Green Success Stories sits down with Charlie Cook, the founder of RightCharge, to learn about why he started the company and how to increase the adoption of smart charging.
Tell us a little bit about you and your background:
I trained as a Civil Engineer but caught the bug for the climate challenge whilst studying. This got me really into the technology, economics and politics of the changing energy system and I decided that’s what I wanted my career to be focussed on. I took a 2-year detour into physics – after being offered a contract as a Civil Engineer at CERN, the particle physics lab in Geneva – but came back to London and joined at Octopus Energy – a UK tech start-up worth over $5bn today – where I worked on electric vehicle charging. In 2019 I launched Rightcharge to make sorting your home charging easier for electric car drivers and to increase the adoption of smart charging. This is all with the goal of helping to eliminate 7.5 million tonnes of C02 by 2030 (the same as planting 124 million trees).
What is a fun fact about you?
My Mum pulled me and my 3 siblings out of school for a whole year when I was 10. Largely because she was tired of the school turning down requests for us to skip school for trips (I believe these were supposed to be educational trips but I couldn’t be sure).
Why do you think climate change and sustainability is such an important topic today?
It’s the greatest existential threat that has ever faced human kind
What do you envision your industry looking like 10 years from now?
By 2032 driving an electric car will be so normal no one will even notice. Driving a petrol or diesel car on the road will be very incredibly strange behaviour – like lighting a cigarette in a restaurant. People will be used to filling up their cars over night 2 or 3 times per week as they sleep. Those who can’t charge at home will fill their car at very high speed charge points (350kW or above) in 15 minutes or less. We’ll probably all be debating the idea of selling our cars and switching to ordering autonomous vehicles on demand.
What can the average person do to make a difference?
The biggest ways to make a personal difference are to stop eating beef and try to reduce flights where possible.
