🚗 EV Charging Beyond Teslas at Whole Foods #022
EV charging is more about the grid than it is about EVs
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TLDR: The EV charging pie is bigger and has more slices (use cases) than I thought. I dug into 3 different unique solutions in my interviews with the founders of ElectricFish, It’s Electric, and Voltpost.
When I ask you to visualize “EV charging” in your head, what do you see? Perhaps you see a charger neatly tucked away in a single family home’s garage. Maybe you see a row of Tesla Superchargers in a bougie suburban parking lot like Whole Foods in Palo Alto. Today, our understanding of EV charging is largely based on what we can currently see, whether it’s in real life or in advertisements. As EVs become more affordable and the cost of gas guzzlers continues to increase (not just financially), charger distribution will need to mirror where the EVs are.
Forecasting the future is hard, but it’s easy to see where some of the biggest gaps are today. Or maybe I should say not see. Outside of high income neighborhoods and upscale retail districts, large population segments remain un-electrified. The average luxury apartment building still only has a few parking spaces with chargers. Townhome neighborhoods which often come with street-side parking haven’t figured out how to solve curbside charging.
Let’s take a more concrete example. Recently, NYC passed the Green Rides bill which requires the rideshare industry to be all zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2030. As of today, there are 78,000 Uber and Lyft drivers and 13,587 taxi drivers in NYC. In order for the combined 90,000 rideshare drivers to transition to ZEVs, they’ll need a reliable and consistent way to charge. After all, their livelihood depends on it. The big problem is that in NYC, there are currently only 200 DC fast chargers and 1,000 Level 2 chargers available to the public. Yikes!
By 2030, EV sales are projected to reach over 40 million. Currently there are 37,000 Level 3 chargers and 126,000 Level 2 chargers. By 2027, we’ll need 109,000 Level 3 chargers and 1.2 million Level 2 chargers. That’s 3x the number of Level 3 chargers and 10x the number of Level 2 chargers that we need over the next four years. If you compare vehicles to chargers, it’s clearly not going to be a 1:1 ratio. This means that chargers need to be shared among vehicles and high utilization rates will be key.
Folks are starting to understand the scale of this energy transition. The ones who understand it the most are those who have everything to lose which explains why the $110B oil & gas giant BP announced they’re buying $100M of Tesla Superchargers.
Before we go any further, it’s important to provide some context on EV charging. There are three levels of chargers: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. The higher the level, the faster the charging, but this also requires higher voltage (power). Level 1 uses the common 120V outlet, but charges so slowly that it’s rarely included in any serious EV charging conversations. With a voltage range of 208-240V, Level 2 is often referred to as the overnight charger because it can completely charge a car in 12 hours. At the top of the class, Level 3 (AKA Fast Charging) chargers operate in the 400-900V range. They charge extremely fast, but are so expensive that you only see them out in public. Tesla Superchargers are included in the Level 3 category.
It’s important to understand the basics because it’s all intertwined. For example, European cities like London and Amsterdam have a head start on curbside charging because their roadways are wired with 220V which allows them to install Level 2 chargers without infrastructure upgrades. Similarly, for some historical urban planning reason, LA’s street lamps are also wired with 240V which explains why they have more EV chargers than other US cities. As the electrification of the built environment and transportation sector plays out, demand for electricity will increase which further stresses an already fragile grid. Playing the EV charging game optimally requires placing the different pieces (chargers) strategically based on how the board is laid out (the grid).
Introducing 3 EV Charging Startups
First up, we have Vince Wong, Co-founder and COO of ElectricFish. They’re focused on low-voltage geographies where the grid infrastructure isn’t going to easily upgrade to Level 3 capability without significant resources (upwards of $50,000-$800,000 per DC Fast Charging port). With an integrated battery coupled with patented power electronics design and software optimization, their 350², charger is able to be dropped in and connected to the grid without any major infrastructure upgrades and it also charges faster than a Tesla Supercharger.
Next, I spoke with Nathan King, Co-founder and CEO of It’s Electric. They are focused on the estimated 40-60 million drivers who park on city streets by building a curbside charger. By partnering with host properties with a revenue-sharing model and drawing electricity from them (at 220V for Level 2 charging), they’re able to avoid curbside infrastructure upgrades and the subsequent interconnection queue.
Then I chatted with Jeff Prosserman, Founder and CEO of Voltpost. They’re also tackling the curbside charging problem, but rather than go around existing street infrastructure, they’re going directly to it. There are an estimated 26 million lamp posts in the US. Voltpost retrofits and integrates lamp posts into EV chargers. By leveraging existing structures, they’re able to minimize noisy and expensive construction.
EV Charging Is More Like The Grid Than EVs
Before I started researching, I had this misconception that EV charging is more about the relationship between charger and car than charger and grid. After speaking with these three founders, it’s abundantly clear to me that problems with the centralized grid are the exact same problems that EV charging companies are dealing with.
Framing EV charging as one major pathway under the umbrella of decarbonizing the grid makes this space more compelling to me. When viewed through the vehicle lens, charging is just one aspect of car ownership. Refueling your car is often taken for granted as an errand. However, when viewed through the grid lens, EV charging’s complexity is revealed. Interconnection, permitting, grid balancing, real estate, network optimization and other factors become highly relevant. Viewing EV charging as interdependent with the grid also shows the sheer scale of this energy transition.
Vince from ElectricFish: Most utilities expect it'll take a decade to modernize their grid infrastructure for all this unprecedented net-new demand for electrification. On average, the US grid’s transformers are at least 40 years old. But fleet owners already have electric vehicles. On one hand it's great that they have EVs, but it's gonna take 14 to 24 months to complete permitting, site evaluations, and construction (if you're lucky). Some never make it past the site evaluation phase. Your utility might do a 9-month study and just say “Nope, not happening.” The US currently suffers from $150 billion in economic damages per year from grid outages. Over the 10+ years it’ll optimistically take to modernize the grid, that's another trillion dollars going down the drain.
Design Tradeoffs
Skeuomorphism is a term used to describe objects that retain ornamental design elements to make something new feel familiar in how the user can interact with them. This is why the email icon is an envelope and attaching a file uses a paperclip. Since EV charging is entering uncharted territory, there’s creative tension between making the experience resemble gas pumping and doing what makes the most sense for this new modality irrespective of prior patterns.
With the understanding that almost all EV drivers today used to be gasoline car drivers, ElectricFish set out to mimic the fueling experience which currently is still faster than even Level 3 charging. They intentionally made the tradeoff to prioritize a fast charging experience over a complete charge.
Vince from ElectricFish: We're never going to charge you from zero to a hundred. It’s not a good use of our system because batteries taper off after 70-80% state of charge, but you get the most bang for your buck when you're at 20% trying to go to 60%. That's still several hundreds of miles of range. Some OEMs quote 180 miles in 10 minutes.
With It’s Electric, their chargers are cordless. This BYOC (bring your own charger) approach ingrains a sense of personal responsibility to care for the cord while keeping the charger sleek and dangle-free. The drawback is that there are now more cords because each driver has one rather than each charger having its own. The company also has to deal with the logistics of shipping each driver their own cord before they can start charging.
Nathan from It’s Electric: The detachable cord model is the way to go. It keeps the footprint of the chargers down to a minimum. This means that people don't have to look at things in front of their building that look like a gas pump. Right now damaged cords are a huge problem for property managers and municipalities that have public chargers. There's vandalism with people cutting cords thinking that there's copper in there. The cords also get damaged when people drop the cord nozzle onto the ground when they're done. My cofounder calls it a mic drop. It might land in a puddle and then road salt can get in there. The little plastic clips that you actually need to have a connection between the vehicles also get damaged. There's UV degradation. We've talked to municipalities that have to replace their chargers 2-3 times a year because of the cord. So for us, the more you can keep the cord not exposed to the elements, the longer it will last.
Then when the cord does break we don't have a down charger. The next driver that comes along is still able to use that charger. The other nice thing I'll say too about the detached cord models, we don't have to make any decisions about what charger end we put on our cord. Earlier this week, ChargePoint announced that they’ll retrofit their chargers with a Tesla type, because OEMs are switching from the old charging standard to the Tesla standard, but we're still going to have these two different charging standards on the road for the next decade. For us, we don't need to worry about that. We'll give drivers a Tesla cord if they're a Tesla driver or anybody else who has that Tesla standard. Or we’ll give you the older standard if that’s what you have. So we get to kind of step aside from all of the standards discussions that are going on.
By retrofitting existing infrastructure, Voltpost is able to provide curbside charging without building any new objects on the sidewalk, curb, or street. The combined lamppost + charger is definitely beefed up from the original, but it doesn’t add a significant footprint or get in the way of anything. They intentionally chose to include an integrated cable, but from the image above and my own experience of seeing it in person, I think it’s quite elegant. While they’ll still have to face issues of wear-and-tear and potential vandalism, the ability for the cord to retract means that it’s not just a wet noodle flopping on the ground.
Jeff from Voltpost: We've designed the Voltpost charging platform in a modular way to enable flexibility of services and quickly swap faulty modules within a few minutes. We can monitor this through our dashboard and maximize uptime across the entire network. With the integrated cable, we significantly reduce friction for drivers rather over the bring your own cable approach. It’s also more equitable from a cost perspective. It's more sustainable in that you're not creating a bunch of cables that everybody has to carry around in their trunk. And it creates a streamlined view of liability. If somebody plugs in any random cable curbside, you're creating a trip hazard. You're also creating the potential of frayed cable being plugged in. Who's going to own that liability if there's truly an issue? So we thought deeply about the bring your own cable approach, but went in the integrated cable direction recognizing the clear benefits with this direction.
Partnering with Municipalities
Climate tech is unique because of the larger role that policy plays compared to “general” tech. The Thiel-like libertarian startup playbook is hard to replicate in climate when physical sectors like energy, transportation, and cities are so dependent and reliant on government regulations and incentives. Beyond just handing out free money via the Inflation Reduction Act or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the government (of varying jurisdictions) has an outsized role to play.
One salient example of this is how Voltpost builds, partners, and sells charging services to municipalities. Their business model is hardware-as-a-service which includes the licensing of hardware, software, data, and operations & maintenance. The municipality or private partner still owns the lamppost and because they’re paying for the Voltpost charging platform, they’re incentivized to maximize utilization rates. One way to do that is by designating parking spots next to Voltposts as dedicated EV charging spots. This isn’t that controversial. Retail parking lots already have EV-only parking spots with chargers next to them. What’s neat is that Voltpost built a reservation feature in their app so that municipalities can actually make this a reality.
Jeff from Voltpost: If a municipality or private partner sees the value in reservations and wants to enforce that the same way they would enforce parking tickets in that jurisdiction, then we can offer that to them. If they don't, then that’s fine with us. We have flexibility to turn the feature on and off in that sense.
Why reservations? When you think of densely populated cities, people park by the curbside. If you don't designate EV-only spots, then you're going to have significantly lower utilization. It also provides reliability, not just in the charger’s uptime. Think about the average driver; if you're coming home from work and want to park curbside overnight with a certain amount of miles remaining, then if you can book with assurance that you have that spot, then I would assume that 6 or 7 nights of the week, that charging spot will get booked. Another example could be an employee coming to work and being reliant on that charger. They don't know if another employee is going to be charging that day. In this scenario, they may choose to charge somewhere else.
Distributing Chargers Equitably
The transition to a decarbonized transportation sector requires all drivers to convert to EVs, not just the Tesla tech bros or suburban soccer moms who think they’re middle class when they’re actually upper-middle class. In the beginning, early EV customers were predominantly living in high income neighborhoods so focusing on at-home and retail charging made sense. However, as EV adoption spreads to the masses, putting chargers in low and middle income neighborhoods will be critical. In fact, it’s actually where most of the carbon emissions reduction potential lies. Think about it - what type of people drive a lot of miles every day? It’s those who operate vehicles for their job - think rideshare drivers, delivery people, and fleet operators. Incentivizing the drivers who drive the most miles to switch to EVs is actually the highest impact customer segment to focus on from a climate perspective.
Nathan from It’s Electric: We're addressing the vehicles that emit the most amount of carbon and other forms of pollution. We want to focus on the neighborhoods where the rideshare and TNC drivers live. These drivers would be great customers because they put a lot of miles on their car.
If you look at a map of Boston, Chicago, New York City, or D. C., and you see where the publicly accessible chargers are located on an aggregator map, like PlugShare or ChargeHub, they're all clustered in high income neighborhoods in garages or parking lots. They're not truly public chargers; you have to pay an entry fee. There's a barrier to entry. By going into these low and middle income neighborhoods that are further away from the city centers, we're also solving this problem around access.
There's just an equity question here: Who gets to participate in the EV charging transition? Is it just people that can afford expensive parking space in New York City? Or is it everybody in the city? Once you start to line these things up on top of each other, it starts to make business sense. It starts to make equity sense.
Climate Adaptation And Mitigation Combined
My anecdotal pulse on the climate tech community is that climate mitigation gets the lion’s share of attention while climate adaptation doesn’t get enough. It’s sexier to talk about carbon removal or nuclear fusion than how to flood-proof New Orleans or prevent wildfires from suffocating us. Net zero isn’t going to happen overnight so climate resiliency initiatives are the bridge to keep us afloat until we actually solve the problem. The vast majority of climate solutions are one or the other, but occasionally you stumble upon hybrids that do both mitigation and adaptation. In ElectricFish’s case, they help with decarbonizing the grid via EV charging, but also protect us from climate change symptoms. When blackouts occur, their battery storage serves as a microgrid and can provide backup power for EVs, to the site location, or back to the grid itself.
Matt: On climate resilience, how do you think about educating people about this? I think the tricky part here is you don't think about it at all until you experience it. You just think the lights will stay on and the water will always flow until a blackout happens and you're like “Oh shit, I need to solve this problem.” One analogy is with home renovation, you typically don't replace the roof until it's nearly falling apart.
Vince from ElectricFish: There's actually quite a few [customer segments] that already get it because they've been screwed in the past by this. They’ve acutely experienced it directly as a municipality or as a fleet. So they value resiliency from the get go. They're looking specifically for co-located storage and DCFC [direct current fast charging] that can also provide backup power.
For instance, if you're a convenience store owner, you know your highest margins are from the store, not the gas pump typically so you need to have full uptime your refrigeration and facilities. There was a parking lot owner that came to us and told us about when their gate lost power. They had to just give out free parking for a couple days and that was so much foregone revenue.
We try to make the case that it's like insurance. Even if you haven’t experienced it in your work as a city employee or fleet operator, you probably have as a consumer. California has wildfires, New York has hurricanes, Texas has deep freezes.
Conclusion
It’s still early days for the EV transition. Look around. Unless you’re in a wealthy Bay Area town, you’re not going to see a ton of EVs or chargers. All those gas guzzlers are still emitting dinosaur juice fumes to go vroom vroom. Charging infrastructure is at the crux of decarbonizing transportation.
It’s not going to be a one size fits all solution. Dealerships, affordable housing complexes, gas stations, curbsides, entertainment districts, municipal fleets, and trucking fleets all need reliable EV charging. For each use case, there are nuances. Level 2 is perfect for overnight charging, but terrible for road trips. Level 3 is super fast, but is an order of magnitude more expensive and requires a lengthy approval processes. The needs of a consumer EV owner are completely different than of a fleet owner.
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Stayed tuned for next week’s issue on interconnection and grid resilience. I’m stoked to share it with you all ✌️