The Behavioural Shift That Makes EV Flexibility Actually Work - Ohme

Smart EV charging isn't just about saving money on your electricity bill, it's quietly becoming one of the most scalable sources of grid flexibility in Great Britain.

Ohme has run the numbers: incentivising 22,000 customers to plug in more often drove a 32–37% increase in plug-in frequency, unlocking dispatchable flexibility across 60 National Grid events.

In this episode, Ed is joined by Joshua Willetts and Dan Norton from Ohme. Josh is part of Ohme's customer operations team and starts the conversation with a live demo of the Ohme Home Pro, and then Dan Ohme's Commercial Director takes us through a deep dive of the economics, regulation, and long-term potential of smart home charging.

They cover:

- How the Ohme Home Pro works, tethered setup, app pairing, tariff integration, and smart scheduling on Octopus Go and equivalent time-of-use tariffs.

- Why plugging in little and often (rather than running to empty and topping up) is the behavioural shift that unlocks real-world EV flexibility.

- The CrowdFlex trial results: how a 1–3 GBP/week incentive delivered a 32–37% rise in plug-in frequency and fed directly into National Grid dispatch events

- What smart charging regulation, including the Energy Smart Appliance (ESA) framework and load control licensing means for charger manufacturers and aggregators

- How V2G and vehicle-to-home could evolve once older EV fleets start cycling into second-hand markets, and what cultural shifts are needed first

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Transcript available here: https://modoenergy.com/transmission-podcast/d2135750-c32a-49dd-a218-e3f69cfc48d7

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⏱ CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro — Ed Porter, Welcome to Transmission

1:04 Meet Joshua & the Ohme Home Pro

1:52 App Setup, QR Code Pairing & Smart Scheduling

4:44 Why a Box? What's Inside an EV Smart Charger

5:22 Live Demo: Charging a Light Bulb via the Ohme App

7:53 Charge Speed, Battery Times & Little-and-Often Strategy

11:37 Introducing Dan: EV Adoption Stats & the UK Home Charge Market

13:33 Barriers to Home EV Charging Installation

18:44 Home Charging vs. Public Charging: The Economics

20:06 CrowdFlex Explained: Smart Charging as Grid Flexibility

23:11 CrowdFlex Results.

26:32 Smart Charging Regulation: ESA, Load Control & Revenue Certainty

28:43 How Big Could EV Flexibility Get? GB Grid Scale

30:34 Vehicle to Grid (V2G) & Vehicle to Home: What's Coming

34:40 What Would You Change? Flexibility Contracts as Steel in the Ground

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You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter — Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.