Episode notes
What do you get when you cross the world's most innovative energy company with the world's largest battery maker? Swaptopus — a joint venture between Octopus Energy and CATL that's bringing HGV battery swapping to the UK and Europe. And the man growing it is Will Rowe, Entrepreneur in Residence at Octopus Energy, who joins us this week from a tennis club, the day after selling his house. Commitment.
Will explains why battery swapping cracks the three problems that have stalled electric trucking: grid connections, charging downtime, and the mismatch between when trucks need power and when power is cheap. Swap a battery in minutes, keep the truck earning, and let the swapped-out batteries do a second job — because a network of stations full of batteries is also a virtual power plant, storing cheap renewable energy and feeding it back when the grid needs it. This isn't just a transport play; it's an energy infrastructure play.
He's refreshingly blunt about the road that led here, too. Will previously founded a hydrogen business for exactly this market — and he tells us candidly why it didn't work, why losing two-thirds of your energy is no route to energy security, and what China's thousand-to-one preference for batteries over hydrogen tells us about where this is all heading. His verdict on hydrogen for transport is one you'll want to hear in full.
Along the way we get into:
- Why trucks are the easy win — 32 TWh of new annual electricity demand if the UK's trucks go electric, lowering bills for everyone, while governments obsess over data centres instead
- Autonomy changing everything — a customer planning to go from 60 to 160 hours of weekly truck utilisation, and what cab-free, 24/7 freight means for an industry whose two biggest costs are labour and fuel
- Bringing Chinese OEMs to Europe — and conversations underway with four of the five biggest European truck makers
- Geography-specific energy strategies — why a swap station in solar-rich Spain looks nothing like one in windy Britain
- Growing up dyslexic with a reading age of six, passing A-levels anyway, and why resilience — and a mum who insisted he could do anything — mattered more than school ever did
- Honest talk about failure — why it hurts, what it teaches, and why loving the problem matters more than loving your first solution
And when handed the EV Café Magic Wand, Will's wish is deliberately unglamorous and absolutely fundamental: just make electricity cheaper. Get that right, he argues, and the business case for electrifying everything falls into place on its own.
Connect with Will: LinkedIn
Octopus Energy: octopus.energy
