LON:PHE | Electric Vehicles - Opportunities And Challenges For The Investor

8th May '18 by TamzinPiworld

17 comments 6160 reads

Redleaf PR organised a day with 6 presenters covering electric vehicles:

The latest innovations
The key suppliers who should benefit
How to pick the winners and losers

Tim and I thought it so interesting, we decided to film, so other investors could benefit.

Here will follow the 6 presentations:

With an introduction by Ralph Anderson, Senior Account Manager, Redleaf

1. The automotive revolution: autonomous, connected, electrified and shared
By Chris Jones, Co founder, VP and Chief Analyst, Canalys

Canalys research and analyse trends impacting the automotive industry. He covers the past, present and future of EVs. With insight to how the EV market might evolve.

http://www.piworld.co.uk/2018/05/08/redleaf-ev-conference-1-canalys-the-automotive-revolution/

2. The evolution of battery technology

By Stephen Irish, MD, Commercial, Hyperdrive Innovation

Hyperdrive Innovation designs and builds lithium-ion battery systems for powering electric cars, off-highway vehicles, autonomous vehicles and home energy storage. They work in collaboration with Nissan and others to design & develop innovative battery systems that it aims to commercialise in the near term. Stephen follows on neatly from Chris Jones’s presentation, to indicate how developments are playing out for suppliers to the industry.

http://www.piworld.co.uk/2018/...

3.The role of fuel cells

By Keith Allaun, CEO, Powerhouse Energy (LON:PHE)

Here Keith discusses the concept of taking plastic bottles and other waste and converting into energy to power a car, effectively dealing with two problems, creating a sustainable economy. PowerHouse Energy are the UK pioneer in Waste-to-Hydrogen systems. Aiming to become the lead distributor of low-cost hydrogen to fuel cars, produced from waste, including plastic.

http://www.piworld.co.uk/2018/...

4. The Future of Transportation – choosing the right investments
By Jon Forster, Co-Manager, Impax Environmental Markets

Jon talks about the EV space, and outlines the key criteria Impax seek, identifying investment opportunities in the environmental space. Impax Environmental Markets is a fund specialising in environmental markets for cleaner or more efficient delivery of basic services: energy, water & waste.

This is a really good overview of the opportunities and challenges for the investor.

http://www.piworld.co.uk/2018/...

5. How the private sector is meeting the challenge of charging infrastructure in the UK

By Tom Callow, Director of Communication & Strategy at Chargemaster

Tom gives an…

Unlock with Email

Unlock with Google

Already have an account?
Login here

Nick Ray

10th May '18

Enjoying these talks so far!

I am sure electric cars will displace petrol and hybrids in a flash as soon as they reach a tipping point on price.

MiserableJacktPotato

Price isn’t the key factor.
Fact is charging takes too long and the charging simply infrastructure isn’t there, particularly in the places that most need electric vehicles - densely populated urban areas.
You can already get perfectly good electric vehicles for a reasonable price, with lower through life costs, people don’t buy them because they have nowhere to charge them. That’s a problem that isn’t going away any time soon.

TamzinPiworld

11th May '18

IGPJ - these were my thoughts, but Chargemaster who run charging infrastructure, gave a very good overview of the practicalities and realities of charging electric cars. This presentation will be published on Monday.

In my household we have a Leaf, a PHEV and an ICE. The Leaf is as good as a Focus 75% of the time, and with Solar Panels we get lots of free miles. It's cheap enough that we sacrificed having a premium car for daily journeys and have a relatively impractical convertible for fun and longer journeys to visit relatives / go on holiday.
Away from base is impossible for the Leaf - you end up spending a fortune on parking tickets and food or aimlessly wandering around shopping centres / supermarkets trying to justify being somewhere whilst the car charges.
The PHEV is good, I incidentally charge it when I can, but am not bothered if I can't, PHEVs with improved batteries are the intermediate future until Chargemaster and the like sort out the charging nightmare.
They can give as many presentations as they want saying it's all fine. It isn't.

I can see why you said that price isn't the key factor! :-)

I guess I was projecting my own personal feelings: I'd like to own an EV and I keep promising myself that next time I change I'll get one. But it is hard to justify paying luxury prices for a relatively small car and then (as you point out) not really having a car that can be used without pre-planning.

I suspect that there is a huge pent-up demand of people who want to buy and will buy when they can tick maybe 3 out of 4 boxes. Perhaps it's price, or perhaps it's range, or whatever. But as the cars gradually creep into the mainstream I think there will be a point where suddenly the switch will occur extremely rapidly.

harvs19

Thank you for sharing these links, very interesting. Does anyone know the name of the specialist materials company that is alluded to at 17.35mins into the last video by impax asset management ?

jonesj

Owning, or wanting to own an EV is should be completely different to the investment case.

1 My best performing investment has been Boohoo, but I have no ambition to purchase dresses.
2 My second best investment has been RWS, but I have no patents requiring translation (possibly a sign of underachievement as an engineer).
3 As a child, I always wanted to own a Lotus Esprit, but Lotus has been a money pit.

I prefer to separate the emotion from investing.

JohnEustace

12th May '18

harvs,
I don't know for sure, but having done a few Google searches my candidate is Umicore. They fit well as they just announced an expansion. They look interesting as an investment. Stocko has them as a High Flyer. I think I may be glad you asked the question!

http://www.umicore.com/en/media/press/20170508rbmexpansionen

13th May '18

I noticed that link was about last year's Umicore expansion. This one is this year.
https://www.reuters.com/article/umicore-results/update-3-umicore-raises-892-million-euros-to-fund-capacity-growth-idUSL8N1PY7YM

cig

In dense urban areas regulation might help: banning or taxing to death stinkers is a low hanging fruit for municipal authorities wishing to improve quality of life within their city for free (or for income if the regulation is in the form of taxes/access charges).

Sure, but it carries significant political risk. If you tell everyone in your constituency their second largest investment is now banned you’re pretty quickly going to find yourself out of office to the candidate who promises to unban it.
If you ban these vehicles you have to replace them with something, outside London most places have pretty awful public transport, and the authority will lose revenue from public car parks, high streets will suffer further decline. How do you pay for the buses?

@JohnEustace - Umicore looks a very interesting company, P/E(f) of 32 doesn’t look too expensive. More research needed but thanks for flagging it up.

In the core of big cities there is often a majority of non-car owners (or people who lease their cars etc). If say Westminster bans stinkers, it will have an impact on the choices of people outside Westminster, who may like to drive through but are not voters in Westminster.

You’ll be surprised to find that there’s a whole world outside London Westminster and that most of the rest of the country doesn’t have everything in walking distance, loads of buses, an underground system and water buses. I don’t doubt banning cars in Westminster would be amazing and work really well. What about the other 99.7% of the population.
You haven’t addressed any of the points, there’s little money for public transport, the local authorities rely on car park revenue (and parking fines and business taxes from the shops), banning cars will lead to further decline of the high street.

14th May '18

Thanks IGPJ. I've just added the link to the Chargemaster presentation (5) above - covering off infrastructure. Very interesting to hear the very real challenges you face as a EV owner. I'll be interested to hear your views once you've watch this.

Very interesting tomps3.
It seemed to chime very much with my experiences, though all the downsides I mentioned were painted as positives when they are actually downsides. If you can charge at home, fantastic. If you can charge whilst you're doing something else you want to be doing, fantastic. If you want to take your EV to North Yorkshire to visit the National Park, you're going to struggle / get stuck going to places you have no interest in just to be able to visit the places you want to see, and it all requires extra planning and effort. As I said, the Leaf is a Focus 75% of the time (that number might be a bit low actually, probably more like 85% of the time, depending on if you're measuring amount of journeys or miles travelled).
I thought the presenter did a great job, but it was clearly marketed as a sales pitch and glossed over the issues I've mentioned. It was interesting their experience is the cars follow the demand, but the company isn't proactively creating the demand, as the lady questioner alluded to with her question about Cornwall.
I felt his chart (about how EV users do/need charging) had a large amount of confirmation bias. What I mean by that is they're only aware of the charges they make, they have no evidence of the charges they don't make. Every sales rep or anyone who uses the car as an important part of their job (like me, my 25000+ plus business miles a year are done in my PHEV) aren't using the network so don't get counted in their figures. I think that their graph would change significantly if you count all the required charges that weren't made (I hope that makes sense!).
So, in summary, EVs are awesome if you do short journeys and can charge at home or at work. We, as a family, get over the shortcomings by having an ICE car but I feel that longer term (10 years maybe) the charging problem goes away. Interestingly the number of charging points in hotels is slowly going up, if we can get hotels on board, I think the problem diminishes quickly (esp for business travellers).

Oops, just reread the above - should read "the cars follow the chargers".

15th May '18

Talk #6 (Paul McNamara) was extremely interesting. Maybe not from an investor perspective, but definitely from an engineering perspective.

Electric Vehicles - opportunities and challenges for the investor

Unlock the rest of this article with a 14 day trial

About the Author

TamzinPiworld

17 comments

Unlock the metrics for all these stocks and more...

Unlock the metrics for all these stocks and more...