Charging infrastructure and smart charging, are the topics for this EV Quest Podcast. Adrian Maidment is talking with Jonny Parker, CEO and Co-founder of Wellington based company Thundergrid. We also talk about car fleet conversions from ICE vehicles to EVs.
Thundergrid’s purpose is to ease the load on the grid, and eliminate barriers to electric vehicle adoption.
Thundergrid – https://www.thundergrid.net/
THUNDERGRID TRANSCRIPT (abridged a bit)
Adrian
Charging infrastructure and smart charging are the topics for today’s EV Quest podcast. I’m talking with Johnny Parker, CEO and co-founder of Wellington based company Thundergrid. Thundergrid’s purpose is to ease the load on the grid and eliminate barriers to electric vehicle adoption.
Hello Johnny.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Hi, how you doing, Adrian?
Adrian
Good, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to have a chat.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Thanks for having me along.
Adrian
Yeah, maybe just to start, could you may be a bit more of an overview of your company, what it does to start with, some of the main areas.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
At Thundergrid, we support people to transition their vehicles to electric. So, you could be the likes of a fleet company or you might have a large vehicle fleet. You could be a government agency or a corporate or even just a homeowner and you’re looking to ensure that you’re doing the right thing when it comes to installing EV charging infrastructure.
And so, what we do at Thundergrid, you know, we are there to assist. We help people plan. We help look at the vehicle data. What type of EVs might be relevant? What type of charging infrastructure might be suited? And then we look at things like electricity capacity to then advise on what you can actually do around your charging infrastructure. So, we help a lot with the due diligence and the planning and review. And then we also provide
installation project management and we can also provide charge point operation management to customers. So, we provide an ongoing service to help with a help desk. So, if you’ve got any users who might want extra support to charge their EVs to help troubleshoot, it might be that you need billing services to recover cost from EV charging and it might be that you also need someone to help with
project managing deployments across the country or across multiple countries. And that’s where Thundergrid come in. We’re the doers, so we help you get it done on the ground.
Adrian
Are you mainly dealing with fleets of cars, or is it individuals?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
The majority of our work is with fleets. So, we work with a lot of government agencies. We work with a lot of corporates. And we work with them to help assess their facilities, their office-based locations, and even their staff homes to determine where’s best to have EV charging points. So, some cases it’s logical to have, you know, a mass group of EV chargers together at, say an office to recharge.
Adrian
Yeah.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
fleet of vehicles that’s based at the premises. Or sometimes if you have vehicles that are assigned to staff members it can actually be an easier deployment to do home charges. We project manage all the installations either domestically or commercially and then we link all the charges into a portfolio for the customer so they can then see all the energy analytics, all the charging data, all the fuel use through their EVs
and they can do that knowing that Thundergrid is there at the end of the phone, ready to support their staff or ready to support them, and also helping to manage any cost recovery that might need to happen between parties. We do a lot of that for government fleets, for corporates, and an increasing number of developers and body corps for apartment buildings where EV charging is quite a challenge to make it fair for apartment owners.
We come in and design the system and make sure a user pays system works. And then we manage it to take the stress away from the body corp. But we are also doing an increasing number of home charger installs for the general public as well who have bought an EV and they want a smart charger for their home. And that’s a small but growing segment for us.
Adrian
Yeah, it’s a lot quite a lot going on. What made you actually want to start the business?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Well, yeah, a long time ago, I worked in energy efficiency for commercial, but prior to that, also in energy efficiency projects for domestic. And a big part of my work was also working to improve the housing standard across New Zealand, because there’s a lot of people who are really struggling to heat their homes and pay the power. And so
through that work, I realized there’s obviously quite a big demographic that are quite vulnerable to power price increases. And being kind of a, you know, sustainably minded, I’ve always recognized the benefit that EVs have for New Zealand, but I was quite worried about what the impact would be of them on the national grid. And if they all just rocked up tomorrow, the likelihood of the cost of power having to go up for everybody seemed a bit unfair to me.
So, I set about to design or put together the tools to enable EV charging load to be managed across the grid, really as a mechanism to prevent the cost of power going up for everybody. And that was really to make energy more equitable and to also open the door to electric vehicles rather than letting them become a problem. Because
EVs are a huge opportunity for New Zealand. It’s quite a rarity as a country that we have 84% renewable energy and we’re currently spending about, you know, somewhere between seven and nine billion dollars every year on importing oil from overseas that we, you know, we bring in and then we set fire to it in our country. And so we’re adding up to our pollution, we’re losing money out of our economy.
And we’re being wedded to the price of a fuel that we can’t control because it’s dependent on overseas entities. We’re quite vulnerable in terms of energy security. So EVs solve that. We can actually generate that fuel locally. We can insulate ourselves from the volatility of fossil fuels. And at the same time, if we do it well, we can also do it in a managed way that doesn’t increase the cost
of electricity for all users across the grid. So that way EVs don’t get blamed if the price of power is increasing. So that’s what Thundergrid is. We’ve got a very holistic sort of bigger vision and what load management means for the grid and how EVs can actually benefit and play a part of that rather than being a hindrance, if that makes sense.
Adrian
It’s quite a good point about the cost because every time I get a power bill, now I wonder what’s going to happen when we’re all in EVs and I don’t know how much more I have to pay.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yeah, it’s a worry. It’s quite a peak in demand for the lines companies. And they built the network to handle so much current. And if everybody gets an EV in the suburbs, there can be potential for brownouts. And so we’re just trying to put the tools in place so those lines companies can have something to…
Adrian
Yeah.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
to stop that happening and to stop a sudden reactionary price increase for everybody.
Adrian (
Just a normal price increase, not a reactionary one.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Exactly, because Dave down the road has bought a Tesla, suddenly Susan’s price of power has gone through the roof, but she could never dreamed of owning an EV, you know, that’s quite, so we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Adrian
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s quite a good way to think about it, isn’t it? Yeah, um, you seem to be growing quite fast. Have there been some sort of challenges along the way?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yeah, there’s been lots. Yeah, we are growing really fast. I mean, we’ve been at this a long time. We started putting things into place back in 2015, 2016, and we started trading in 2017. Always interested in EVs, always trying to figure out how we can do that. And our expertise has been energy efficiency work. We do energy management. We’ve got quite a…
Adrian
I guess it has been, obviously.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
a broad brush of experience when it comes to fine tuning buildings and building systems, improving the performance of facilities and managing energy better. And so, yeah, we started off really small and it was at the time we were kind of scratching a living really, just trying to have coffees with people and talk about EVs and trying to establish when is it going to happen in New Zealand.
And the last couple of years, it’s suddenly gone gangbusters because there’s been a paradigm shift in the cost of EVs, in the availability, the choice. And it’s become very obvious to everybody that electric will be the future of all vehicles in many cases. And so yeah, we’ve undergone quite a lot of growth and a lot of demand for our services. And that’s really great. And
But there’s always definitely challenges along the way. You know, as a small growing New Zealand company, there’s always the, you always need capital to try and invest. We’ve had to be very diligent about our growth. You know, we could only grow in line with our own sustainability. And there’s other challenges too, which is I think to be, you know, we have quite a lot of expertise, but sometimes it’s hard to get your voice heard over some of the bigger guys in the room or at the table.
if that makes sense. So, yeah, we’ve really just been, you know, having to overcome challenge by challenge and just think smarter each time. And so that’s how we’ve been solving everything. And one by one, we’ve been removing roadblocks for our customers. We’ve been rolling up our sleeves and helping remove things that were stopping their installations, be it, you know, electrical capacity, be it…
a misunderstanding between say a landowner or the tenant that needs the EV charges. And as a company, we’ve been slowly overcoming and gaining trust of larger clients. So they’re not just going to work with some of the big guys, they are willing to work with a small, fine-tuned entity like Thunderbird.
Adrian
Some of the customer feedback after they’ve switched.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Well, it’s, yeah, it’s funny. There’s definitely like a kind of a transition journey there. And it depends how it’s managed and how the cars often are delivered to the staff. That’s what we find. So, you know, some places have historically just bought some cars and some EVs and some chargers and then not really spent any time to show the staff around them. And as a result, you know,
they’ve left the petrol cars there and people by default go to the petrol cars because they’re not sure about this new EV and how it quite works. But slowly people are getting a lot better at the, the handover in terms of onboarding, staff with EVs and once people are in them, once they’ve switched it on and they’ve done a drive, there’s actually very little to worry about. They’re a lot easier to drive than petrol cars. They’re a lot cleaner, simpler and quieter.
But always the elephant in the room that most people have concerns about is the range anxiety. And when you start looking at how vehicles are used and when they’re parked and when they can be recharged, you start realizing that very few people are actually traveling 500 kilometers a day and that an EV can fill the needs of the daily requirements of many companies.
And once they get over that first understanding, they’ve looked at the data and they’ve introduced the cars and they’ve done their testing, they soon realize that actually there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just the same as a petrol car, except it happens to drive on electricity. That is tons cheaper and easier to deliver to the car.
Adrian
So, there’s the records of some definite cost savings. Did it all sort of get compared to the petrol past?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yeah, there’s it depends very much on how you’re charging the car. So, you know, if you’re in control of the power on site, so if you’re charging the car, maybe at the staff homes or at your office, your price of power is going to be a lot lower than if you’re charging those cars at public charges. So that’s kind of the one way to optimize your costs is figuring out where you’re going to actually refuel most of your fleet.
But even still, with using some of the good and growing public charging network, it still is far cheaper than the cost of petrol. And often a lot of people overlook the maintenance savings that come with EVs. You know, before they’re having to get oil changes, filter changes, fuel filter changes, spark plug changes. You know, there’s a lot of, you know, there’s over 2000 moving parts to a combustion engine with a lot of weight.
The maintenance bills are a lot higher and more comprehensive, but with an EV it’s an electric motor and a battery. So, it’s far more efficient and it doesn’t require so much servicing. So, your servicing costs are a lot lower too. It depends on what you’re comparing it to. Generally, the capital price is a bit higher for an EV, but they are dropping to the price of petrol cars too.
Depends very much on what you’re doing really.
Adrian
Is there any particular sort of popular cars for fleets? What’s… is there a sort of a… I guess depending what they’re using, what’s their… is there a sort of a go-to… car?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yes!
There’s a lot of really good ones now. The range was quite limited a couple of years ago. And now it’s being really opened up. And the all of government price book has been opened up to many different brands. We’re seeing Polestars entering fleet markets, being a very dependable EV. We’re seeing Hyundai’s being a really strong backbone.
Adrian
Yeah.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
with a good supply and a good arrangement with corporates. We’re seeing Chinese brand BYD making a big entry and really laying the gauntlet down in reducing the upfront cost of purchasing an EV. And we’re also now seeing Tesla, which has typically been a brand that many fleets kind of avoid for fear of looking too prestige.
But slowly Tesla is becoming way more affordable and more mainstream. And so that barrier of prestige, which was preventing many people from introducing them to the fleet, is slowly being removed. We’re really seeing a good mixture of electric vehicles now, and it’s a bit more of an open playing field.
Adrian
So if I ruck up my business, I’d say a medium sized business, what are the first things you’d be asking me to analyse what my needs would be?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Well, it depends on what stage we’re brought in. So sometimes we work with a fleet expert. So someone like a fleet consultant would have already done the due diligence on how the fleet’s used and what type of EVs might be relevant. And then we would get tagged in from that point to work on the infrastructure challenge. But for example, if you are just coming in cold, you know you’ve not done anything and you’re not even sure what EVs.
Adrian
Yep.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
I’d say the first thing is to look at your vehicle telemetry, like if you have vehicle trackers or to figure out what your daily range pockets of travel are. And then how you use the vehicles. What’s the purpose of them? Are they moving heavy goods? Are they moving stock? Are they just moving staff? And once you figured out your daily bubble of travel, your daily range requirements and your typology
of vehicle needed, then you’ve got half the things you need to start figuring out what’s an EV equivalent that will give me those functions that I need and what battery size will guarantee that daily range that I need. So, we can sort of help point you towards experts that can do that. And then what we do is step in when you’re now ready to then choose, we’ve identified the locations.
where charging would be beneficial. And that’s where we then come in as Thundergrid and do a site inspection. So, we look at all the fuse boards on site. We look at the cable reticulation. We’ll look at site plans or any electrical drawings. We will do walk-throughs with the local electrician or someone who’s familiar with the site. And at the same time, we’ll look at the electricity billing data, what’s called the time of use, 30-minute data.
And as well as we might put on data loggers, which are there to record the power every, you know, every five minutes or every minute to really figure out how the power is being used on the site. And then what we do is go away and compute the amount of EV charges that could be supported or the amount of EVs that could be charged with that available connection before you either need to upgrade the connection. You can really figure out what you can do.
without having to go to your local lines company and ask for more power. And so we do that, we cost it out, design it, and then help people install it.
Adrian
I guess you’ve got to make sure you can actually do the charging here, can’t you?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yes, one of the classic problems we often see is where someone’s bought all the EVs, or they’ve got them on order and they’ve not stopped to think about how are they going to charge them and do they have enough power and so on.
Adrian
I read that, I heard one of those stories and I can’t remember what it was, it was something they bought their fleet and then they couldn’t charge them on like on…
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
That’s right. It can become a scramble. You know, it’s we’ve had calls before with vehicles held at port because they can’t receive the cars because they haven’t got the charges. It’s all hands on deck to try and, you know, get the sites assessed, get the due diligence done and then get the infrastructure installed ahead and get it done, you know, competitively as well. So, it’s, it is quite challenging and my advice to anyone out there thinking of this is
really start with the infrastructure because it’s the number one thing that can trip you up. So, it’s better to learn now if your site hasn’t got enough power before going to invest in the EVs. So having a site assessment done with a report on the building’s capacity and using various load management techniques, how many EV charges or EVs could be supported, I’d say is probably your number one starting point if you can.
Adrian
Yes, that would be embarrassing isn’t it if you bought the cars and you can’t charge them. Just when you said before about you know sort of things starting to accelerate, when you say the next five years are we gonna kick on or is it gonna flatten off a bit or are we just still early days sort of in the development?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
The way we’re anticipating the growth, it will continue to accelerate because, you know, we’ll be seeing a lot of aging petrol vehicles being retired from fleet. And we have a lot more onus now on corporates to report their environmental emissions for shareholders. They need to look at all aspects of their operational business to figure out where are our emissions and where should we be tackling them.
And one of the obvious ones is their vehicle fleets, which can be significant, depending on the nature of the business. So regardless of government, regardless of technology, it’s becoming apparent that EVs are the logical choice for many, many corporates because of cost savings, but because of the emission savings. We anticipate a long period of growth in the EV sector as those older…
petrol and diesel vehicles get cycled out of service and we can then open the door for cleaner more efficient vehicles.
Adrian
Yeah, I mean, just myself, whenever I see a car go pass with a company logo on it, I would always just look at it and see what car it is now, just to see if it’s got an EV or not.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yeah, yeah, I was not the petrol ones because some of them now are almost trying to hide their exhaust. You have to kind of look carefully because they before an exhaust was a big, you know, a big sort of show-off thing and now it’s like everyone’s trying to hide them if they’re still petrol. So it’s it is funny and you start sort of seeing you know what vehicles are appropriate as well because you know you can it’s obviously the issue New Zealand’s quite famous for having a
Adrian
Yeah.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
On the roads than are necessary. And is that vehicle really fit for purpose? Is that really being used in four wheel drive all the time sort of thing? So yeah, it’s a good point. And it very much comes down to a branding and credentials and persona for very many companies. And so getting it right is quite important.
Adrian
Yeah, and you also have a point about that, you know, getting into business reports of companies and then talking more about their environmental sustainability side of things. A signal of that popping up on websites and everything.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
Yeah, we’re seeing it through supply chains being influenced. You know, for example, when we’re responding to tenders, they’re asking us about, you know, what are we doing for emissions reductions? And that’s becoming true. Any kind of sort of council or government tenders will often have a broader outcomes around emissions. And we’re starting to see corporates putting out the same ones to their suppliers. So.
The influence is there, the story, the writing’s on the wall for everybody, is that you do need to reduce your emissions and have a strategy for it.
Adrian
And where are you looking to take your business over this next five years or so?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
So, in the next five years, we’re about to undergo a stage of growth. So, we’ll be looking to expand within New Zealand’s and to really build out our service focusing on commercial EV charging services. We will be looking at some stage for it to, you know, to set up in Australia as well to start doing the same thing there.
And we hope to do a lot more development in the background to really try and solve some of the broader power management issues that are out there. So, we’ve been developing some technology that will support the grids to flex in real time to accommodate EVs. And we plan to try and bridge gaps as well between different parties and different service providers to try and bring in things like roaming.
People can roam between EV charging networks. We can just try and remove barriers and difficulties for users So yeah, our objective is to now grow out in New Zealand’s and then expand into Australia as well
Adrian
Is our grid going to be okay?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
It depends on how quickly we can electrify most of the things that New Zealand needs to electrify and how much grace we can get the grid to reinforce itself. So, I mean, EVs are one thing, so they’re rocking up quickly and adding a lot of congestion at the right times, but they don’t need to be drinking power all at once, so they’re manageable.
But there’s other loads coming on, such as, you know, as we step away from gas and cold boilers. So, electrification of process heat, stationary heat, will require a lot of energy from the grid. And then as we, you know, look beyond 2030, when there’s no more gas connections to houses, you know, every home is going to have electric hot water storage or instantaneous electric. But we’re also seeing an increase in induction cooktops. So, there’s, you know, the overall demand
is creeping up. And so, yeah, that’s why we’re really urgently trying to build the tools to enable that load to be managed through the existing pipes, if that makes sense.
Adrian
That’s good Johnny. Is there anything else you to cover or important for people should be aware of?
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid) (
I think one thing I want to point out is that in order for us to have EVs and protect the grid, we need people to choose smarter chargers. Right now, there’s quite an array of mixture of confusing EV charge stations out there. So, people can choose ones from some companies that are not controllable. They can’t be linked to any platform
energy management system and they’re often cheaper but the problem is it comes at a bigger price to the whole of the country because it means there’s no means to flex that load. So, I think one of the key messages out there is to, if you’re looking at buying an EV charger, choose a smart charger and what a smart charger is essentially is one that can communicate over the internet
and it can use a language called OCPP. You know, if it’s got that and it has the means to be linked to the internet, your charger can be made to be smart. And I think they’re the bare minimums. If people can shop for that, that would really help everybody in New Zealand and it would help the grid in the future.
Adrian
Okay, that’s a pretty good spot to finish on. Thank you, Johnny. Yep, so I’ve gotta get a smart charger and hopefully you will be lowering my power bill. Ha ha ha.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid
Cool. Awesome.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid)
That’s right. We hopefully will be avoiding, you know, the need for your power to suddenly jump up in price as everyone’s freaking out.
Adrian (30:10.95)
Yeah, yeah, you’ve got my business if you can do that. Thanks very much.
Jonny Parker (Thundergrid) (30:16.721)
We can and we shall. So yeah, that’s good to know.
Awesome, thanks Adrian. Well thanks for having me along and have a good evening.