Alex Thwaites is the Director of EV at UK-founded energy firm, OVO. Joining the company back in 2021, Alex has held several roles, from Head of Commercial and Head of Zero Carbon Living, before moving into his current role of Director of EV back in May 2023. OVO is a relatively new energy firm, having been founded in 2009, and by investing heavily into emobility, with numerous partnerships on both the OEM and CPO side, the firm is in a strong position to pick up customers in the form of the early mainstream EV adopters.
We spoke to Alex to find out a little more about how his career led to this role, the current state of the industry, and some of the steps OVO are taking within the EV sector for the future.
Do you own an EV? If so, what model are you driving, and what do you like about it?
We do, we have two EVs, one leased and a second through salary sacrifice.
We have a Renault Megane E-Tech, which we really like – the wheels are massive as standard which makes it look very nice!
The other is a BMW iX3, which is my favorite car to date, it’s absolutely lovely to drive and so comfortable.
What inspired you to join OVO, and how did this lead to your current role as Director of EV?
I wasn’t specifically looking to leave my old company but a former boss sent me a role posted by OVO and said “This has got your name written all over it!”. Once I started really looking into OVO, I absolutely loved what I saw: the culture; the entrepreneurial spirit; the start-up challenger mentality – even though they were a huge, scaled energy supplier at this point. But the biggy for me was Plan Zero, which is our sustainability plan. We were the first energy supplier in the UK to have a plan on how to tackle the climate crisis and I loved it.
In your experience, what have been the biggest changes in the energy industry due to the rise of electric vehicles?
I’d say the biggest change so far is how the energy and automotive sectors are having to come together. Previously, a driver never linked their car with their energy account at home because you’ve never had to. You’d fill up at a petrol station and that was that. But with an EV, most people charge their car at home and pay for it through their energy bill, and hopefully they’re on a dedicated EV tariff and charging it cheaply.
So, all of a sudden, partnerships between car manufacturers and energy suppliers make a lot of sense. The coming together of these two huge sectors to solve problems and provide solutions for customers driving an EV – or looking to get one – has become really important in being able to give customers the best experience.
I do, however, think the biggest change is yet to come, and that will be in the form of bidirectional charging. I genuinely think bidirectional or vehicle to grid (V2G), will change how we view energy and also how we view our cars.
At the minute a car is a thing that gets us from A to B, but your car is going to become something you can earn money from when it’s just sat on the driveway. It’s a huge battery on wheels that could power your home or help balance our electricity grid and stop the need to fire up a big fossil-fueled power station. V2G at scale is going to change our energy landscape completely and I’m personally really excited about it.
How significant do you believe EV charging-specific energy tariffs, such as that offered by OVO, will be for driving mainstream electric vehicle adoption?
Absolutely critical.
There are lots of benefits to getting an EV: they are better to drive; have better tech in them; no emissions etc. But one of the biggest things for a consumer is that they are significantly cheaper to run – especially if you are on a dedicated EV tariff at home. EV drivers can save literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds in running costs compared to a petrol or diesel driver.
For example, an average driver on OVO’s Charge Anytime offering, which costs just 7p/kWh to charge your EV, can save over £500 a year compared to paying for their charge using their normal energy rate, and over £1000 a year versus a petrol or diesel car.
What is super interesting though, is that there have been a couple of reports stating that only ~25% of EV drivers are on a dedicated EV tariff, which I think are critical to mass market adoption, and so there is an education piece we as an industry need to do for the early adopters who’ve already made the switch to EVs, around what is available to them now.
Also, for those who can’t charge at home and rely solely on public charging, it’s really important that industry and government do all they can to make that experience as seamless and cost effective as possible.
Right now, public charging doesn’t give the same cost benefit as charging at home. It may never be as cheap as charging at home but there are things that can be done to bring that cost down – such as removing the 20% VAT on charging costs so that they are in line with the 5% VAT on home charging – but we need government policy to support it.
You’ve already expanded into the public charging arena with the OVO Charge app. Is OVO hoping to reach more EV-driving customers who don’t have the space or ability to charge at home?
Absolutely, we always knew we wanted a public charging solution for our customers. As mentioned earlier, there will be EV drivers with no access to charging at home, and those who do will likely still need to use the public network at some point, so it was always a critical goal on our roadmap.
While we were looking at solutions, we came across the team at Bonnet, founded and run by Patrick Reich and Eliot Makabu. We loved the product they had built, as well as the people and their tech.The stars aligned, as they were looking for investment, so OVO acquired Bonnet in 2023 and rebranded the offering to fit with the OVO Charge app and we created Charge Anywhere as the public charging offer.
Available to any EV driver, you don’t need to be an OVO customer to take advantage of the tech. EV drivers can get access to over 34k charge points nationally and over 400k across Europe. You get real-time updates on charger availability, a route planner, exact directions to the charger on Google or Apple maps, you can filter by charger connector or speed and you can either pay in the app or via our RFID card. So it has everything you need to use the public charging network all in one simple-to-use app.
How has your partnership with Volkswagen Group, for 10,000 miles of free charging with new eligible EVs, gone down with customers? How do you see similar offers evolving, further down the path of EV adoption?
We actually have a couple of multi-year partnerships with car manufacturers: one with Volvo Cars UK and one with Volkswagen Group UK (with more to come).
Both have free mileage offers and a host of other rewards too that can be accessed via our energy savings account OVO Beyond. Our customers seem to love it as they get their EV and also get some free mileage to go with it. For Volkswagen Group customers who are an average mileage driver, they could bank up to a year’s worth of free driving, so what’s not to like?
As I touched on earlier, I think automotive and energy partnerships are so critical to the adoption of EVs. Home energy has become the new fuel station for many EV drivers, so partnerships on bundled tariff offerings as part of the car purchase make a lot of sense and I can see them definitely becoming the norm.
Our thanks go out to Alex and OVO for taking the time to discuss this with us. You can find out more about OVO Energy here.
