Hello and welcome to the fully charged plus podcast, really good episodes this week.

I'll tell you what happened to me when I knew I was doing this one. I was actually not so much anxious but a bit depressed because of the current state of the race that we're experiencing in the UK between a massive uptake of electric vehicles and the charging infrastructure which is now panickingly rushing to try and keep up with demand and I was kind of, you know, I've

been hearing a lot on the Twitter and on the comments about charges not working and people having trouble with charges and queues at charges and all that stuff. And I think it is kind of specific to the UK market. So for people overseas in different countries, there's going to be varying levels of it. There'll either be less electric cars but some charging, there'll be more localized stuff. Nor way seem to be coping with it. They've got an far more electric cars than we have. I know Denmark and the Netherlands, the two markets that I know quite well,

where it does seem to be if not as quite as challenging as it is here. But we really have seen there a genuinely huge increase in the number of electric vehicles on the road. There's over just, we're just coming up to half a million electric cars in the UK, which is, you know, considering it was probably a thousand when I, if that, no, it would have been a few hundred when I first got a Mitsubishi Imiyev many years ago, you know, it is a very different world.

And so today we're talking with Osprey charging and it's a fascinating conversation. This is a fascinating conversation with Ian Johnston from Osprey, who is just a ball of energy and of optimism.

I think the thing is that it's basically three, I'm going to say that now, three big charging networks in the UK that are proving to be reliable. And that's really all you want. Easily accessible and reliable.

You turn up at one of their charges, you tap to pay and it works. That's it. That's the top and bottom of it. And certainly Osprey is one of them, we mentioned the others. I'm not going to mention them now, but you know, anyone in the UK knows which ones are which and you kind of start to avoid the ones that have been less reliable in historically.

But Ian has a fantastic grasp of this. Obviously he's right on the inside of this business. So it's a really interesting episode. I really hope you enjoyed it. Before we start though, I just really do want to talk about our sponsor, which you know, it was good.

I had a long conversation with Jordan from my energy the other day and it was just amazing to hear what they're doing. And how successful they are and how lucky we are to be sponsored by them.

This podcast is sponsored by my energy. And if you just go to myenergy.com, I'll spell it for me, NY, ENERGI.com. Their webpage tells you everything that they do. And I can honestly say that I support what they do because I actually use the technology they make. So I've got the first thing I got was a zapy charger and that's when we met them many years ago.

I met Jordan in a garden in Orkney that had a zapy charger, which is and what a zapy charger does. All a zapy charger does is I say all it's really important is you can charge it flat out from the grid just like any other charge it. No problem.

You can also charge it at a set time so that it will come on under set time and it will charge your car up for instance when you want to use off peak electricity.

And it will also take the majority of the electricity that it's putting in your car from your solar panels. If you have solar panels, it will take as much as it can from them. Or you can set it to a point where it only takes electricity generated by your solar panels.

So for instance, in my house and I was a whole other episode about this, but you know, my house I do have batteries. I have a lot of solar.

I have electric heating, electric water heating, electric cooking, but there are times now and it's becoming more common when nothing in the house needs any electricity.

It's all like fully charged. It's already hot. It's already cooking. Whatever it is. There's no demand from the house.

So when the solar is doing that, then every, every electron that is produced by the solar panels goes into the car. And I added the other day, there was this freak sunny day in the middle of February, a Sunday.

And by chance, my car was pretty empty and the batteries were full and the cooker was hot and that water was hot and I wasn't doing any washing.

And I plugged the car in and set the zappy to charge it just from the solar and I added 120 miles of range from solar panels.

There is no other way. There's no other technology. It doesn't matter about petrol diesel. Forget that. It doesn't matter about hydrogen.

There is no other technology that currently I can plug a car in and refuel it at home for no money. There's no transaction.

Now, without question, and I've said this so many times before, yes, I paid for the inverter and the solar panels and the installation and the charger and everything to do that.

...