Starting out as an energy company specialising in renewables such as wind, solar and biomass, RAW Charging naturally progressed from creating energy to finding ways of harnessing it for other sustainable purposes.
Today RAW is focused on providing fully funded EV charging infrastructure to site hosts and is building one of the largest networks of public charging across the UK and Europe. We spoke with CEO Jason Simpson about the company’s approach to offering “destination charging” as part of a premium customer experience at hotels, attraction parks and retail locations.
What is your strategy for making EV charging more accessible and convenient for drivers?
Our focus is on what we call “go-to destinations” in three very specific segments: hospitality, leisure and retail. The classic scenario is someone who has been driving a few hours to get somewhere and, therefore, needs to charge. This driver is also someone who plans to stay in that location for at least half a day and often overnight.
We want to give drivers a way to charge their battery in an easy and convenient way at their destination — as almost an unseen part of their visit. That way, they can focus on enjoying the hotel, attraction or shopping centre they are visiting.
On the technology side, we are trying to carefully match the use case with the solution, so we are focused on AC charging at these destinations where people will be staying for a number of hours.
What about DC rapid charging?
Utilisation of rapid charging hubs is good because they act as a magnet. Someone needs to charge; they look for a place to charge quickly and drive there — similar to fueling up at a petrol station. That’s fine, but that will become quite transactional over time. I’d much prefer to see a situation where people have a reason to go somewhere and then have a need to charge once they arrive. We will build some RAW Rapid charging hubs, but I’d like to see those locations also be considered a destination rather than just somewhere drivers are passing by.
You primarily provide funded solutions. What does that mean?
For most of our site hosts, RAW Charging pays for the equipment, the infrastructure and the grid connection — if the project needs one. Basically, we install our solution on property that we lease from the owner, so that makes it a fully funded solution. We typically pay rent or provide some kind of revenue share to the host.
We have another model where we share some of the investment with the host if they want to have financial involvement, or if their site isn’t as commercially viable as it needs to be to be fully funded.
With our third model, the customer pays for the investment themselves upfront, and we operate the solution for them. We typically only set up this model with partners that we have a broader relationship with.
What is one of your standout customer stories?
Merlin Entertainments. We’ve installed and now manage their five big park attractions in the UK — Legoland, Chessington, Alton Towers, Warwick Castle and Thorpe Park. At each location, we provide charging in different areas, such as the main car parks, the on-site hotels and for employee vehicles. That’s on a fully funded basis. We currently have more than 100 ports across the Merlin portfolio, and I’m sure we will expand from there. These locations have thousands of parking spaces, so as the number of EVs visiting these destinations rises, we will continue to fund the expansion of EV charging at the parks.
What are some of the benefits you are providing your customers?
We are focused on the end customer experience, which is what our site hosts are most concerned with. The first point of contact for EV drivers visiting these destinations is when they plug into a charge point and the last point of contact is when they unplug and leave. If they don’t have a good experience, the host runs the risk of losing that customer in the future.
We focus on investing in that customer experience by providing the best solution possible — the functionality of the charge point must be the best it can be in terms of manageable cables, a decent-sized screen that offers contactless payment charging and other integrated services. The Waitlist feature within ChargePoint hardware is another great example of how we offer a premium customer experience.
What are the advantages of partnering with ChargePoint?
ChargePoint has been instrumental in helping RAW grow and evolve our business over the years, bringing a lot of market knowledge to the table.
ChargePoint is kind of like an Apple in an Android world. It’s kind of a semi-walled garden in that there are a lot of things we don’t have to worry about at the integration level. Our customers and, therefore their customers, have a seamless experience. Their data is protected from cyber-risks.
How would you like to see your partnership evolving?
“I like that ChargePoint is hardware-agnostic and has such a strong focus on software. There’s so much potential in terms of adding feature sets and ways to make use of roaming and charging data to give us more insight into the end driver.”
— Jason Simpson, CEO, RAW Charging
It will be more and more important to us as a business to understand our customer profiles and develop ways to have contact with them.
We expect our network of charging installations to double in size this year alone, so we would love to partner with ChargePoint in terms of telling our story and getting that out to new hotels, leisure parks and golf clubs.
What is your vision for RAW Charging as the industry evolves?
We are currently going through a rebranding exercise. Our new logo features a road design to reflect our stronger focus on the customer journey and that premium guest experience. The driver is on a journey to a destination. Our new tagline spells that out further: Connecting Amazing Places.
Basically, we’re saying, “We want to help you have a great day wherever you go, and when you wake up in the morning or when you leave the destination at the end of the day, you can relax in the knowledge that your car will be charged.”
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