EDF Peugeot & Citroën will partner on Electric Vehicle (EV) services

By Cynthia Taylor

An electric vehicle partnership was announced and will connect one of Britain’s biggest energy providers, EDF Energy, with well known car manufacturers Peugeot UK & Citroën UK.

The aims of the partnership is to offer businesses and residential customer with electric vehicle services as well as rechargeable products, this will come together with every sale of Citroën C-Zero or Peugeot iOn. Both of these vehicles are on sale in the UK and will benefit from government’s Plug-in Car Grant. 

EDF describes today’s initiative as a “one stop shop’ for vehicle customers and it hoped that it would promote and expand the development in the future of vehicles that are fully electric as well as plug-in hybrid cars. It is forecasted that by 2015 there will be about 85,000 EV’s on Britain’s roads and by the year 2020 600,000 EV’s.

EDF Energy’s Energy Field Services director, Eric Solomon, has expressed his delight that they are working with Citroën UK and Peugeot UK, and to be able to offer this EV package to fleet and domestic customers. He went on to say that he understood that electric transport with low carbon is a important component for UK to be able to meet its carbon reduction commitments.

Infrastructure

EDF Energy is collaborating with Elektromotive, who is a provider of the Electric Vehicle recharging infrastructure, this charging points scheme will offer residential and business customers smart meters, dedicated charging points, and site surveys plus other things. There is already about 100EV charging points installed around the UK.

Residential customers

Households are being offered a residential package which contains a committed charging point, this will charge 35% quicker than traditional chargers, the package will contain a smart meter, and an EV statement that show consumption which allows customers to be able to see how much they are being charged per vehicle. The charging point carries a 3 year warranty.

EDF Energy says that the low carbon charge point in the residential package will allow residential households to be able to affect savings through their Eco 20:20 tariff; thus domestic customers will be able to save 20% on lower tariff electricity during weekends and evenings.

Business customers

EDF Energy says that businesses will have the benefit of a range of services for recharging and products for their fleet customers, this package includes, technical report, site survey, installation service plus the smart meter technology. However, as if this time it has not come up with a business tariff.

Spokesperson from EDF says that they anticipate for the future charging management products as well as smart metering especially for fleet operators, this will mean they will be able to benefit from ‘time of use’ tariff.

Future Partnerships

EDF Energy says that they envisage a number of future strategic relationships and partnership with other motor manufacturers, who will help develop and support future marketing of electric vehicles and the ability to recharge them, companies they are looking at are BMW and Renault-Nissan Alliance.

There has been collaboration with Toyota and Mercedes-Benz on the plug-in vehicle demonstration and trials projects and they are also consulting with other motor manufacturers, central and local government and charge point manufacturers so that they will be ready for the roll-out of electric vehicles.