The time is now. With a perfect storm of government regulation, investment, and rising electric vehicle (EV) sales and consumer confidence, Charge Point Operators (CPOs) need to be making the right decisions when it comes to the planning and deployment of EV charge points and they need to be making them now.
But we aren’t talking about snaffling up any and all available charging locations as soon as you can, just so that your competitors can’t. We are talking about ensuring that you are in a position to bag the best, most viable, profitable and maintainable sites for you and your customers, and that you can do it when the time is right.
We refer to this as “just in time deployment”, when the quick and easy identification of a potential charge point or charge point network allows a CPO to make the most of the market. But, as we all know, behind the scenes of a scalable and sustainable business is a lot of groundwork to be done. Not only that, the market is at a point where investment is key to the future of the industry. And the quicker a charge point operator sees a return on investment, the quicker they can attract more investment.
So what might be slowing CPOs down when it comes to establishing and building their business?
Escaping data drudgery for rapid success
We know how many data sources need to be evaluated for each potential charging location before they can be ruled out, listed as a potential, or approved for deployment – and that’s before the planning stage per site is even reached.
When done in-house, the plethora of data points needed must be gathered together and doing so requires a lot of time and resources. This data must then analyzed and mapped, combined into data models which requires skilled data science resources, before potentially needing to be packaged as a competitive, attractive proposition for the investors who will fund the project and the clients who will trust them to operate on their land. Sound like a labour intense and lengthy process to you?
Thankfully there is such a thing as charge point analytics, and we at Dodona are exactly that. An intelligent platform which removes the resource-intensive part of the process that slows every charge point operator down. It gathers, aggregates, and then presents the many, many points of data that support a sales opportunity, create trust with an investor, and enables an efficient rollout. It turns what can be a significant data science project into a few button clicks.
As a platform, it also offers a user-friendly, CPO-centric interface which can be viewed and interacted with wherever it is needed in the business, and is not just the uninterpretable brain child of the singular data savvy team member.
Gaining that competitive edge – not soon, but now
But exactly how much time can be saved by using such a solution? Well one prominent UK CPO client of ours shared with us that through using Dodona eMobility they went from needing weeks to respond to a large-scale tender to being able to confidently respond after a single afternoon. In doing so they swiped a significant multi-hundred charge point deployment contract from under the noses of their rivals in the process…. and they knew that they it was the right, evidence based decision to proceed quickly and commercially appropriately. Put another way, our customers deploy twice as many the amount of chargers as their peers with a higher confidence that those locations will fit their business model and ROI horizons.
So we are not just talking a time saving here, but also the gaining of significant advantage over competitors at a time when there is still a huge business opportunity out there in the EV charging space. With western governments pushing for mass EV adoption very soon – by 2030 in Europe - projected revenues on energy resale from EV chargers sit at 51 billion euros.
To ensure their slice of the pie, CPOs need to look now at where and when they should deploy, and do so in the most time and cost-efficient way. They also need to remain competitive, however, maintaining operational agility in order to be able to scale and adapt, especially in a market where smaller, more nimble competitors are likely to pop up. “Out of the box” solutions like Dodona can help CPOs (and ineeded anyone looking to deploy EV charging networks) maintain that business velocity by delivering value both today and tomorrow, identifying highly utilizable sites with future profit.
But the proof is always in the pudding, so reach out to us for a free discover consultation. In addition, you might be interested in reading The Business Case for Charge Point Operators.