Pod Point is set to float up to half of its electric vehicle (EV) charging company, with owner EDF expecting to maintain a stake of more than 50%.
Announcing that it was considering a float the company said it was active in each segment of the EV charging ecosystem across home, workplace, destination and en-route.
At end June, Pod Point had installed and shipped more than 102,000 charge points. The number of home units installed had risen from 7,348 in 2018 to 28,361 in 2020, with 22,647 units installed in the six months to 30 June. In addition, Pod Point owns and operates 853 charge points (a mix of both AC and DC units) at 396 Tesco sites. It said it expects to significantly increase the number of owned charge points at both Tesco sites and other locations in the near term.
The company expects that approximately 25 million charge points will be needed in the UK by 2040, most likely to be home chargers. It expects the total number of public charge points to increase from around 21,000 in 2020 to up to half a million in 2030.
Pod Point also noted the EV chargers’ two-way connection with customers and the electricity grid. It said over 79,000 of Pod Point’s smart charge points communicated with its back-end systems in the previous three months to collect real-time data on customer charging patterns and behaviour. It said, “This foundation enables Pod Point to develop future revenue streams whereby Pod Point plans to offer energy monitoring services, host software services, electrical grid load management, fleet management, and solar and storage recommendations to current and potential customers.”
In the medium term it expects to become “a key participant in distributed smart energy”, with charge points actively involved in managing load “by controlling the flow of energy into EVs on a national and local level”. Growth would be available through EDF’s UK customer base and through access to EDF’s capabilities across the energy value chain.