SUMMARY KEYWORDS
People, Electric car, net zero, driving, My energi, technology, Libbi battery, products, charge, electric vehicles, home, car, solar, electric, heat pumps, UK, solar panels, installer, customers, electricity.
SPEAKERS
Liz Allan, Tom Callow
Liz Allan 00:12
Welcome to Electric Evolution. This podcast is about the journey to a more sustainable future; in order for us to be able to do our best to achieve Net Zero, I'll be discussing a variety of topics with experts in their field in order to educate and increase our knowledge of green energy, electric vehicles and the electric vehicle infrastructure. So whether you're an individual who wants to make a difference at home, a small business, or a corporate. This podcast is just for you.
Liz Allan
So today on the podcast I've got Tom callow, from My Energi and you are the Head of Communications there. So welcome, Tom. Thank you for joining me. So I've seen you many a time on LinkedIn and we actually met in person about eight weeks ago at Solar and Storage Live, didn't we? So it's really nice because you were comparing, you were running a session where there was a number of other people talking about electric vehicles.
So I know that you've worked within the electric vehicle industry for many years or the automotive industry for many years. But can you just give me a bit of background about how you managed how you got to where you are now working at my energy and what is Head of Corporate Communications is? What does that what do you do?
Tom Callow 01:42
Sure. Well, thanks for having me. And my background really is as you say, in automotive and communications kind of mixture of both. So I was a motoring journalist when I was younger and then decided that kind of public relations and all that sort of chance was a bit more positive and less, maybe less cynical sometimes.
So I went to that world. Spent eight years in a public relations agency consultancy in the automotive space, and then I went in-house to the automotive services company for a couple of years to do their external communications and public relations and so on. And then, bizarrely, one of my previous clients from the agency world was a company that did electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
In that automotive services company, they were selling about half a million cars here in the wholesale world and they wanted a charging infrastructure because they suddenly realised they were going to have to start selling and stocking electric cars. So I got in touch with him, and asked him about some chargers and could our team get in touch, which turned into all those conversations that you don't plan and where he offered me a job at the end of it.
And I wasn't looking to move but it was that time when electric vehicles seemed to be ramping up and I thought was a good idea. And that business got acquired by BP that's been four years and had always from the sidelines had always sort of admired this amazing brand. This amazing company called My Energi, you know, was a great product.
You know, it's always sort of annoying. Really, when you say competitors have really good products and are a really good brand. And they were so good. And just so sort of, you know, say well regarded by the customers.
So I'd always admired My Energi and got approached about a role funnily enough last year, so last July, July 2021. And basically agreed I agreed. I joined the business in sort of late summer 2021. And for various reasons, ended up joining in sort of April this year.
So I've been in the business about eight months. And in my role as Head of Communications, basically, I manage our public relations activities. So work with the media and also government relations activity as well. So I'm working on a lot of policy and regulatory issues sort of day to day. Sometimes that's easy. Sometimes the government is happy if the government of all flavours that we've had in sort of recent decades have been pretty pro-electric vehicles and energy transition, but sometimes the detail is a bit messy.
So sometimes there might be a piece of regulation that was really going to sort of stifle the market, which we have to kind of raise a red flag about and say, Look, you know, have you really thought this through? So it's a really fascinating role. I get to work with a lot of external stakeholders. I was that sort of journalist, you know, government, government officials, ministers, MPs, etc. And obviously, try and translate what they're doing into the internal world for business as well. But mine is you know, a fantastic business to work for. And as I say, it's, it's a company I've admired for years now.
Liz Allan 04:19
And it started off, didn't it? Is it only about a few years old now?
So didn't it start off with something like kind of 20 people am I right? I don't know.
Tom Callow 04:31
It started with two people, which was just Lee Sutton, who's our CEO and co-founder and Jordan Brompton, who's our CMO and co-founder, and Lee and Jordan have been friends for some time, doing different things. And basically, Lee had an electric car I think at that point, I'm right in saying that he wanted to figure out how to maximise his solar generation. So he, he wanted to create a kind of device that would basically maximise the amount of solar energy you could actually use in his home. So a solar diverter.
And Jordan just had amazing ideas about how that can be marketed, how it could be you know, sort of sold into the customer base. And so I, you know, always describe Lee as our genius engineer, and Jordan was our genius marketer. And together that's a pretty formidable combination because I think a lot of companies have a genius engineer, and nobody to take the idea forward, or they have a genius marketer. And they end up always sort of overhyping a product and there's nothing substantial there. So we've got the best combination of both in my opinion. But some of the better the ad was our first product, and yeah, the company was founded in 2016. The Eddi actually came out in 2017. So that took a year to really get the product right in the market
Liz Allan 05:41
So the Eddi is the diverter then?
Tom Callow 05:45
Yes, the Eddi is a solar diverter. That's right. So all of our products end with "I". There's a kind of a reference to it. And so, So Ed, I think is "Energy Diverter" that's why it's Eddi. And Zappi is basically trading on the familiar Zap name that we seem to equate with EV charging and then and then we move forward so Zappi came out in 2017 and was really a game changer because it was the world's first solar-dedicated EV charger. So it was a well World's First Solar Home charger that you could use to directly put solar energy into your car and monitor in in real time effectively to see what energy was coming from the solar panels.
Prior to that people have always been sort of guessing about how to charge their car from solar energy. Yeah, 2020 and 2018 was a big year for the company. So Jordan and Lee managed to get some investment from Sir Terry Leahy, who is the ex Tesco CEO and a technology investor called Bill Curry who gave them about 1.2 million pounds of investment in 2018 which really put Rocketboosters under the company, dramatically increased output etc. And we've now sold over 400,000 devices. And that's globally as well. We're a big exporter, which we probably don't talk about enough. So that's a job I've got to do is start talking about that more. But yeah, we're a big exporter as well. So we sell into Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia. And obviously, we're looking at all the growth markets for electric vehicles and solar energy and renewable energy now as well.
Liz Allan 07:11
So, going to solar and storage, storage live was so interesting seeing the products and your marketing is just fantastic. I've got to say, you know, I was going to I got a photo with one of your business development chaps, kind of next to the Libbi battery. Because, to be honest, that one looks really, really interesting. And as I was talking to you about before we started recording as a family we're really interested in this. We've not got solar panels at the moment, and we haven't got an EV, so part of this podcast is trying to understand what's out there. What's available, what can we do and what can the average person do in order to kind of obtain these things? So how did how does Libbi work with the solar system, you know, with the solar system with you know, kind of with all the other systems?
Tom Callow 08:04
How they integrate I mean I guess the first thing to say, which I think is really important this at this time, of the cost of living crisis, is that we fully understand that our products and we're talking about how to get most people to do all these things and we fully understand that our products at the moment like anyone's in our sector are available to a certain group of the population with the means to afford them either to finance them or buy them outright.
There are a lot of people who can't afford this technology. Yes, there's a big job, I think, to government and industry to work out how we make this technology more affordable, how we get it to people who can't necessarily afford it by themselves. So that's talking to policymakers talking to landlords talking to the house building sector and making sure we get solar panels on you build homes by default as a good spec, making sure we get landlords to start installing this as well.
So the rental tenants get it because obviously they're very transient, you know a renter that's in a property for maybe a year that they're not going to get paid back from and so instead of panels themselves, they need a landlord to do that for them. But if you look at the system basically we see electric vehicles as a real gateway into sort of renewable energy generally and domestic decarbonisation as I call it.
So what often happens and this isn't this isn't a route everyone will take. But what often happens is an electric car is the first step because that's out there. People are thinking about electric cars, they're kind of quite sexy, desirable products, you know, people see them driving and they say I got electric kinda makes sense. You know, reduce tailpipe emissions, etc.
And then you start charging at home because the majority of homes will have access to some form of street parking. It's not the vast majority but we think is the majority of most papers and governments just exactly 60% of home. 65% have off street parking.
But what happens if you're charging at home and you buy our Zappi charger to charge your car. What you might suddenly think is, well, this is great. I'm charging my car. I'm not doing any tailpipe emissions, but my electricity bill is going pretty high pretty high, right? So the average energy you need for a car to charge let's say 10,000 miles a year, or 910 1000 miles a year is roughly equivalent to the annual the average annual electricity consumption of a UK home so you could basically see your bill double.
Now, that seems dramatic, but you've gotta remember obviously you've doubled your electricity bill, but you've zeroed your petrol and diesel BILL Right? So actually, the payback is that you might be spending more electricity but you're certainly paying less than you would have done on petrol or diesel.
But what that's sometimes spurs is people think well hang on a minute, I'm using this extra electricity. How can I mitigate that right how can I mitigate the using extra electricity, which then leads people to think okay, maybe solar panels are a good idea because I can generate my own power and put that into the current generated energy plants current. Once you've done that, you then look at your solar consumption, what we call the consumption figure. And there's a there's a there's something called self-consumption that is a figure of how much of your solar you're generating, you're actually using. And for the average home in the UK with just solar panels. It's you're actually using the minority of the energy you're generating. So if you made if you're generating energy on your roof, you're actually exporting. We call it wasting because you're getting so little money for it now, you're basically wasting most of the energies that you're making, which sounds bizarre.
Hence products like Eddi our energy diverter solar diverter, which then pipe that solar, wire that solar to places where it can be used during the day when you're out of work or something. So it might hit your hot water tank while you're out of work. It might charge your car if it's plugged in. It might put you on for heating, they will do things that can be useful for the energy it's making, but without having to kind of waste it by sending it back to the grid and expense.
And then the Libbi basically bolts onto that system by saying right, you still got access solar energy that you're, you're creating during the day, you might still have off-peak energy or your access you're accessing during the night and you can't use it. So let's bring in a battery like Libbi to store that energy. And then you can use it later. So a typical kind of use case of Libbi is that it's charged during the day with sunshine charge during the day with solar. When most people are paying like that's probably changed quite dramatically and there are a lot of people during the day so you're charging your battery when it's sunny, and it's even sunny out in October.
And then it's being used in the evening when you've got a peak electricity consumption. The UK domestic peak is by far and away always been the evening and obviously peaks in winter. So use it in the evening. And then your battery basically ended up being depleted or mostly depleted at the end of the night. End of the day sorry and then the next day it's then charged off again during the day and then sold.
So that's sort of a typical use cycle of, of a Libbi battery. Because basically maximising what you can use with the energy you're generating. So it's capturing what is essentially free energy at that point. So the marginal cost of that solar is zero because you've already paid for the solar panels. Obviously, you have to pay for them first place but the marginal cost is zero because it's free to you know, we said we believe in this idea of maximising what we call the self-consumption figure because if you're generating it, you should be using it or you should be capturing it and then using it later. The idea of exporting it back to the grid is something we really try and avoid because although it's good to have people connected to the grid, for reasons of things like flexibility grid flexibility, it basically means that in the future, your consumption might be altered very slightly while you're asleep to help the grid but you won't notice in the morning when you wake up. That's good. But again, sending energy back to the grid is something we try and avoid for our customers if we can,
Liz Allan 13:18
Yeah, that sounds a brilliant idea. So So what does it actually What does a Libbi power as heat, so it's obviously you're getting the solar panels that are integrating with the Libbi. I've got the right words integrating with Libbi what does that do? Is that powering electric just electricity sources in the house and so you're your lighting and if you've got electric heating or things like that,
Tom Callow 13:45
Yeah, so your Libbi effectively sits as a power supply for your home. So you can if you're if basically if you're if you've got a charge fully charged Libbi, let's say if you charge up to anything so if you get home, you can run off that battery you can run your home off the battery. So whether you're using an electric shower to have a shower, whether you're cooking electric hob, whether you're heating, electric heating and freezing whatever with your charging an electric car, anything that uses electrical energy in your home you can run off that you can offer to be basically as in the when it whenever it's charged. We also have an option for a sort of blackout circuit as well where if the if this is a blackout, some supply side is actually you can actually power the home office of a circuit from Libbi as well because usually you'd still need some form of grid connection. You will be able to run it because it basically would cut the power to the cuts on power delivery traditionally, but we have a way of usurping that as it were.
Liz Allan 14:39
So will the diverter also work with, something like because we're looking for air source heat pumps? Will the diverter also work with that and actually recognise the kind of power that's coming in that way because I know that that's not something that you're producing, but with the divert to manage that.
Tom Callow 14:59
So we I mean, Eddi will power any what's called a resistive load. So it will do it will actually work in integration with those or resistive loads. So it depends on the kind of technology we're using. And the other thing with heat pumps is that most of the time, the modulation kind of physical modulation capabilities can vary. So what heat pumps tend to like is being run pretty much constantly, but they can run very low. They don't necessarily like being kind of turned off and turned on too much. So that that can be something that some people don't realise about heat pumps is that they're not It's not like switching on and off that sort of immersion heater or something like that. They like to stay stable as possible. But yeah, I mean, that the whole, the idea of it is that as you bring all the technologies together, they will integrate more thoroughly.
One challenge for the industry is how we look towards things like interoperability, so that word is about how these technologies work with each other from different manufacturers bluntly, so there isn't at the moment, a common language if you want to call it that the language that all of these products speak that they can necessarily integrate with each other. So what happens is, it's sort of a bit of a Microsoft versus Apple type scenario. In a way where you end up with technology that doesn't quite play nicely, all the time.
So there are there are standards out there, and there are some protocols, but the issue is that obviously different engineering teams implement them in different ways. Everyone has a different idea of what the tolerances on standard XYZ are so you don't necessarily get that full interoperability of technology and our approach that at the moment is very much been well we'll build an ecosystem that we can effectively slot it.
So we'll build all of the things that customers need, so divert the charge of the battery, so that you can actually bring the system together because a lot of customers have had frustrations where there's three different sort of third party things together, you know, a charger or a developer and a battery. And they just don't really work so there are really kind of you know, there are quite expensive batteries out there.
For example that will if you plug an electric car in the battery basically is trained to see a load and then just discharge. All right, well I'm full. You've got the plug something in I will discharge my battery. Yeah, what we what actually a lot of customers want is consulted so that not happen sometimes. So they actually want the battery to stay charged. For example, if it's the middle of the night and they getting cheap electricity and the battery is still with what was expensive electricity for some reason, then they might want that to stay charged and use cheap electricity instead. So we can do that. With our system. We can prioritise whether the EV chargers certain the battery discharges, all that kind of stuff. So we bring a lot more intelligence to it. And it's not simply a battery. And obviously, Libbi in itself is you know, it's a battery. It's an inverter and it's a controller. So you've got that you've got a solution really I sit the whole system battery system is not simply the battery itself.
Liz Allan 17:40
Oh, the innovation with all these chests just is mind-blowing, you know, the way the places that we're going and the way that we're able to do all these things. And that's why I want you to know, part of this podcast is to actually not just educate needs kind of people out there because I'm sure you know that there are lots of I'm not sure whether you agree with me this there seems to be quite a lot of misinformation out there about certain technologies and the way things work or they don't work and the press jump on these things, don't they? So it's about, for me, it's about making it more kind of something that can be achieved by people or that understanding the level of understanding can be achieved by people so they can make informed decisions.
Tom Callow 18:26
Yeah, and I would say, you know, there are we've been quite lucky. I think that the adoption rates for both things I say around electric cars are such that word of mouth, the trusted word of mouth, is proving it's probably the best market channel of all, to be honest with you. So there are still people out there that you know, I was reading a LinkedIn Post this morning by someone that had tried an electric car for six weeks and he said, You know what, this isn't for me, I'm handing it back and here are the six reasons why. And some of them were just sort of ludicrous. I mean, you know, he was sort of saying, you know, you, you know, in winter, you get less than 50% of the stated range, which you know, I mean, I've driven every electric car, and I know that's not true.
You will get this sort of, you know, you will get people making sort of blindly sort of ignorant assumptions or statements that just aren't true. They're dramatic, which is fine, but actually what you're seeing now is this corrective action where you get the people who do have electric cars say, that's not true, is it?
I know, you've obviously had a bad experience. But clearly, your electric car with a range of, say, you know, 214 Miles clearly didn't just do 100 miles on a charge. That's not right. Maybe you lost 20 or 30% of your range in winter with all the heating on at night and over the house, maybe driving aggressively, but you clearly didn't lose like 60% of your range, that's not gonna happen.
So you get the voices of moderation. Now, I think among that kind of populace creeping in, so people like me have to spend less time on Twitter and LinkedIn correcting people because there's now a big group of people are doing it for me.
Liz Allan 19:49
And actually, that should work should make because in my mind, it is about like, video job, you know, it's about the communication and like you say, it kind of feels like it's not it's not a fanclub. That's not the that's not the right word, you know, not a phrase but but actually people who like say, who are driving are Utah you know, the driving EVs, they're utilising you know, kind of renewable energy or clean energy sources for different and let let them be the spokespeople because that's the way that other other people are going to start listening, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Callow 20:27
I mean, I think the we certainly I mean, I think some people still say, Well, we're still in early adopter phase. I disagree with that. I think we're past the early adopter or very early adopters. We're still in a we're still being you know, the phase of adoption is still kind of quite open mindset. Let's call it that. You know, we're gonna have some time before we get to laggards, but you know, we have many many salespeople out there now who I would say driverless cars daily who, who drives them just because they're there's a next car. They don't they don't really care that electric they it's just a next logical Caslen, Dubai, it's a bad guy. People who trade diesel cars there were lots of people that specifically drove a diesel to save money because they thought they were going to get better fuel economy. Maybe that was true. But they really it was just because they you know, the world sort of UK sort of mostly had diesel petrol cars, then it's also to diesel being a majority then diesel's obviously massively declined to 10% Market Share due to petrels back in the sort of ascendancy electric. And I think a lot of people just just it's just a transitional technology. It's a bit like people who end up with an iPhone who didn't really want an iPhone, but they were just upgrading their phone and it was just the next logical thing to have. And I think that's the stage we're at now. And you know, I speak as a TVv household and my wife justice to her petrol car for electric one and her primary reason I'm thinking she remind me says her primary reason having electric car is actually so she can well she cares on environment. That's clear and I don't have too much trouble with that. But she definitely cares about the environment and she is you know, she doesn't like it. She's driven around, just don't like seeing petrol fumes coming out of his office and think I'm doing that too. But a big reason is preconditioning. She loves the idea as soon as she found out I could do that on my previous electric car. She couldn't believe that I could remotely heat my car up in the mornings or set it to heat up at 6am I didn't know all of the stuff that people said I don't care. I want to remotely drink this Michael that is so it won't just be about people converting because they want to save the world and they will save like firemen or they want to save, pounded many, many pounds a year whatever people will switch to technology because it's better technology in so many ways. It's the that you know there's there's a motion gentleman Steve copy who talks about this a lot which is the modulation he gets for electric car as well. We were driving it is so much more refined. And you know when you when you want to just get a little bit of power out of electric car just go very slowly through traffic. That's what you get. If you put your foot down very gently and you just want this much power and you get to a power in a petrol diesel car. You can't you can't do that. You've got this dirty Grid Engine running whether you're falling through traffic or you can't it doesn't it doesn't like down to like a tiny couple of cubic centimetre, centimetres of petroleum being but you're still burning through petrol. You can't modulate it. So it's just it's just a it is a better form of driving in my view, and I'm happy yeah, I will argue that all day with people tell me it's not that it isn't better. We're driving. Yes, you don't get exhaust noise and yes, it's not as visceral and people who say that EVs have no soul but you know it's that changes when you drive. I don't know many people who drive eat a lot and genuinely think they're all sort of soulless appliances. That's very much a few of people who've never driven one before driving.
Liz Allan 23:35
Probably people thinking they're driving a toaster or something.
Tom Callow 23:38
Yeah, and the conversion rates are just insane. I mean, I used to be involved in something in Milton Keynes, which is the actual paper experience Centre, which was all about multi-brand sharing when people would come in. There's no sales fee, sales commission there was no hard sell at all. It was just a learning centre with a few cars you could test drive and people would come in no one I never. I never experienced anyone coming in and I spoke to the team as well. And then they never experienced it, anyone coming in, saying, a really love the idea of an electric car. I'm really keen. Let me drive one. And then they drove one and went, Oh, actually, that really wasn't as good as I expected. I don't think I want one anymore.
That never happened. What happened a lot was people that came in going I really don't know about this stuff. I you know, I think it's going to be boring. And they were clearly being dragged in there by their partner and they just thought you know what, I'm just not interested in this. I know it's going to be terrible, but I'll sit in the passenger seat and I'll just fold my arms and frown a bit.
And then they'd get out and go. That was brilliant. That was so smooth. I can't believe how quick it was in it. And they were just getting their mind blown because they brought all these preconceptions to the test drive, and they were just all blown away. And that's the most common thing that happens is that people go from sort of sceptic to supporter, really quickly with electric cars once they drive them, but if you don't drive them you don't know so I understand why people are sceptical
Liz Allan 24:55
So tell me is that place in Milton Keynes, is the experience centre, is it still open?
Tom Callow 25:01
It's open for a slightly different purpose now. So I think it's about sort of mobility experience now so you can go there and learn bit more about the mobility spaces, but it was a five year project that the government supported in the UK and it you know, hundreds of thousands of people came through the doors, thousands of test drives. It definitely helped boost the uptake in Milton Milton Keynes, in my view, because people just saw it as a very natural thing to do and bring in cars as well.
You know, the car dealerships get a lot of money spent on them, and they're often made into these palatial structures, but actually, they're often out of town. A lot of people literally don't go car shopping anymore, they do it at the very last minute just to kind of check the boot space and stuff, but people don't necessarily go browsing in dealerships as much as they used to.
But people go shopping in shopping centres actually, if you put cars that might make more sense. So it's one thing, for example, Polestar is doing, that I think is really interesting. Polestar with their sort of spaces concept where they're bringing, they don't have dealerships in the UK as such, they have these spaces where they put two or three cars in a very high traffic shopping centre, for example, that people will see and they'll go in, and they'll ask questions and again.
They have a very similar model there, they have no sales commission, no one's going to shove a contract or an order form in their face, its just to learn about the cars. And actually, funnily enough, more often than not, the UK CEO was saying the other day, more often than not, they actually get questions about the infrastructure and the UK system.
They don't actually get people going again, what trim level is this? Or does this come with blue paint or whatever? It's actually, I know about the Polestar 2. I've done my research online, but can you tell me how I charge it? Can you tell me? What's this vehicle to grid stuff coming down the line? Is that going to happen?
You know, they're asking more about the industry and the ecosystem than they are about the product.
Liz Allan 26:37
So that's really interesting, because I've actually not driven an EV yetr, so part of this is to take people on my experience of doing this as well. And actually helping others to make that decision. Because when I've done it, I want to share it.
So, at the moment, these are the things I want to do. I'm looking for Drive days and things like that, to try and go out and test drive a fewbecause I have my eye on what I've quite like which is an MG4, but I have no frame of reference at the moment. So I want to, you know, try and try a few different cars out.
And actually, I'm driving a lot more I always say this I'm driving a lot more these days. And for me, totally the same as your wife. I don't like the fact that I'm I feel like I'm polluting all the time. And I told you who I'm married to. A Professor of climate change, it doesn't go down well either. So, you know, I think that gonna be the route that we're going.
So, I was going to ask you a little bit more about who your actual target market is, and how can people if they're interested in any of My Energi products. How do they go about finding out more about it?
Tom Callow 28:00
So we, as My Energi at the moment, we sell, it's actually through a really great national network of wholesalers and installers. So wholesaler electrical businesses take our products, installers buy them and install them all. Installers also buy them from us, as well.
So at the moment, the benefit of, I guess, coming to the My Energi website is that you would, say you want a Zappi, for example, an EV charger, you would get a quote from, say, three or four companies that would have had to compete for your business through our platform. So rather than going to a manufacturer's website and the price is x pounds, and that's it for now, you'll actually be in a system where you get competitive quotes from our installer network.
And obviously, a lot of those installers also instal solar; it's a very common link that solar installers often install Zappi's because they're the best Solar Charger out there. You will get a quote for a Zappi and you'll be able to get your quote for solar at the same time and therefore work with that installer to scale the system that you want.
And more often than not, they'll probably also have battery technology available to them. Now our Libbi product is really just coming to market now. So we the first products are arriving soon. We're going to be scaling that up throughout the first quarter and first half of next year.
Demand has been amazing for Libbi, demand has gone through the roof and probably you saw at Solar and Storage Live. Queues of people waiting to snap a selfie on the stand. We're really going to be ramping up supply in that period, because we know it's going to be a very high-demand product.
So the installers that can install that will obviously grow in line with that as well. So people will essentially buy them through an installer, to get a system fitted. That's a great approach as well because obviously means you can kind of knit technology together rather than buying piecemeal yourself. As I say some customers have done it before with third-party products and struggled to get the technologies to talk to each other.
Again, people do this in different ways. Some customers are financing their products, some customers are taking out financing to do it. We've done some interesting modelling and things like solar panels that show that given the cost of electricity now, you might actually be able to finance solar, pretty much at breakeven point.
So what I mean by that is you might be able to finance the solar system where the amount you're saving and your energy bill, at least in some months is offset.
The amount you're paying in the finance is actually offset by the saving in the bill if that makes sense. It won't work for everyone, but there's a really strong argument for that kind of thing, the moment where people should really look at how much it might cost you to finance because you might find yourself very surprised by that.
There are various things out there like Home Improvement loans, there are green mortgages available now that allow you to invest a certain amount of money in some equity-releasing green technologies. There was a great announcement from Octopus Energy the other day about a deal they've done with I think Lloyds Bank and Halifax bank, to basically increase the proliferation of heat pumps in the UK, where they're I think they're saying they can get the cost down to about £2000.
So their mortgage customers which again, I assume it's done through financing on the mortgage, so really great options in the market now. sort of financing and bring these products to more people.
But really we're trying to democratise the technology and get it out to as many people as possible. So we know the current customer typology is more likely to be an EV driver or someone who is you know, is slightly better off to afford you know, several 1000 pounds on solar panels.
But we really want to make sure this technology gets democratised to as many people as possible as quickly as possible because that's really how we're going to make net zero and achieve the energy transition.
Liz Allan 31:25
I totally agree, we've got to get this out to more and more people. As I say not everybody can afford it. So if we can make it more affordable for people across the UK, it'll make a massive difference, won't it?
Tom Callow 31:39
Absolutely. And we believe that if you can afford this technology if you can afford to switch to an electric car, you can afford to get solar panels, you should. It's getting to the point now, you know, we've got less than 1000 days left to kind of mitigate that its 1.5-degree increase in global temperatures. You know, if we want to try and do that within that sort of timeframe.
Let's not beat about the bush. It's getting very urgent, and I think there is this moral obligation on people to actually think about shouldn't I shouldn't I do this if I can afford to do it?
And it's not just about virtue signalling, it's not just about telling people what to do for social reasons. There's a real economic benefit of it. So if more people buying new cars get into new electric cars. And obviously, we're kind of at maximum supply anyway, so we can't really have more people buying electric cars for supplies. But if we can take up all of that supply coming in and we'd get more people buying electric cars, and the new end of the market. What that does is a really positive effect on the used car market because it basically helps to get used prices down so as you increase supply, you lower prices in the used market you have more availability, more model availability, to used car buyers who are obviously on lower budgets because a used car is are cheaper than a new car.
So you know, that will drive faster adoption by people who are less well off, and who will hopefully be able to afford all these cars and the secondhand market eventually as well. So it's a good thing economically and socially, to be invested in this technology as quickly as possible if you can if you have the means to do so.
Liz Allan 33:08
I do agree. Absolutely. So if people want to contact you, if they're interested in what they've just heard, can you give your website address and an email address that they can contact you on?
Tom Callow 33:21
Yeah, so if you go to www.myenergi.com. We've got a quote form in there if people want to go in and find a Zappi etc. Or a quote for anything else, and they're very welcome to track me down on Twitter or LinkedIn, you'll find me very easily if you search Tom Callow, and always happy to engage with potential customers or people just want to learn more find out more.
Liz Allan 33:48
Tom, thank you ever so much for this. It's been really really interesting. I'm sure we could probably talk for a lot longer about this. So probably will give you a shout and get you to come back on again. But I really appreciate it.
Tom Callow 33.49
Thank you very much.
Liz Allan 33:49
And bye to everybody else.
Liz Allan outro
Thanks for listening to Eectric Evolution with Liz Allan. If you want to find out more about Full Circle Continuous Improvement, please visit us at www.fullcircleci.co.uk. Don't forget to keep listening for more episodes coming up. really soon.