In conversation with... Marcus Fendt, The Mobility House

In this episode, Jon and Sandra talk with Marcus Fendt, Managing Director and Chief Sales Officer at The Mobility House. They explore how The Mobility House has positioned itself uniting the automotive and energy industries, what Marcus has learned as he’s led the company to grow to over 350 employees, and what he sees as the key opportunities and challenges in the sector for the next years.

Episode transcript

[00:00:04.490] - Jon Slowe

Welcome to Talking New Energy, a podcast from LCP Delta. I'm Jon Slowe.

 

[00:00:09.310] - Sandra Trittin

And I'm Sandra Trittin. And together we are exploring how the energy transition is unfolding across Europe through conversations with guests from the leading edge of the transition.

 

[00:00:18.860] - Jon Slowe

Hi, Sandra.

 

[00:00:19.850] - Sandra Trittin

Hey, Jon.

 

[00:00:20.560] - Jon Slowe

How are you doing?

 

[00:00:21.250] - Sandra Trittin

I'm fine today. How about you?

 

[00:00:23.030] - Jon Slowe

I'm good, Sandra. I'm, I'm excited about most of our episodes, but I'm particularly excited today because one of the things I like most about the energy transition is how it brings together industries or sectors that were previously unconnected and quite different. And I don't know how you feel, but for me there are many exciting aspects of the transition, but that sector convergence is one of the most fascinating.

 

[00:00:46.890] - Sandra Trittin

You're fully right. I mean, that's specifically interesting. Right. And we see that in different kind of areas. Also on the heating part, right? With heat pumps going into the electrification, but then also in the mobility space. Why I'm especially excited to have our topic today in that focus.

 

[00:01:07.840] - Jon Slowe

Well, let's dive into that collision, if that's the right word, or convergence, maybe a better, more positive of word between the energy and the mobility sectors. And delighted to welcome today's guest, Marcus Fendt from The Mobility House. And Marcus is managing director and chief sales officer. Hello, Marcus.

 

[00:01:31.250] - Marcus Fendt

Hi, Jon. Hi, Sandra. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

[00:01:35.630] - Jon Slowe

Thank you for joining. So not all of our listeners will know of The Mobility House yet, Marcus. Many do, I'm sure, but for those that don't, can you give an elevator pitch on the mobility house for us?

 

[00:01:51.200] - Marcus Fendt

Certainly, more than welcome. So, Mobility House was founded 2009 with the vision when the first electric cars came to the market at that time, Tesla, mainly that we bring the battery and the flexibility of charging an electric vehicle together with the energy market. And by thus creating our vision slogan, which is called zero, zero. So, zero emissions while charging electric vehicles while driving it, but also zero cost. Why? Because the flexibility in a renewable energy market is worth so much that you can gain back the cost you have to charge an electric vehicle over the course of a year in the energy market and drive for free.

 

[00:02:36.950] - Sandra Trittin

Wow, this sounds really exciting and a great journey looking at you as a person, Marcus. I mean, your pathway is quite impressive, right? And you have been with mobility house from the beginning. So probably can you pick a couple of points where you are mostly proud of, or would there be also any points where you would think, wow, this was even harder to tackle than we had originally in mind?

 

[00:03:07.440] - Marcus Fendt

From both sides, actually. You certainly can imagine when we started with that vision, we never thought that this transition is a transition for rather 20 years than five years. Really, one of the most struggling things is how long a transition, which is not like the Internet or like mobile phones, more or less possible to be done. Just green field. No, we are really kind of in the machine room. So, we change everything with that new set we have. So, we come from top-down power plant now to bottom up. So, we turn it around now we have consumers, we have much more things decentralised. We didn't thought that so well through by having that vision. But on the other side, if you're an entrepreneur, you have an idea and you follow it. And our vision is so appealing, and we always focused on the next step we could do. So, mobility house is active in various fields. All of them are leading to integrating electric vehicles and providing flexibility with electric vehicles. So, we are the leading reseller for charging infrastructure. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, we have an energy management system for fleets, which we sell worldwide.

 

[00:04:33.410] - Marcus Fendt

And very proud that last week we got a confirmation that we also now charge all the buses in Boston. Smart. We won New York the year before Amsterdam, and we control more than 1600 fleets, 30,000 vehicles in a behind-the-metre optimisation. And we have done various in front-of-the-metre projects with stationary EV batteries to show and prove already what the value of EV batteries, stationary but also mobile, will be in the future and and drive politics. And Sandra, we have done a lot of things there together to understand that, because it's really not so easy to understand for people and politicians that an EV will have an enormous value. And if you look at the TCO (total cost of ownership), the EV will be the cheapest you can buy. This is not understood yet. They all complain about expensive EVs. That's not the case.

 

[00:05:29.400] - Sandra Trittin

And it's really impressive what you have reached there as a company. I can fully relate to your point from the beginning, that it takes much longer than we expected and it's much more complex than we expected. But I think if there would be not this type of people from outside of the industry, I think it would be even more difficult to make it happen. But how do you keep that long breath? I mean, how do you keep the motivation, how do you manage to keep the team motivated and to stick to that goal that you are having first?

 

[00:06:02.710] - Marcus Fendt

Because it continuously is proven, year-by-year, that this is the right goal, and we are coming closer. Would we like to come closer faster? Certainly. But we never changed our vision. So, this is really funny, because sometimes we need money and we have to go to investors and they said, you are here again, okay, you changed the company. We have seen things differently three or five or ten years ago, but the vision is still the same. And second, we have an incredible team, and they all buy in, and this certainly also motivates you. If sometimes something is harder than thought, then there is always another team member, another part of the business, which is working well. And now, as we are 350 people internationally active, there is always a day where you go one step further and where we come one step closer to achieve our vision. So, we also have to focus on the positive things and not complain about what's hard in it.

 

[00:07:10.800] - Jon Slowe

Did you have that vision from day one?

 

[00:07:13.880] - Marcus Fendt

Absolutely, yeah. We even had it a little bit more progressive, so we stopped that, especially after two car manufacturers invested in us in the beginning. The ambition of our founder, Thomas Rathbone, really great guy, good friend of mine, working with him together since 20 years already. He said, free Tesla for everybody. So, this is a little bit over exaggerating. So, we will not be able to pay off your Tesla or EV in general, but it's absolutely proven. And we just launched last year a product which is an energy tariff, where we just by unidirectional charging and marketing, commercialising your flexibility, earn €250 for a customer per year. And then we have a new law in Germany where we get another benefit. If you charge grid, which is another in average over Germany, €160. So, it's €400 saving per EV driver a year for nothing else than plugging in. So, this is minimum half of the energy cost you have for an EV. And I hope that people now we are at 3% electrification you have to understand we are not Norway, so more and more people have to understand that and then communicate it, pass it on.

 

[00:08:33.380] - Marcus Fendt

Media has to take it off. This will be subject matter, media like you in the beginning, but more and more it will be, I think, mainstream, then people will switch automatically.

 

[00:08:44.110] - Jon Slowe

You mentioned there your energy tariff that you have. So, when some people look at you, do they see an energy company now, Marcus? Would you describe yourself as, yeah, we're part energy company, part flexibility company, part charging company. Do those old definitions still make sense or would you say, no, they're actually not relevant. Now there's a new sector or a new type of company that spans these different verticals.

 

[00:09:11.780] - Marcus Fendt

That's a good point, Jon, because you are directing to something which is really new. So, storage more or less was not existing. So, this was something of the Swiss. Hi, Sandra. They had storage, it didn't exist in a largescale. And also, flexibility was not needed because you produced according to consumption. Now we have to consume according to production. And if we produce more, ideally, we can store it. And by that incredible decrease of battery prices and the incredible increase of capacity and also durance of batteries, battery storage becomes more and more relevant part in the energy sector. Still not understood by politicians. It's differently in the UK. So, you have already close to 20 gigawatts in storage installed or in planning. So, Germany just has around one little bit above 1.5 gigawatt. We are heading for also for 40 gigawatts until 2035. But all the legislation is not there. And there are two new things. It's storage and flexibility. And how do we frame us? Certainly, we are in the energy field, but we are not a classical energy company. We created a technology to optimise or to commercialise flexibility. And that's a new asset.

 

[00:10:43.880] - Marcus Fendt

It's not about kind of trading just or producing a kilowatt hour and selling a kilowatt hour. That is the old energy world.

 

[00:10:52.600] - Sandra Trittin

I would say probably to add on that, Jon, I had a thought around naming these new players like neo-utilities, because they are coming originally from a technology development point of view, like either providing, as Marcus was saying, storage, solar, et cetera, or providing platform services. And then the leverage of selling energy is only a means to an end, to keep, for example, the financing of the hardware in that way, the financing of an electric car to a minimum level for a client, right. And there's a bunch of players coming around that, just from different angles. But the main source is normally from a solution point of view and not from an energy tariff point of view.

 

[00:11:40.140] - Jon Slowe

The energy tariff is just part of what you need in order to fulfil that purpose. Marcus, that you described.

 

[00:11:46.030] - Marcus Fendt

Absolutely. And like in the energy product I described before, we actually wanted to sell just the technology to utility companies, but they don't understand it. So, we had to be our own energy provider. We had to get our...

 

[00:12:03.370] - Jon Slowe

The number of companies that have had good technology, good solutions, good software, and tried to go to market through existing utilities and retailers and reached that conclusion.

 

[00:12:14.020] - Marcus Fendt

So, we thought, no, we show it to you, we do it for ourselves. And we are not interested in selling a kilowatt hour. We are interested in getting the flexibility of when the customer wants to charge the car. So, at the end it will be charged whenever he wants to have it. And the more time we have to pick being at the cheapest kilowatt hour in terms of charging or being at the most expensive kilowatt hour in terms of not charging. We market that flexibility on the apex spots in intraday market also intraday. So, day ahead intraday and Intraday continues until five minutes before you really have to deliver the energy to a customer. And there we create a lot of value because we squeeze fossil power plants out of the market and maximise the use of renewable energy.

 

[00:13:10.540] - Jon Slowe

So, you're really trying to play across the full value chain of the flexibility value chain of this interface between mobility and energy. I think there are many companies that are trying to play in one part, but there is a number of companies like yourself that I think are saying no, actually we can't... Maybe it's a bit harsh to say we can't rely on partners, but we can't rely on others to take this to market. But you're operating on that full value chain. Is that a fair description?

 

[00:13:39.690] - Marcus Fendt

Yes, because we have to. I think if you enter that market in five years, you don't have to do that anymore. But as we are in a lot of things, always at the forefront...

 

[00:13:51.120] - Jon Slowe

You're creating it, yeah.

 

[00:13:52.140] - Marcus Fendt

We have to show how it works. We have to establish processes; we have to shape processes. We are also very active on the regulatory field and try to influence laws that they free the flexibility which is already in the market and not subsidise new expensive flexibility, which is not even technically developed. So we had to do much more than we actually wanted to do and want to do. And most probably also drop out about of some things in the future. But if we do not sell chargers today, the right ones to fleets, they buy the wrong chargers, they later on can control these charges and make use of them in the energy market. If we do not support them and how to install them, they wouldn't equip their fleets with electric vehicles. If we don't teach them how to make use of grid control to charge cheaper or energy management to charge greener, they wouldn't do it.

 

[00:14:57.020] - Marcus Fendt

So, we have to do a lot of things which is, as you say, full part of the value chain. If we do that for the whole time, because we put most of our money in the flexibility trading and flexibility aggregation and there an electric vehicle is really complex because you have not a fixed asset. An electric vehicle has always the initial mobility demand. So, you have to take care of the customer and the customer needs why he bought that electric vehicle.

 

[00:15:27.570] - Jon Slowe

And it's not always plugged in.

 

[00:15:28.840] - Marcus Fendt

Exactly. Second, you have to take care about the battery because that's the most valuable part in the electric vehicles. And a car manufacturer has a lot of obligations in terms of warranties and guarantees he gives. So, you want to do that the vehicle is lasting as long as possible, and that you do not kind of tear down a battery within three years of energy marketing. So, it's always the second use case, the energy market. And therefore, you have to take care about mobility battery. Then most of the vehicles are connected behind a limited grid connexion. Everybody is living in a single home, or you're parking in a parking garage, you are at your employer's parking space, you are in a multi-unit dwelling, so you have restrictions behind the metre. And then finally you can go to the energy market and create value. But you have to do these three other things first. And this is a huge differentiation between all the other traders which are in the market because they get an asset, they get a ten-year warranty or even PPA contract, and then they know exactly what to do. So, these algorithms are just trading algorithms.

 

[00:16:45.480] - Marcus Fendt

We have to incorporate a couple of things more, but we get the flexibility much cheaper because it's there already.

 

[00:16:52.790] - Sandra Trittin

Yeah, I would think it's that orchestration layer, right, that you need, which takes all of these contexts, topics based on physical limitations or financial limitations into account. And it reminds me quite a lot also of the kick off with tiko in Switzerland, where we also had to fulfil the full value chain for heat pumps, like acquiring the customer ourselves, doing the hardware installation ourselves, doing the customer support ourselves, doing the orchestration, even the integration to the trader. Everything had to be done exactly for the same reasons. But I also agree with you that I think over the time, there will be specialised companies now, more and more, also for efficiency reasons, but still quite some challenge, especially around that orchestration layer, which is not as easy as it always looks from outside, right?

 

[00:17:45.350] - Marcus Fendt

Not at all. And we are total freaks here. So, we know energy markets, we know flexibility, we know all that. It's a little bit different in the UK because you had economic seven all the time already. So, people were used of dynamic pricing. But in Germany, people are not interested in energy, so they get a bill once a year, they pay every month, whatever, €70 or something like this. And if there is a deviation, they pay a little bit more or get something out end of the year. It's an absolutely low interest product. And how do you bring people into that? That they engage according to their cultural background, to their personal interest? Most of the people, they are not interested in it. This is a very limited part of people who like to control their washing machine and optimise their private life according to energy cost. No, these are basic costs you just had. So, we need to make it as easy for customers as possible that they join in, and we get a renewable and cheap energy system for the complete country and Europe in total.

 

[00:18:54.090] - Jon Slowe

Marcus, you mentioned investors earlier and I'd say 2009, you weren't late to the market, if anything, you were probably early and you're having to, as you described, work across the full value chain. So how can you tell us a bit about raising money? Have you had to do that a number of times? Has that been one of the hardest parts or actually has that been quite easy, given the vision that you have and what you're actually putting into practise?

 

[00:19:21.500] - Marcus Fendt

We are really lucky that actually all of our investors buy in in that long term perspective. And all of our investors, even as they are still one VC (Venture Capital) fund, he's so kind of engaged in that idea that he said, no, I don't go out because normally a VC four has to sell after five years. He even is the guy who sees the biggest potential in there. He goes into the billions. But all of our investors are long term investors like Mitsui, it's a Japanese trading house opening a lot of doors worldwide. We just closed a contract in Thailand and Mercedes at that time, Daimler or Renault anyhow, because we serve them for their customers. Mercuria, you might know, Sander, you especially, it's the biggest trading house in Europe for energy and they are long term investors. Would they sometimes like that kind of. It grows faster. Certainly. So, we are all not happy about the current turmoil we have in the world. We all thought that the energy transition goes faster, but everybody understands that it is going the right way. And you see the increase of renewable energy. In Germany, we achieved now 60% out of renewables for an industrial country, this is record breaking. Back in 2005, the people say 5% renewables is the maximum you can achieve. Then the energy will break down, blackout, we surpass that now twelve times. So, it's not always easy, especially also in the surrounding. And now profitability is high, so we have to adapt a little bit. We will make it. And we gained a leading position in all of our fields in the countries where we are. So is it easy but we make it.

 

[00:21:24.000] - Jon Slowe

You said you were lucky with your investors, but I'm sure you make your own luck, Marcus, in terms of the ones that you got on board and the vision that they bought into and that vision that you said has been there from day one all the way through to now. And that makes it, if you're making good progress against that vision, then that makes it much easier for investors to buy into that and back you long term, I'd imagine.

 

[00:21:45.930] - Marcus Fendt

Yeah, but, you know, as a startup or scale up, there are many good ideas which kind of failed at right times to get money because investors are especially financial investors, they are kind of very volatile. And you know how the market was two years ago, everything was kind of evaluated like crazy, and two years later, everybody's saying, yeah, you have to be profitable. Guys, come on.

 

[00:22:11.800] - Sandra Trittin

And then there is also the cultural aspect, right? I mean, if you ask in the US for money, it's quite a different game than if you ask in Europe. So, yeah. Has quite some implications.

 

[00:22:21.400] - Marcus Fendt

Absolutely.

 

[00:22:22.350] - Jon Slowe

In terms of key issues, Marcus, I'm sure a lot of what you focus on is monetising flexibility. And you've talked about the policy and regulatory landscape and the need for the market rules to adapt and evolve and change. Putting that to one side, what other key challenges do you think? Well, what other key challenges are you focusing on and do you see ahead in the next sort of one, two, three years?

 

[00:22:48.410] - Marcus Fendt

So, from a market perspective, for me, there are two factors. One is education and the other one is regulation. Education means a little bit. People must now, when we come closer to that 10% electrification area, understand what actually is the advantage of that. Electrification, that's not clear to most of the society, and we can compare that to mobile phones or smartphones. In the beginning, just freaks had it and they were big like a shoebox. And then I think by 2012, everybody had a smartphone, more or less, even if you're 80 years or older, because your grandchildren kind of talked it into you. So, this is one part, and media play a big role in that. And the second one is the regulation. We do not have a regulatory framework yet, really for the new world. And there we have to work on for mobility now are the key challenges is that we focus on that customer journey and do not jump on every possibility, because the possibilities are enormous. You could do vehicle-to-home (V2H), you can do flexibility with heat pumps, you can do flexibility with biogas or whatever. So, our clear focus on electric vehicles, our clear focus on electric fleets behind-the-metre and also our country focus for the different businesses we do and growing subsequently out of that, this is our key challenge. We have to keep track with and solve that because the opportunities are multiple.

 

[00:24:38.990] - Jon Slowe

That's interesting. The education and regulation challenges, I guess you can't solve them alone. You can contribute to them, but that's wider issue, but that discipline, I think, as you say, there are so many opportunities, but you need to keep laser focused on which ones you're going to go after.

 

[00:24:55.680] - Marcus Fendt

Absolutely. So, I'm so happy I have the best Chief Product Officer you can have, because from the sales side, you say we need to do everything.

 

[00:25:05.730] - Sandra Trittin

Yes.

 

[00:25:06.770] - Marcus Fendt

If you have a good product guy, he's challenging you and saying, okay, market focused. And by having that continuous positive battle, most of the time, we figured out the best way.

 

[00:25:22.090] - Sandra Trittin

Yeah, but I can relate to that, right. Having worked for such a long time in business development and sales. I mean, there are so many opportunities, and especially now in the eMobility space, right. It's one of the hottest topics, I would say, for 2024.

 

[00:25:38.430] - Marcus Fendt

Yeah. And you know, Sandra, the big companies you had that, they talk you into things and they say, yeah, we have to follow these processes and we need that interface, and this is the most important thing. Otherwise, we don't give you a contract. And in the beginning, certainly if you are small and unexperienced, you always join in. Yeah, we do it, we do it. We do it. And then you have a complete messed up system, too expensive processes. You can't handle your customer or your customers of your customer, because everything is by far too complex. And it's a great learning that you stick to what you think is right in front of these big players, which actually give you the customers and the money because they don't know it better. They just have the money.

 

[00:26:27.420] - Jon Slowe

Marcus, we talked a bit about Germany and the depth that you're in the German market and with your energy tariff. You mentioned Thailand, you mentioned buses in Boston, your geographical footprint, you're deepest in the German market. But do you want to replicate that depth across multiple markets, or are there certain parts you take to other countries or like you described with buses in Boston, is it a case of finding the need in the market and adapting your offering to that local need in different international markets?

 

[00:27:00.250] - Marcus Fendt

Jonn, good that you're specifying that. So actually, it's quite easy, but it might be because of the talk mixed up. So, charging we do in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so there we help the customer with everything. They are really completely vertical integrated behind-the-metre optimisation with our charging and energy management system charge pilot, we sell it to partners worldwide, being a bus depot in Boston, Seattle, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, we sell it.

 

[00:27:32.290] - Jon Slowe

And its software, so you can do that.

 

[00:27:34.660] - Marcus Fendt

An edge device where you have a hybrid system. So, you have a local software part because a bus depot where you optimise or fleet depot where you optimise against the nameplate of the fuse. You want to have local because it has to react within seconds out of the Cloud. That doesn't work, otherwise you might have one connexion failure, and somebody has to go to the switchboard and release all the fuses. But we sell this. We are partners worldwide, so not by ourselves, but we are partners. And there we really can proudly say that we have the leading hardware neutral, local and open standard charging and energy management system for electric vehicles worldwide. That's what we developed and that goes hand-in-hand, but not necessary with our energy market and trading flexibility. Trading activities we do in Germany, France, Netherlands and soon in the UK. And there we follow more or less the market depending on where are electric vehicles and where are appreciating energy markets. So why not Norway? A lot of electric vehicles, but now a little bit changed due to the occurring crisis, but no flexibility at all because they have water rinsing down the rivers, so you don't need any flexibility trading there. Therefore, we are not in Norway at all.

 

[00:29:02.900] - Sandra Trittin

Yeah, makes totally sense, right.

 

[00:29:05.100] - Jon Slowe

Well, there's lots more we'd love to talk about, Marcus, but keeping our time. It's time for the talking new energy crystal ball. So, this week, let's set the dial to 2030, and I want you to give me a picture of The Mobility House in 2030. So, let's say we're doing the podcast in 2030, thumbnail sketch of the mobility house. What will it look like? And then as a follow up, if you had to pick one or two or three challenges to reaching that, what would that challenge be?

 

[00:29:34.920] - Marcus Fendt

So, 2030 we will have all over Europe, the majority of energy produced out of renewable energies. We will have a regulatory framework where storage is an elementary part of the system, being it mobile storage within electric vehicles, because those are the biggest storages you can get for cheapest, being it's stationary storage, being it's hydrogen, whatever. And Mobility House will play a leading role in commercialising the mobile storages. That is our focus. And there we will be one of the leading flexibility traders, either directly or we are partners, or for partners, actually. That's my crystal ball, and we are on a very good way achieving that. What will be the main challenge? I mentioned it already a little bit before, not to get distracted and trust in the experience we have and do not get squeezed in things by companies who don't have the experience but have the market size potential, but really follow our experience and gut feeling, how to bring flexibility trading and the value to the customer.

 

[00:31:00.820] - Sandra Trittin

Sounds exciting.

 

[00:31:01.770] - Jon Slowe

Sounds exciting. And I love the clarity of that vision and the clarity of that discipline and following your instinct because you must spread that to your whole team, because you need all of your team to have that same overall vision, but that same overall discipline of focus, I imagine.

 

[00:31:20.320] - Marcus Fendt

I can be so clear because my team is teaching them. That's really a hand-in-hand.

 

[00:31:31.530] - Jon Slowe

Well, admire usually the progress you've made. I think the vision that you had back in 2009, that zero zero vision that still works today, follow that through, built what you built and the progress that you made. And yeah, if we're to get to where we need to get to on the energy transition, we will need every bit of flexibility that we can get.

 

[00:31:52.900] - Sandra Trittin

Never more relevant than now.

 

[00:31:54.710] - Marcus Fendt

Absolutely. And if you compare it to, I always like the smartphone example, nobody of us was aware back in 2010 when we started with smartphones what is possible to do all with a smartphone. So yeah, the camera was obvious, and kind of perhaps audio recording and stuff was obvious, but we do everything with a smartphone today. So, I just travelled a week to the US and the only thing I needed was my smartphone, more or less. And I think this is a little bit you can compare it in an analogy with an electric vehicle. The electric vehicle is able to do much more things than just for driving. And it will power your home, it will power your neighbourhood, it will power kind of our electricity system, and you get the money back and you will also have a view at your car. And not only you as a private owner, but also if you have a logistic fleet, it's part of your TCO, a truck fleet, a bus fleet. Even in bus depot they are 30% peakers, they drive 3 hours a day. So, rest of the time, these batteries, 300 kilowatt hour, they are sitting around a busty pool in the future will earn money with those batteries. It's totally different thinking what electric mobility can do, which is hardly understood today.

 

[00:33:23.220] - Jon Slowe

Well, Marcus, thanks again for your time. And yeah, wishing you all the best for the next years and turning that 2030 description into reality. Thanks very much.

 

[00:33:32.920] - Sandra Trittin

Thank you so much, Marcus.

 

[00:33:34.460] - Marcus Fendt

More than welcome. Sandra. Jon, what a pleasure! Follow us and spread that kind of vision to the market for us and everybody who is also active in that field and following us.

 

[00:33:46.750] - Sandra Trittin

So, what's your thoughts, Jon, after these roughly 40 minutes? What's your key takeaways in thoughts?

 

[00:33:54.050] - Jon Slowe

My key takeaway actually is around the power of that vision, of that focus and of that discipline. I've got lots of other things in my head as well, but I think, for me, that's one of the bigger things. You have to get that initial vision right. You have to have the confidence to stick with it. You have to be able to communicate that to your investors, to your team, to the market, to lots of people. But yeah, that's my biggest takeaway, I think Sandra. How about you?

 

[00:34:23.720] - Sandra Trittin

Yeah, so I agree with you. That's really impressive. Just to give a totally different perspective then on that is finally we have the value of flexibility reached, right? And we are able to forward that value to the owner of the asset. And it has been a long journey, right. To get there. And I think finally, especially in the eMobility space, we see it in a way, how it's applied, how it's set up and implemented into different kind of markets and into different business models, as by The Mobility House, for example. It's the first time that you really see the full chain through, from the beginning to the monetisation. And it's possible to easily communicate on it without being a freak.

 

[00:35:10.830] - Jon Slowe

Yeah, because the EV market now is, I think it's moving now from those innovators and early adopters to the mainstream, different rates in different countries. But it's such a powerful proposition that Mark has described €400 for value of flexibility and that's a big chunk of your running costs.

 

[00:35:30.080] - Sandra Trittin

So, I will have to sign up with my electric car.

 

[00:35:33.930] - Jon Slowe

Well, this flexibility theme comes back. And again, Sandra, I'm sure we'll come back to it in future episodes as well,

 

[00:35:40.990] - Sandra Trittin

For sure.

 

[00:35:41.820] - Jon Slowe

But it's been great to hear it brought to life by Marcus today. Thanks to everyone listening. We hope you enjoyed the episode, learnt a lot and can see more and more the power of flexibility from distributed assets such as electric vehicles and more. Look forward to welcoming you back next week. Thanks, and goodbye.

 

[00:36:00.430] - Sandra Trittin

Looking forward. Bye.

 

[00:36:01.910] - Sandra Trittin

Thanks for tuning in. We are excited to bring you captivating conversations from the leading edge of Europe's energy transition. If you've got suggestions for topics or guests for future episodes, please let us know.

 

[00:36:13.730] - Jon Slowe

And if you're enjoying the podcast, then please do rate it and share it with colleagues. For show notes, transcripts and more, please visit lcpdelta.com.