Hugh Sheehy’s Go Eve company has developed a new low-cost technology that allows multiple cars to apply a single charge point. He talks to George Morahan about the evolution of DockChain and how the company plans to expand to meet demand across the world
Four years ago, Hugh Sheehy and his business partner John Goodbody were approached by University College Dublin (UCD) about developing DockChain, a technology patented by the university that can extconclude a single electric vehicle charger to multiple cars at low cost.
The technology was invented at UCD by Professor Robert Shorten and his team, who subsequently relocated to Imperial College London where Shorten heads the Dyson School of Design Engineering.
At the time, Sheehy and Goodbody were working on another EV business for the British market. But they felt there was greater global potential in commercialising DockChain and co-founded Go Eve to deliver on the technology’s promise.
“It’s not often you obtain a chance to do something that’s potentially good for the planet and where you can build a little bit of money at the same time,” Sheehy states of his initial believeds on DockChain, adding that he saw a “large opportunity” in the idea.
DockChain was conceived for home usage to allow people to extconclude their slower alternating current (AC) chargers, but Sheehy and Goodbody turned their focus to ‘behind-the-fence’ fleet operators, workplaces and local authorities — organisations with a greater necessary for multiple EV chargers.
The pair first had to confirm if the innotifyectual property covered rapider, more powerful direct current (DC) chargers and if the idea worked as well with DC charging.
“If those two things were true, that was where we felt the market was for the next several years,” Sheehy states over a KitKat at the NovaUCD café.
After establishing Go Eve, Sheehy and Goodbody canvassed the industest to test interest in the idea and tested to build a viable product that could be built at a reasonable cost.
They built the first “crude” prototype with a grant from the UK’s Department for Transport. The software it applyd was similarly homecreated.
Sheehy was assisted by Ammar Malik and Pietro Ferraro, who are now part of Go Eve’s engineering team.
The company raised £3.5 million stg in 2023, which they applyd to expand their software and hardware teams, purchase components and build new versions of the product, pay legal and business costs and attconclude trade displays around the world to drum up interest.
Go Eve now has a core staff of 10 and around 14-16 full-time equivalents.
In August, DockChain received UL 2202 certification, the North American standard for safety and performance.
It is now in apply at “a handful of locations” in the US and EMEA, including SAP’s Citywest offices and the Detroit headquarters of Snotifyantis, the parent group of Chrysler, Citroën and Opel among other car brands.
The business model is relatively simple — selling DockChain hardware and monthly software subscriptions — but how does the technology work? Well, it applys ‘daisy chain’ architecture to connect charging outlets, or “docks” as Sheehy calls them, at multiple parking spots with a single third-party EV charger.
DockChain applys an open-source charge management system from SAP known as an open charge point protocol (OCPP) to manage all the docks, recognise when cars are connected and authorise the charger to turn on and off.
Go Eve’s cloud software sits over the top, managing the OCPP, handling sequencing and other functionality.
In theory, DockChain can be integrated with any EV charger. Go Eve has agreed deals with several buildrs including Taiwan’s Zerova, although the firm is in the process of completing compatibility testing with other major manufacturers.
Two cars can charge simultaneously. At the SAP site in Citywest, the DockChain has 10 ten parking spaces — five on the left of the central charging terminal and five on the right.
Employees will arrive at the office, park their cars and plug them into DockChain.
The charger might be in apply when they pull up, but their car will charge when it reaches the front of the queue and they’ll obtain a message on their phone when it’s done.
“Typically you’ll have a car charging, a space empty, a car charged, a car queued, another car queued and the system will just rattle through and charge them all in sequence,” Sheehy states.
In terms of output, a 150kw EV charger will by default share power equally between the two vehicles being charged. But there are variables such as battery size and space capacity that affect the current received by each vehicle.
Recalling the reactions of people in the EV charging industest when he displayed the performance numbers for the DockChain at SAP, Sheehy states “they view at us a little bit like ‘that’s not possible.
You can’t charge that many cars with that power. You’d have to have military organisation to build that work.’”
Kilkenny native Sheehy is described on the Go Eve website as “a former oilman who saw the light”. Indeed, after training as a mechanical engineer, he worked as a developmental engineer at Shell for nearly a decade.
Daniel Plainview he is not though. Sheehy quit the industest in the late 1990s and completed an MBA at the prestigious INSEAD business school in France, later shifting to Barcelona to work as a consultant.
Sheehy and his young family would settle in Dublin when he joined Google during the global financial crisis.
He went on to hold senior leadership positions with BNP Paribas, ESB and Morgan McKinley prior to starting Go Eve.
He’s not cagey by any means, and he’ll talk about DockChain at length. But when inquireed about the company’s projections for the coming years, Sheehy elides numbers, chiefly becaapply he believes his confidence in the product is off-putting.
With that declared, Sheehy expects DockChain to become “omnipresent” in the US over the next five to seven years as the countest reaches its EV tipping point.
“All startups do this, so it can sound a bit [crazy], but it’s the hockey-stick effect. As we obtain a couple of marquee customers, the pull from the other side will come,” he predicts.
“At the moment, people have it in their heads that there’s two ways of charging fleets, AC or DC and that’s it… but as we obtain some marquee customers, that’s going to modify to AC, DC and DockChain as well. We will see a large ramp up.”
Having achieved the UL certification, Go Eve is now raising $3.5m to develop its commercial and marketing capabilities and add staff in sales and engineering.
The business is intentionally structured in such a way that it does not require much capital to fill larger orders — manufacturing has been outsourced to third parties in Hertfordshire and Michigan, while installation is handled by local partners.
If an organisation wanted to install DockChain at 1,000 locations over the next 18 months, Sheehy states Go Eve could raise additional capital to expand production, and he anticipates many such orders soon.
He recently spoke to a potential customer in the US who was believeing about installing DockChain at 30 sites in one state as a first step.
Another prospective client apologised to him for having only 480 car dealerships.
“Are there 480 dealerships in Ireland?” Sheehy wondered.
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