Customer Insight: The Value of Confident Site Selection

With more electric vehicles on the roads, the EV charge point operators (CPOs) need to make sure they are choosing the right locations for their charging points. We explore the importance of having confidence in your site assessment process, drawing on a recent conversation with UK CPO, PoGo Charge, a Dodona customer and one of the UK’s leading charge point operators.

How many electric vehicles (EVs) are currently registered in a given area? How often are they already passing a potential charging site? What is available in terms of power in that area and could it withstand demand at times of peak demand? What does the local competition look like? Are there any points of interest nearby and could they provide for the potential needs of EV drivers as they wait for their vehicle’s charge to complete?

These and many, many more questions require answers before operators and owners of charging points and stations for EVs can be confident in their chosen charging location. Without these answers, CPOs can be risking a lot when deciding to invest into one or more chosen charging sites.

But the objectivity of these answers also needs to be there. The data must be able to speak for itself, in order to ensure that the right answer can be drawn from it. Stuart Douglas, MD of PoGo Charge, emphasizes exactly this point in his chat with Dodona Analytics Co-Founder and VP in the US, Chris Chamberlain, stressing the importance of being able to have confidence in the answers to these questions before they can make the right decision regarding the next PoGo charging sites.

“It pulls all of these things [data points] together for us into one place and gives us a really good indicative score at the front, which gives us a level of confidence as to whether or not this is a site that we should proceed with or further develop.”
- Stuart Douglas, Managing Director, PoGo Charge

As a leading charge point operator in the UK, PoGo Charge is currently growing its network of rapid-chargers for EVs, with the aim of becoming the largest provider in the UK. The need for accurate and objective data in the site selection process is therefore central to their decision making. Its Network Development Team make no secret of the importance of using Dodona Analytics for site assessment:

“Essentially, we live or die through site selection” states Stuart, and this is of course not just only the case for PoGo. Any CPO looking to survive past the initial EV adoption phase needs to be making informed decisions when it comes to site selection. Indeed, data collection and assessment will be the foundation of any charging network if it is to thrive into and beyond the point of mainstream adoption of electric vehicles.

And yet, not all questions are relevant to all CPOs and their network development plans. Some data points may be incredibly relevant to one CPO and yet irrelevant to another. There may even be other data sets they are not yet aware of which could be essential to what they wish to achieve with any one or multiple sites. This is also what happened for PoGo – using Dodona helped make new data points available to them which they would otherwise not have taken account, with new levels of confidence in their site selection being the result.

“It [Dodona Analytics] has given us confidence in site selection, which is really key. And it's also probably educated us as well. Your product brought additional themes and data points to us that we wouldn't otherwise have used maybe. So I think that's something that we've taken a lot of benefit from.”
-  Stuart Douglas, Managing Director, PoGo Charge

You can hear more of what Stuart has to say on this topic and more, in this in-depth conversation he recently had with Dodona’s Co-Founder and VP US Chris Chamberlain: