Will Soon Become Shell Recharge Solutions

Today, the electric vehicle charging network Greenlots announced that it will rebrand to Shell Recharge Solutions in early 2022. Greenlots was bought by Royal Dutch Shell in 2019 but until now has continued to operate under the Greenlots name. 

The new name unifies Greenlots and its European counterpart, NewMotion, which Shell purchased in 2017, under a single brand, bringing Shell’s regional electric charging services under one identity.

Shell also purchased the largest public EV charging network in the UK, Ubitricity, earlier in 2021. Evidently, Shell is taking the transition to electric vehicles very seriously and wants to continue to sell you energy for personal mobility in whatever form that may be. 

“Our name is changing, but our vision to lower carbon emissions is more focused than ever,” said Andreas Lips, CEO, Greenlots. “We have ambitious targets and as Shell Recharge Solutions we will further integrate the expertise shared across three businesses to provide more customers with smart EV charging solutions, delivered through a consistent brand experience.”

We recently reported that the company is also getting into the home charging business and licensed the Shell Recharge name to a company called Sky Intelligent to manufacture and distribute a level 2 portable EVSE. Sky Intelligent provided InsideEVs with a 40-amp unit for the purpose of a full review which we posted two weeks ago. 

The press release also noted that Shell currently installs an electric vehicle charge point every 20 minutes and that it’s Shell’s ambition to operate 500,000 charge points by 2025 and 2,500,000 by 2030.

We’re not surprised to see Royal Dutch Shell make such an aggressive move into the EV charging space. Quite honestly, we’re surprised we haven’t seen similarly aggressive actions by the other big oil companies (hello ExxonMobil?).

Maybe they just believe they can flip a switch and transition to become an EV charging provider when they need to – or perhaps they don’t believe electrification will happen as quickly as some others predict.