London Gatwick has become the first international airport to open an Electric Forecourt®, a dedicated electric vehicle (EV) charging station, with the new GRIDSERVE facility available for all to use from today. We spoke to Gridserve founder and CEO Toddington Harper to finmd out all about it.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Toddington Harper and I'm the founder and CEO of GridServe.
00:04 It's incredibly exciting.
00:14 This is a project that's been in the works for many years.
00:20 It's incredibly exciting, the collaboration between GridServe and London Gatwick.
00:26 We've taken an idea into a design, got planning permission for that design in collaboration with the airport.
00:33 We put a brand new grid connection in.
00:35 We've now built an incredibly exciting facility.
00:37 This is the most advanced electric vehicle charging facility at any airport in the world.
00:42 It's the first electric forecourt at any airport in the world.
00:46 It's designed to be able to provide visitors to London Gatwick Airport
00:53 complete confidence to come here in electric vehicles.
00:56 It's also designed to support people who are staff, for example, working in the area
01:00 to give them the confidence to transition to electric vehicles.
01:03 It's designed for residents.
01:04 It's very accessible from the motorway.
01:07 Just a few minutes off the airport on the south terminal to be able to charge incredibly easily.
01:16 It's now meant that if you happen to be in the London Gatwick Airport area for any reason,
01:25 visiting the airport or not, you now can charge any type of electric vehicle without any concern at all
01:32 with a much better experience than you would get at using a petrol station.
01:35 In addition to the 30 chargers here, most of them high-power chargers up to 350 kilowatts,
01:42 so capable of providing 100 miles of charge in five minutes,
01:46 although in practice most vehicles today, the fastest vehicles today, will take about 10 minutes.
01:53 In addition to all of the charging, we also have a Costa coffee, so people can get a great coffee.
01:59 We've got a Little Fresh, a supermarket powered by Amazon Just Walk Out technology.
02:07 [Music]
02:14 Which is fantastic.
02:15 So you walk up, you swipe a contactless card, you walk in, you pick up what you want,
02:19 you walk out and you get billed automatically.
02:22 There's fantastic high-speed internet as well.
02:25 There's lounge facilities.
02:27 There's meeting room facilities.
02:29 And all of it is also powered by net zero carbon energy,
02:34 because in addition to providing charging for electric vehicles,
02:38 we also produce clean energy from solar projects as well.
02:41 Getting to net zero is incredibly important,
02:55 and the urgency of the speed that we get there is critical.
02:59 So the UK has signed up to getting to net zero by 2050,
03:04 but the reality is getting to net zero by 2050 doesn't really align with the needs,
03:09 the science of climate change.
03:11 We need to get there as quickly as we possibly can.
03:13 And so by building infrastructure like this,
03:16 it means people can get to transition to electric cars today.
03:21 Not until 2050, they can do it today.
03:24 And they know when they turn up at a grid-serve charging station,
03:27 whether it's at London Gatwick Airport or it's across 80% of the motorway network,
03:33 that when you plug in to a grid-serve charger,
03:36 your vehicle is being charged by net zero energy.
03:39 And what that means is that every kilowatt hour of electricity that goes into a car
03:45 is netted off by a zero carbon kilowatt hour of electricity that we are producing,
03:50 either directly by grid-serve at our own solar farms,
03:53 or if we've got excess needs, which we often do,
03:56 we'll be buying renewable energy from other different renewable energy projects.
03:59 And so people know that they can transition today.
04:02 You have a better experience than petrol and diesel.
04:05 You can be powered by renewable energy.
04:07 You've got great facilities that you wouldn't get at petrol stations.
04:12 And there's no need to wait.
04:14 So what we're hoping to do by projects like this as well
04:16 is that not just give people the confidence of people who already have electric vehicles,
04:20 but really the incentive and the excitement around people in the vicinity
04:25 being able to transition to electric cars as quickly as possible.
04:28 So we've been having some great conversations also today about opportunities.
04:37 So building this infrastructure here means we now have got a great grid connection.
04:41 We've got a fantastic base, and it's how do we build on that.
04:46 So it's how do we work with the airport and businesses and individuals
04:51 using the airport to help assist the uptake of electric vehicles,
04:55 and actually different types of electric vehicles as well,
04:58 in the earliest possible timeframes.
05:00 So there's this huge opportunity.
05:02 We've built the infrastructure.
05:04 We've got opportunities for people to come around and do test drives,
05:06 learn about electric cars.
05:08 We've got as much power as is needed to charge as many vehicles as we possibly can.
05:12 So it's now how do we collaborate and increase the uptake of electric vehicles of all types,
05:17 and how do we work closer and closer with the airport
05:20 to really help assist this transition as quickly as we can.
05:26 [ Silence ]