Loyd Davies founded ElectrAssure 18 years ago. He talks about the exciting opportunities for the business within the EV sector.

Loyd Davies, service development director at ElectrAssure

It’s been quite a journey for ElectrAssure.

I founded the company in 2004, having spent 12 years in the Royal Navy and then some time in IT. I was a control engineer in Royal Navy submarines, which, combined with my IT background, has been useful in developing our service offering.

My son Alun – who is co-director – joined ElectrAssure soon after leaving university nearly 12 years ago and we are still very much a family operation.  We’re self-funded so still have full control of the business.

We were ‘early entrants’ in the EV charging space.

I set the company up as a commercial electrical contractor. We moved into EV charging nine years ago, when that was a very small industry. Local funding agencies were offering government incentives to put in charging points and we went down the formal route of getting all our engineers trained. In fact, they were on the first City & Guilds course in the UK for electric vehicle charging. That set us off in the right direction, but our EV charging business picked up pace in the last three years.

A key event was when the Jaguar I-Pace was released.

One of our customers was British Car Auctions, which won the contract to run Jaguar’s demonstrator fleet. We installed the charging system and we still manage and maintain it today with charging rates of up to 120kW for around 40 vehicles a day from multiple manufacturers.

That system has been extremely reliable, so the people at BCA were kind enough to recommend us to Volkswagen UK. We then won the tender for charging systems for Volkswagen’s UK PDI centre – four 100kW rapid chargers charging all new VW Group EV models coming into the UK – as well as the smaller systems in the east coast ports of Tynemouth, Grimsby and Sheerness.

ElectrAssure has consistently  punched above its weight.

At Volkswagen we successfully competed for the tender against large established players and the project has been very successful, which gave us a great deal of confidence. That project confirmed that we had found our natural space – mission critical, high availability, charging systems. The BCA and Volkswagen systems reliably charge large numbers of vehicles per day, all at high power.

We have continued to evolve and grow.

In 2020, we installed 30 DC rapid chargers for Western Power Distribution across its sites and we were invited to bid for a National Grid contract.

As with the previous bids, National Grid was a challenge that required us to step up to new levels of certification, including a full two-day on-site verification of our competence. We welcome these challenges because the more of these that we do, the fewer competitors can follow.

The contract with National Grid will deliver a business critical EV charging infrastructure.

The infrastructure will cover 300 National Grid UK sites. It had 160 existing chargers, most of which didn’t work fully. ElectrAssure’s first task was the ‘mobilisation phase’ – to repair or replace those units and bring them onto our management system. Those 160 chargers now work correctly and National Grid was happy to publish a case study on that phase earlier this year.

The mobilisation phase was completed in October last year. The main roll-out will be around 1,400 chargers across 300 sites. It’s a five-year contract so, once installed, ElectrAssure will manage the charging infrastructure for National Grid.

Delivering bespoke solutions.

Working with one of our major customers, ElectrAssure has recently completed a temporary installation of 125 dual 7kW chargers for an event. We will then manage and maintain the chargers for the duration of the event before bringing the chargers back into the customers infrastructure rollout. It’s a sustainable solution that benefits everyone and demonstrates ElectrAssure’s flexibility and solution ethos.