Naomi Nye, head of sales at Drax, explains the importance of technology and collaboration as she looks ahead to 2025.

Naomi Nye, head of sales at Drax

I’ve worked with a number of different companies within the EV sector over the past decade, but what drew me to Drax was the USP that we are experts in the energy space. We’re part of the national critical infrastructure, with the largest supply of renewable power – and, for me, EVs have their own fuel source, which is electricity. We’re trying to work towards the 1.5° reduction pathway and electrification is important because transport is such a huge contributor of those greenhouse gas emissions.

We have to do something and we’re being pushed down that road with legislation and funding – and I think companies are picking it up and doing it in slightly different ways. For us, it’s very much about a partnership with our customers to help them get a better understanding of the limited resource that is energy.

If we’re turning places into fuel stations, which is essentially what we’re doing now with depots and offices and other premises that weren’t designed for that purpose, we need to put in infrastructure in a slightly different way. That means thinking about it more as an asset to the business, not only in terms of electrifying vehicles, but looking at the bigger holistic picture.

Keep track of technology

We’re able to build bespoke solutions around the needs of our customers. We have an incredibly large team, so we’re always looking at products, propositions and regulations to help them. Technology moves really fast – you only have to look at mobile phones and how they can be out of date within a month, because the replacement has just been released.

Our job in the EV space is to put in technological solutions that are flexible, future-proofed and that will continue to grow with an EV strategy. When we’re talking to customers, particularly when we’re looking at multi-site locations, we need to put together a strategy that’s going to work for those companies now, but also in a year’s time – and also in five years’ time.

Drax offers an end-to-end turnkey solution and all of our installers are in-house, so we have control of the complete picture. But, importantly, the way that we work on a consultancy basis with customers makes the real difference. We understand, first and foremost, the business model, needs and requirements – and then we look at how we can integrate all the bells and whistles.

Collaboration is key

The whole industry relies on people working together and it can really help to bring lots of different companies together. It’s probably one of the only industries that doesn’t really have a specific target market, because EV goes wherever you park a car. So all of the businesses that are at the end of the line will have different needs requirements.

We’ve got a number of different case studies. For example, we’ve worked with FI Real Estate, initially around the issues of putting charging kit in the ground and the questions that come with that: how do we pay for it? Who pays for it? How do we know who’s using it? We’ve also done trials with SES Water and helped it with bespoke solutions.

Expect more technology in 2025

We will continue to foster relationships with customers and provide them with everything they need. As we move forward, we’ll see technology change and developments around energy and how we’re managing it – and will manage it in the future. The more EVs on the road, the more chargepoints are required and the more energy we’re consuming. The big questions will be around how we manage increased demand and the existing infrastructure that’s already in place? Technology will help – and we’ve got that at the moment with low balancing and various smart charging technology and flexibility services that we can offer where we can shift some of that usage of energy into potentially different times of the day.

We’ll also see more technology emerging around vehicle to grid in 2025 – we know it works but, commercially, it needs more impetus to cut through to customers.