Irish businesses need to “urgently” prepare for making the switch to electric vehicles (EV).
So says Ivan O’Connor, commercial sales director of charging firm ePower.
“Putting guidelines in place now will give you something to work with and build upon as EV use becomes more widespread. Having a system in place from the start is a big advantage,” he says.
“It’s also very reassuring for staff who might even be considering going down the EV route, when they can see how it would fit into their working lives.”
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While the Irish Government’s plans to put a million electric cars on our roads by 2030 lies in tatters (we’ll be lucky to get to half that number) the electric revolution rolls on.
Electric cars have hit their highest-ever share of the new car market in 2025. EV sales account for 18.4 per cent of new cars this year, exceeding the previous high in 2023. This is a trend that Irish businesses have to catch up with.
Any business with a turnover of more than €20 million needs to submit official reports on its carbon footprint, and while cars and vans aren’t necessarily the largest component of that, they’re generally some of the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to carbon reductions.
Swap out your old diesel and petrol vehicles for shiny new electric ones – with the 100 per cent capital allowance claim-back still in operation to soothe the cost of doing so – and you can start putting a real dent in your company’s emissions.
[ Highest ever number of new electric cars sold in Ireland in 2025Opens in new window ]
However, many remain reluctant, or maybe they’re just not sure how to take those first steps on a new electric path.
Wicklow-based GEV wants to act as an electric transition broker for Irish businesses, helping them through all the processes, from vehicle choice to charging and even sorting out reimbursing employees for charging at home.
John Shiel, chief executive of GEV, told The Irish Times that the secret to charging anxiety for businesses is simple – flywheels.
Flywheels – and we’ll get to the technical explanation of that in a moment – are at least one potential part of the solution of getting enough power, and enough reliable power at that, to a company’s HQ so that a big fleet of EVs can be charged up and ready to go when you need them.
“The reality is that it’s been slowly building for quite a long time,” Shiel says. “The early adopter thing has been out there for quite a while, and the bigger companies have been playing around with electric cars, but what we’re seeing is they’re all thinking about it now.
“In Ireland, it’s a little bit slower than what we’re seeing in other parts of the world. Some are further down the road, but definitely they’re all talking about it, and it’s really the total cost of ownership, the reduced costs that they see.
“They’re worried about their initial investment, obviously, and they’re worried about where to start.”
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GEV’s plan is to make that start easier, which begins with working out what a company’s current vehicles do, and how easy it will be to make that step to electric power.
“What we do at the very start is we put a telematics device into their vehicles. It costs less than a tank of petrol or a tank of diesel. And then we can come back to them with a scientific report, and that tells them for all of these vehicles, they have a substitute in the market that’s electric.
“You can drive it as you do currently and you need not be worried about range. For other vehicles, maybe there are two days or two weeks in the entire year where you need to be worried about range. We also come back with a report on the drivers, and see which ones need to be retrained.”
That retraining is about proper driving style and skills to get the best performance out of an electric car or van.
That’s not just going slower, by the way, it’s about making sure you maximise all of the little systems built into the car that help to stretch out range and improve efficiency.
When it comes to charging, though, GEV has some neat ideas, that have already won the company industry awards for innovation. The first, possibly the most important of these, is the way payments can be easily sorted out when an employee charges up an electric vehicle using their home charging point.
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“Those drivers do not want to wait two months to get their expenses back to pay their utility bills. So we take care of all that. We pay the bill, and we can see precisely through our telematics and management software that the charging point is putting out so many kWh of power, and the company vehicle is taking in so many kWh per hour. It just cuts down dramatically on administration time and costs,” Shiel says.
Research carried out by GEV on its existing customer base – which includes the likes of Kingspan, Pinergy, and Uisce Éireann – shows that there can potentially be savings of as much as €119 per month, per employee by switching to electric power and using these simple app-based processes for charging and paying.
Speaking of charging, many businesses will want to centralise that, especially those that send out vans and cars from a central depot on a daily basis.
Charging the vehicles up at the company HQ before they head out is a great way of making sure that those vehicles have enough range to get through their working day without needing to stop and top up, which saves both time and money (although GEV can provide a charging card that works with most of the major EV charging providers, too).
However, getting enough power into one building sometimes isn’t easy. Shiel says GEV can help with that too, using smart charging systems to balance out the demand on the local grid, making the best use of existing resources and minimising the need to go to ESB Networks and start asking for upgrades.
Still not enough power on-site? That’s where the flywheels come in.
“We’re bringing into Ireland a new, mechanical battery, a flywheel technology. So a mechanical battery, once it gets spinning in a vacuum, it holds a large amount of energy, and that energy can be dispelled very quickly. You would use it in scenarios where either the grid can’t cope with your peak demand or where you need a quick injection of power.
“The mechanical battery has what’s called a C rating of 20, which means that it can operate 20 times faster in the collection and dispersion of energy than a battery itself.”
Such flywheel systems were originally developed for motorsport applications – both Audi and Porsche used so-called flybrid, hybrid-engined racing cars at Le Mans – but these new flywheel batteries are more powerful, and much safer.
Early flywheel batteries could suffer catastrophic failures because they used a single, heavy flywheel spinning at perhaps 16,000rpm. These new designs use multiple smaller flywheels – like a stack of CDs – so that if any component fails they can simply slow down and stop.
Each flywheel stack can store 40kWh of energy, spinning up to speed using cheap, low-demand night-rate energy, and while they’re expensive to install, they could be a game-changing solution for businesses who need more power, and need it now.
Will such innovation be enough to push more Irish businesses through the electric barrier? Time will tell.
“Given where we are, because we are staring down the line at inevitable fines from Europe,” says Shiel.
“It would make total sense, instead of wasting that money, to invest that money and reduce our carbon so that we don’t have to pay those fines.
“When I look at that particular issue, I think it makes total sense for us as a country to do this, because we are going to be left behind competitively if we’re not playing in this space.”
