Counting charge points tells you almost nothing. That frustration led Chris Rimmer and his colleagues at CENEX to build Are We Nearly There Yet? - reports that express public charging progress not in kilowatts or headline totals, but in years ahead or behind demand, local authority by local authority. (At recording: near-home charging sits about a year and a bit ahead. A little ahead. Not loads.)
Chris has spent nearly eight years at CENEX, the not-for-profit consultancy set up in 2005 to drag zero emission vehicles out of the lab and onto the road. His particular skill is compression - turning meter points, grid flexibility and battery degradation into one sentence a politician can act on.
He talks to Paul and John about the route in: physical geography and oxbow lakes, a graduate scheme at E.ON, a call centre at 24, a living lab of 75 Milton Keynes homes. A year in Mexico working for a Christian charity reset his sense of who bears the cost when the climate shifts.
Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-rimmer-58468233/
CENEX website: https://www.cenex.co.uk