesting models coming to market. It was the time of the, the, the new Renault Zoe, the, the Jaguar I-Pace got launched around about then, the, the, the second generation Nissan Leaf. So there were some interesting vehicles and

mainstream vehicles coming along. I was like this is really cool, uh, what are all the challenges? Started to open up those challenges and realized that this ecosystem of er many, many different charge plan operators er out on the road, you, you've got different apps, different cards, you've got an entirely fragmented experience, meant there was an opportunity there and I was like actually you know what, maybe the time is about right for me to step away, er and go and build my own business and basically go

from being what we described as a, a chicken entrepreneur to an entrepreneur. What's the concept of chicken entrepreneur, maybe you can elaborate on that one. I, so there's two things about the chicken entrepreneur. Firstly, there's the, the concept of a chicken. You're a bit of a chicken, a bit of a coward, you're too, too scared to make it work. The other one is, um, a story that a friend of mine used to tell, which is the idea of a ham and egg shop, and you've got

a pig and a chicken walking down the road, and the, uh, the pig and the chicken are having a conversation and the, and the chicken goes, I think we should open a business, we'll make a ham and egg shop. And the pig turns back to the chicken and goes, I don't think you'll be fully involved. You'll only be participating. Because ultimately, the pig has to fully sacrifice himself to provide the ham for the ham and egg shop, whereas the chicken only has to participate in providing

the eggs. So the idea of a chicken entrepreneur is someone who's not fully participating, whereas the pig is really getting fully involved. Love the story. Uh, that, that's, uh, the analogies are the best. And so now you are the, the, the, your pig, so to say. What makes your life sacrificed? What makes your life a pig? Maybe just very good, very good. Uh, what makes my life a pig? Um, I mean, if we go back to the basics, here in the UK we're still only about

3% of all vehicles on the road are electric. Um, so we've kind of broken out of that, uh, early adopter phase, you know, people who are exploring, innovating, it's cool, I wanna try something different into the beginning of the early adopters. And there's a, a valley of death in there, you know, where people go, it's not good enough, I expected it to be like X and it's actually like Y. We are living in that world, um, we've got a lot of drivers who are confident, and

they've been doing it a few years now, they were some of the innovators, and we've got a bunch of drivers who just aren't impressed by the way the world actually works. Uh, so what we're trying to do right at this moment and that you know the pig is trying to transition that gap between er the expectation of what the world should be like and what it's actually like. Um, so we've got this dangerous territory where we've really got to prove ourselves to the, the first of

that early majority that we are capable of handling, um. Reliability of chargers, um, you know, the experience at the charge point, fraud, um, enabling people to charge at home and still be fairly reimbursed when they charge at home, enabling people to share depots, simplifying and streamlining the whole, where is the charger, you know, find, charge and pay experience. Uh, and that is basically if you break it down, that is the pig that I'm dealing with every day is how to make it appear and make it

as easy as possible for the drivers to, to find, charge and pay on their journey. And, and so to set this into context, it was great already and if you had to prioritize what are the, the biggest, uh, uh, yeah, things that don't let you sleep at night, challenges that, that you're then, yeah, addressing every day, uh, the, the core say of, of your daily business. Uh, it's, um, so there's two ways, I I'd look at that as two ways to answer this question. One is

as an entrepreneur running a small business, what is it that keeps me awake at night, um, and operating in this marketplace, what are the challenges that we really face? As an entrepreneur, er, honestly, the biggest issue I face day to day is I have shiny object syndrome. Uh, everything is exciting, everything's cool, I should give a little bit of time to this, a little bit of time to that, so I'm constantly being drawn between, should we talk about plug-in charge, or should it all be about

vehicle to grid, or should we be doing more energy flexibility, and we're having that whole constant dynamic of conversation. But from an industry perspective, I think the one thing that we've got to really keep an eye on is cost. Um, ultimately we've moved away from the adopter who has gone, I'm doing this because I want a Tesla, cos a Tesla's a status symbol. I'm happy to pay a bit more to drive a Tesla into a world where commercial businesses are making financial based decisions. Um, and

the bit that. I, we just, we haven't solved here in the UK is it simply costs more to charge in public than it does for a liter of diesel. And that's where we've got a real problem we need to overcome, uh, be it through economies of scale, uh, changes to taxation, uh, looking at things on a total cost of ownership basis. Whatever the method is, we need to help those businesses who are now starting to approach this marketplace and go, yeah, I can see electric vehicles

is happening, but it looks quite expensive. How do we help them understand how they can reduce their costs, manage their costs, and ultimately give them a a basic business case. Uh, you know, and that includes the operational impacts of driving EV. How do they get a business case that goes, you know what, the right thing for me to do right now is buy 100, 1000 electric vans, uh, so that I can replace my fleets with electric today. Um, so that's very insightful. Uh, the, just said

it again better in context, um, one step back. So Paua in essence, I think is an MSP, right? In terms of positioning in the market. Uh, maybe you can elaborate a little bit of the, the user, the, the listeners have, we have done some one on one in some episodes, uh, with Thomas Dava, for example, Hubject, I can, I can, uh, recommend to release the X object, uh, to relisten to it. But, so yeah, maybe you can, you can elaborate on your positioning, also give a

bit of an introduction to the company more generically. Yeah, that's a, that's a really good challenge because, um, as with any new industry, particularly where technology is involved, we love our TLAs. Let's get loads of three letter acronyms in and complex language to try and describe what it is we do, and I, I was on another podcast recently I got told off, uh, for using too many of these three letter acronyms, so. In effect, we could be regarded an MSP, a mobility service provider, we provide

services to people on the go, um. The way we've looked looked in the market is slightly different. Um, you've effectively got two broad groups of customers. You've got B2C customers, so these are individuals, business to customer, direct to an individual who's driving, and you've got B2B customers, so a business to business service. Uh, in that case we're providing a business, our business provides a service to another business. Uh, we're in the business predominantly of servicing other businesses' electric vehicle charging needs. Uh, we don't do infrastructure

we're literally just a software player and we aggregate many types of software together, be that in your home. In your workplace or out on the road. And each of these is a fragmented software platform, a software layer. So, um, you know, you go into a depot, you might find, um, some views, some Ampeco, some BP, no, no, BP's just announced they're leaving workplace, so no BP in the workplace anymore, but you might have had some PodPo or something else in your workplace. At home, you might

have a, a zappy, you might have a, an Indra charger, you might have, um, a wave charger. Uh, and then when you get out on the road, by my count, there's 120 public charge point operators. Each of them with a slightly different brand, slightly different way of working, and that is a very fragmented layer. What we're doing is bringing, uh, integrations with each of these layers together, and clearly there's plenty of work to be done in that area. But we're integrating at multiple levels to bring

all that kilowatt hours of charging data and pricing data to the surface. When we can surface all of that pricing data, we can then tell the various party who paid for what and whether someone else owes someone else money. The really big challenge in here is when you drove a petrol or diesel vehicle, you went to the petrol station, you paid for your petrol. If it was your company vehicle, your boss paid for your petrol. Suddenly, when you charge at home, that whole flow reverses. You're

now charging with your personal electricity bill, so you are personally paying the electricity company for the electricity that goes into your company vehicle. That's relatively easy to understand, you reverse the payment flow and you pay the driver for what they used at home. It becomes horribly complicated when that vehicle is used for both personal and business use. So imagine a a middle management driver. They've been given a company car as a perk, they're told to drive to a conference in the north of England, so off

they drive to the north of England, they come back, they pay to charge in public, they charged it a bit at home, uh, and then they go and take the kids to the seaside at the weekend. Who pays for what bit of electricity that went into whose vehicle and how do you? In my language, slice and dice that money so that all of the home charging, workplace charging, and public charging is suitably allocated, particularly when public charging's at 85% and home charging's at 10%. That is

a complex piece of maths. It's a complex piece of maths that we're spending a lot of time automating, capturing all the data, allocating it correctly, and ensuring that we can then devise the right answer to the question of who pays whom for those business miles that were driven. Uh, and that in there is where there's a lot of fun and games. Yeah, they're very well described, I think, uh. Um, yeah, you, you definitely have a, a, a charismatic and, and, and simple way of putting things

You didn't use too much jargon there. I hope the listeners. I'm happy to use jargon if anyone wants it. Exactly, yeah, I think in the, in the Insider's guide to Energy, which, uh, and then your other podcast that you're running, I think there you use a bit more, no, uh, there's a more geeky, uh, uh, as well, uh. It's quite nice to sometimes go a bit geeky cos it depends on who's listening, you know, some people are like, this guy simplified it so much, I understood

all of that. It's like actually there's layers to that onion peeling exercise we need to go through as we become more technically aware. Um, one of the things I'm having to do constantly is keep this, this story running of how we communicate with customers, communicate with people who are new to this space. Um, I had a situation the other day where for the first time I was engaging with a customer who'd never done anything in EV and I was like, well, how do you do that

how do you bring that story together? So yeah, I had lots of fun and games. Yeah, so they're giving the already interesting as well that you do B2B uh and that the whole infrastructure layer that you described is especially uh for the B2B space. So that's also, I guess, uh, differentiating yourself from, from the larger players uh that there might be out there, right? The large utilities, some of the likes that you worked before, if you have to describe the USP as well that you choose

your Your battles so to say. Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of features around business that are really important for us. Um, we've always fundamentally believed since the beginning that by bringing data sets and information together, we can provide a layer of value to the customer that you can't in the B2C arena. When you speak to an individual driver on the street about their charging experience, they're after things like convenience, lowest cost possible, make it easy. Which you can do. But if, if your

customer is just price driven, then all you're doing is discounts on networks, that's the entire proposition that the customer ends up with. In our business arena, we get really complicated questions like um I'm adopting electric HGVs. Where can I charge them? er and suddenly you need to go and classify all of the public charging infrastructure and go which, what is big enough to handle an HGV? Where will it go? How long will it be there? Does it need to book? Can these guys handle booking? Uh

how do we manage payment, you know, we've had some scenarios where charge points will cut off at a certain limit because they will only dispense about 125 kilowatt hours. And if you need to put 400 kilowatt hours into your HGV, suddenly you've gotta charge it 3 times. So you know there's, there's funny little quirks that we're starting to discover as we solve more and more of our business customers' problems. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, I think you also described in one post, uh, recently as well where

there was all about the future of MSPs and direct payments. Uh, I think that shows a bit the complexity, right, that if it, if, if the direct pay doesn't solve the issue of finding the right chargers for an HEB, you know. Yeah, there's, there's a fascinating question here because, you know, in theory, a credit card can pay for anything. Um, and a credit card can pay for anything, and that introduces an element of risk for a business because a business might not want to give all

its drivers a credit card. So then you start talking about locking your credit card down to certain codes that are used for certain activities like only pay for charging. Unfortunately, charging has been classified as parking in some places and in other places has been classified as fuel. So if you do lock it down to charging, it doesn't work everywhere. And the credit card can't tell you how many kilowatt hours are dispensed, where the charger is, you know, what the route might be, you lose all that

functionality. The, the question you then have is, OK, so let's not do credit cards, let's do something else. What do those layers look like? And then you have to start to unpick, well, you could do a mobile app start, so I'm gonna send a digital signal here from my phone to a server, which is our server, another server to the charge point operator's server, and from there to the actual charge point. So now you've got lots of. Connectivity you need to handle. Now that has faults

and problems and delays and things, so that experience might not be great. What if you just did a card and you pulled up and you touched your card and it started? Great, there's direct digital authentication at the charger. But all of a sudden, you go, Oh, well, that card could be cloned, it could be copied, it could be lost. And all those questions start to emerge. I think the, the one I'm excited about, but we're we're just on the cusp of but not quite there is

um I will say 15 Lemonades. Uh, ISO 15118, which is the international standard for plug and charge. Also does vehicle to grid, but plug and charge is what we're interested in. Plug and charge is a token on the charger, a token on the car, a handshake between the two, and the driver experience is much, much simplified, much like your Tesla charging experience. So that experience of pulling up, plugging in, authenticating, simplifies that driver experience, it creates a layer of um. Uh, what's the word I'm looking

for, security between the driver and the charge point, uh, and enables some of that ecosystem to be a bit slicker. So that's something we're excited about, haven't quite seen happening yet. When it does happen, I think it will start to translate into, uh, smoother, uh, more seamless experiences, but we need a lot of different parties to move forward to make that really work. Makes sense. In talking geographies, I think you are very much based in the UK and, and focused at the moment only on the

UK market. Uh, and nevertheless, I'm sure you know if are familiar with other markets. How, how would you compare the UK market on on what you're doing in particular, uh, with other geographies? It's, it's a really interesting question because I get asked this a lot, um. I would, I would start by arguing that the UK was behind. Part of the reason that we exist as a business is because Europe as a whole adopted a, a sort of a collaborative roaming mindset from early on in its

journey. Um, and, you know, we, webje Grev, you know, German, French, you can, and you know, the, the OCPI standard coming out of the Netherlands, you can quite quickly see that there's, you know, very much a, a European influence to what it is that we're trying to replicate here in the UK. We're an island, we behave like islanders, er, so it had to be British, and then of course we had these British companies early on going I don't wanna work with them, I don't wanna work

with them, so we had quite a lot of tension and we still got that whereby, I would argue that we're one of the market leaders in terms of aggregating all the networks together. Um, and we're probably running about 55 to 60% of all the ChargePoint connectors, maybe 80% in rapids. But we've still got tension with certain parties in the market who don't believe in this. We don't think it's the right thing to do. And therefore the consumer unfortunately is disadvantaged by the egos of some large

corporations. As a consequence, I think there's a lot we can learn from Europe about the way that we work together. But as a, as a country that buys cars, we buy quite a lot of cars. We do drive on the wrong side of the road, which doesn't help us at all. Um, so it does mean that we, you know, we sometimes see that impact of, you know, right hand drive, left hand drive impacting the market flows of vehicles. Uh, so we do see there's a bit

of a, a laggard opportunity in there, but ultimately as a car buying country, we're 2nd or 3rd I think behind Germany and France. Um, Germany and France, obviously huge market leaders in this space. Uh, everything coming out of this sort of Benelux region has driven a lot of this dynamic, so Western Europe as a whole isn't pushing forward. Norway, a whole other story in its own right, um, but you then start to look at like what are the outlier countries now, now that we know that

Western Europe is moving, we know that they're adopting, what are the outliers? Couple of countries I've got an eye on at the moment are Spain. Um, I think they're behind in the transition and I think they're gonna accelerate quite quickly. Um, Poland, uh, quite an interesting one to watch cos Poland's got a lot of car buyers, it's a decent sized country, it's got large ranges to cover, but I think we're gonna see some changes and transition in Poland. And then Italy. Uh, I think Italy's really

fun. Uh, it doesn't have a lot of charge point operators, so I, when I'm looking at a marketplace, I'm looking for fragmentation, a challenge to overcome, to bring networks together. Italy doesn't have that, it's got 2 or 3 big players. So as a consequence it might be harder for us to create a value proposition in Italy. Uh, but they're 3 markets which I'm quite interested and intrigued by over the next 6 to 12 months. And we mustn't forget that ultimately Northern Ireland and Ireland share a

a physical border. So, um, Ireland is a logical market for us to look at because it is right next door. Uh, it speaks the right language as well, which makes our lives easier. Yeah. Interesting. And, and talking more about EV adoption in the UK, what have been the drivers in the UK? There's like, um, in, in Europe, the fleet emission, um, yeah, quotas and then some incentives. Maybe you can, uh, get through what, what's there. And I also recently saw BYD being, I think the number

one overseas European market. Uh, Is there like suddenly BYDs everywhere? How, how is your perception of the market and the other drivers? Yeah, that's a cool question, um. So I mean, back in the beginning, the early adoption was done by the early adopters because it was cool. The choice was limited. They picked one of the two or three manufacturers that provided an electric car that didn't look like a, a Gee Whiz or a little mobility machine. Uh, and quite quickly you had Zoe's, uh, the Nissan

Leaf, and the Tesla's on the road, quickly followed by the IPace. And for a long time the market ran like that. Um, what we've seen is we've seen various, uh, emission standards starting to appear. Uh, so currently the really big ones that are driving the transition are the Zev mandate, which requires the automotive manufacturers to sell a certain amount of cars, uh, to enable them to hit, uh, emissions-based thresholds. And that is having an impact. I think it's a little bit vague in the van space

Uh, the UK government has set some objectives about the percentage of new sales in cars and vans. Cars is tracking OK towards where it should be, but it looks like vans has got a lot of catching up to do. So as a consequence, vans might be the tricky one to solve. Um, I think the other piece that's really driving the transition is a UK specific tax mechanism. Um, so it's something called salary sacrifice, and the way that the salary sacrifice works is you, you give up

on some of your gross salary, you sacrifice it to your employer, and in return for sacrificing your gross salary, the employer gives you access to an electric car. Uh, what it means is your net salary goes down, but because you're not paying as much tax, the net salary reduction is less than if you had leased or acquired that car yourself. That tax efficiency can save up to 20 or 30% on a car, which is a good amount. So as a consequence of saving that 20 or

30%, we've seen a lot of companies adopt salary sacrifice schemes, which has led to a lot of sort of middle management type cars going into the marketplace. And if you think about it, they're a perfect group for that early adopter, you know, just after innovators, they're, you know, a little bit wealthier, they've got a stable job with a large corporate employer, and therefore the idea of them taking on Audi e-trons, um, you know, remains of the Jaguar I-Pace type ecosystem, you know, the new Renaults, you're

starting to see all of these things flowing through that salary sacrifice market. Uh, and as you mentioned, BYD is available on some of these schemes. Uh, and I think what I'm noticing is the BYD Tesla lookalikey model thing is quite, quite at work. You walk down the street, you see a car coming towards you and you go, is it a Tesla or is it a BYD? I think there's been some cross alignment between the brand look and feel that means that BYD has been able to

steal a decent market share here in the UK. Uh, they're affordable. You put them through a salary sacrifice scheme, they're even more affordable. You're buying a high performance vehicle with 250, 300, 400 miles potentially of range. Um, and actually a lot of people will sit and go, you know what, for my daily commute, why not? So I think we're seeing uh middle management and salary sacrifice schemes drive quite a lot of uptake. Uh, but I think the space that's probably lagging at the moment is, uh

vans, uh, you know, big fleets adopting large numbers of vans. I think that's struggling. Uh, and then the exciting one for me just because of pure scale is, uh, the UK government's doing a lot of work on what they call the ZHI program, which is the zero emissions HGV and infrastructure demonstrator. So that will place several 100 electric heavy goods vehicles on the road and we're starting to see them arriving and they are big beasts. Uh, so we're starting to see some of those really big

vehicles hit the market right now. Well, yeah, very, very interesting. And also recently, uh, Octopus announced with the BYD this this partnership that made quite some news, I think internationally. This 300 pounds monthly fee and then you get V2G, a V2G package which makes it driving for free. I haven't looked into the details, but how was that perceived in the UK? What's your also personal perception? Maybe you mentioned in the beginning that also you're dealing a lot with V2G and with uh smart charging type of

um uh ideas. Yeah, what's your take on, on that one and especially the UK UK being maybe the best market in the world for those? Um. Yeah, so we, let, let, yeah, let's start from the beginning on VTG. We're an island. Um, is Ireland's are bad for some things but really good for others. Uh, in this particular case we're really good for ancillary services for our electricity network. So we don't have a copper connection, a perfect connection to Europe. We have uh interconnectors, we've got lots

of generation, it's mixed, it's variable, but it's on an island. So we see quite a lot of variability in our electricity system. We also pride ourselves on having very high reliability on that electricity network and that is only as, as, as a function of the fact that we pay decent money to people to provide frequency response, er short term response, and then ultimately the stability that our market needs to keep the lights on effectively. Uh, it means that we pay quite a lot of money into

these markets, which means that from a vehicle to grid perspective, there's a decent chunk of revenue associated with being able to provide flexibility from your battery. Um, we did a lot of work on this through the sort of 2018, 2019 period. Numerous Innovate UK trials have, uh, taken place around, you know, it's government funded trials taking place around demonstrating elements of vehicle to grid. So when Octopus made their announcement, there were two things that went through my mind. One was brilliant. That's what we said we'd

do five years ago, and they're actually doing it. Um, so it's great to see it coming to life in the context of what it should be able to do. So there, you know that that piece of the puzzle makes it really quite exciting cos now all of a sudden you've got this opportunity to go well actually you know this marketplace is happening, um. I'd like to see some on the road, I'd like to get some real customer feedback to really believe that what they're stating is

true. But you know, they're octopus, they're capable of making stuff happen, so I'm excited by what that will mean. The second thing that went through my head was it got very little mainstream media. It got a lot of industry news, it got a lot of social media, and I couldn't help thinking that was very purposeful, um. Going back to this idea of the early adopter and the innovator, you know, the innovators are the ones who are excited by that kind of proposition. So I, when that

happened, I was kind of like actually, you know, there's a really interesting opportunity in here to push this into the hands of the innovators, cos the innovators will complain, but when an innovator complains they go, oh it'd be great if you could do this and you could do that and you could do this. Rather than going, it's terrible, it doesn't work, it would be much more of a, you know, a a feedback exercise. So I do believe that the, the, the channels that it was communicated

out to were very purposeful, er, that the people who recognize what the value looks like are the people who are the early innovators and will get value from it. er and I'm excited to see whether it will really have the impact in the market that I think it deserves. Interesting. And how do you, uh, and, and we'll finish up with, uh, with those points, see the opportunity for you, uh, as Paua as well for V2G and smart charging. I mean, it's uh, as you hinted in

the beginning, there's plenty of challenges nowadays. That you tackle, but I, I, I'm sure you can on top, um, also try to leverage uh some of these fleets at home or in the, in the business side or even in public as we're seeing some Amsterdam, I think has, has a, has a nice, some nice pilots in, in public charging already for smart charging. Yeah. It's got swings and roundabouts, doesn't it? Um, if you are a, um, a parcel delivery company or you're a, you know, an

HGV taking freight from one end of the country to the other, um, the time it takes to charge is an operational impact. So if you get to a location and you plug in to charge because you're going from A to B, you need to get as much juice in that vehicle as you possibly can in that short period of time to get back on the road because the time away from the road is time you're not earning money. Get back on the road and do the

job. So if it's sat inside operational hours, I don't see a huge opportunity for vehicle to grid on rapid charging. I don't see any opportunity for flex either. In fact, give me as much as you can while I'm here because I need to go and get on with my day job. Everything outside of that is fair game. So you suddenly go, that van driver takes his van home at night and he plugs in on the street and he did 70 or 80 miles and he's gonna

pull that in 6 or 7 hours uh from the on-street charger. He's gonna go and sleep for at least 8 of those hours, so you've got 1 hour, and you know it's a bit of breakfast and time and he's not gonna work a, you know, an 18 hour day sort of thing. So suddenly you go actually I've got a decent chunk of time to charge this vehicle. So smart charging on street, smart charging in car parks starts to make sense. You know what, he got back

home at 4:30, 5 o'clock, plugged in. Let's just sit it there for a bit. Uh, let's let it run and then you know what, 1011 o'clock energy demand is dropping, price is dropping, let's push that vehicle onto charge. Uh, give them what they need and then by 8 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock in the morning he's fully charged. By 8 o'clock in the morning he picked the vehicle up and off he goes. That is very logical. Uh, does it also give enough time in

that window to do a bit of ETG? Possibly. Um, here's where the fun bit begins. It's less around the technical capability to manage the energy load and more around the commercial implications. Because now that driver has plugged in and maybe he didn't need to charge, maybe he just plugged in because he was told to plug in. Who gets the commercial benefit? Does it go to the business as the asset owner, as the person who's told the driver to plug in, and the business gets the benefit

maybe through cheaper cost of charging. Or does it go to the driver and the individual gets the benefit? And I think that is where we're gonna see some really interesting dynamic emerging. You know, you can see a scenario when someone goes, I'll take an EV cos I can take it home, I can plug it in and I'll get all the money paid to me from my business vehicle cos they paid for it. I'll get all the money from charging it at night. The other side where

the business goes ooh I'm gonna switch to EVs cos I give it to all my drivers, they're gonna drive and I'm gonna get free charging. So there's quite an interesting question in here and it's a bit like the um the old days when you had a credit card and you got points on your, your airline points on your credit card. You know, the driver got the benefit or the person paying for the credit card, you know, transfer the benefit of the airline points to the individual

Are we gonna see the same thing? It's gonna be different, is it not gonna be different? The other fun one is, let's say I go to work in my van and I happen to spend a day at work and I recharge my van at work. I then drive home at night and I plug it in at home at night. Um, and for whatever reason, a vehicle to grid event takes place that night. I discharge my battery into my home to reduce my demand on the grid

uh, and then it recharges overnight. But I also have a relationship with my boss, which says that when I charge my vehicle at home, I get paid. Do I get paid twice? Once for discharging it and once for reimbursing the driver at home. And that monetary flow and that, uh, value of the electron and that value of flexibility, uh, I think it works at a B2C level, a commercial, an individual level. I think when you enter the world of businesses and the relationship between the asset

owner and the individual plugging it in, that's where I think some really spicy stuff to get stuck into. Great anecdotes, great, uh, examples. Thanks for that, Neil. As we're running out of time, maybe a last message you would like to keep the, give the listeners, how they can reach you and others. Yeah. Um, hello everyone, my name's Neil. Um, I'm at paua.com, uh, four letter uh URL these days, it's quite rare, um, but you can find me over there. I'm on LinkedIn if you want

to hunt me down. Um, and I guess if there was one final thought or wish that I could offer, if you're a policymaker listening to this and you don't drive an electric vehicle, please don't write policy on electric vehicles until you actually drive an electric vehicle, cos we really need regulators and legislators who understand the real experience. All right, thanks a lot, Neil, and have a good rest of the day. Cheers, man.

And that brings us to the end of another deep dive on smart charge. A big thank you to Neil for pulling back the curtain on life at Paua, where every day is a master class in wrestling fragmentation into submission. Fresh insights from today's chat. Shiny object syndrome in practice between plug-in charging, vehicle to grids, and energy flex. Neil admits that toughest leadership challenge is knowing which shiny new idea to chase and which to table for tomorrow's road map. The art of slice and dice building. We

heard from how Paua's software. Captures every kilowatt hour whether at home, in the depot, or in the public network and then algorithmically allocates costs down to the mile. That's the secret sauce that turns messy data from 120+ operators into neat invoices for businesses. Credit card conundrums and HGV quirks. Who knew that public charging transactions are sometimes coded as parking or fuel on a corporate card? And for heavy goods vehicles, you may need 3 separate chargers to fill a battery, adding operational headaches that power is busy

smoothing out. UK roaming leader withholds out. The UK leads Europe in network aggregation. Paua covers up to 60% of all connectors and nearly 80% of rapids. But large incumbents still resist true roaming. Those corporate egos, Neil Warrens, leave drivers paying the price. On the horizon beyond ISO 15118, plug and charge is just the beginning. True mass market impact will come when smart charging windows, dynamic tariffs, and full V2G stacks all converge and when regulators finally clear the the runway. If you're passionate about stripping complexity from

fleet electrification, subscribe to Smart Charge by RiDERgy. Leave us a review and share your own roaming or V2G questions on LinkedIn. To see Paua in action, head to paua.com and follow Neil on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Keep innovating, keep charging smarter, and we'll catch you next time.

Ep. 18: Niall Riddell, CEO & Co-Founder of Paua, on Aggregating UK EV Charging Networks, Simplifying Fleet Billing, and the Promise of Plug and Charge

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