Where will electric cars charge when they dominate the roads?

Compiled / Zhu Lin

Editor/ Qian Yaguang

Design / Zhao Haoran

Source/ NewYorkTimes, by Jamie Lincoln Kitman

"The sexiest thing is the car itself. obvious. ”

Mark LaNeve said he was a longtime auto industry executive who joined Charge Enterprises after a brief retirement.

With the steady growth in the number of electric vehicles on U.S. roads in 2022, his company is betting on the electric vehicle charging business. The company is providing a nationwide service that includes site selection, planning, permit application and construction of electric vehicle charging stations.

Lanifu, 62, said: "Tesla has always been dominant, but now everyone else is joining the fight. ”

"There was a lot of excitement around the new Hummer, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Lighting, Chevrolet Silverado and Rivian pickups. People also began to pay attention to charging piles, but no one noticed: charging piles must be designed, manufactured, and installed. We think that if it's done right, done with scale, it's going to be a huge business. ”

Rooted in a fossil fuel-powered industry, Ranif was a sales executive and marketing star for Cadillac and Ford, and spent about three years as CEO of Volvo North America.

He joined Charge in 2021, and the New York-based company has expanded its business to drive electric vehicles on top of its previous main business, wireless communications infrastructure.

"I used to be basically in charge of sales and marketing at GM and Ford, a U.S. auto giant and Fortune 100 company, and I really enjoyed that kind of work." Ranif, who is now the president of Charge, said in a recent interview.

"Frankly, I can do something I never dreamed of. But about four years ago, we had a Tesla in Ford's fleet. As a veteran of the traditional automotive industry, I don't want to like it. I thought, 'What's going on here?' But I only drove it for about three days, and I have to admit that I liked it very much. I tell everyone there, 'Guys, this is the future'. ”

Former GM Chairman Rick Wagoner, a board member of ChargePoint Holdings, which operates charging stations nationwide, introduced Ranif to Andrew Fox, one of Charge's founders and CEO. Ranif sensed the opportunity had come.

He said that in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by the US Congress in 2021, it said that $7.5 billion would be allocated for the construction of charging stations, which made him more optimistic.

Insufficient charging infrastructure

As U.S. automakers, state governments, and the federal government increasingly seek to use electric vehicles to address carbon emissions, the main problem is the inadequate and imperfect charging infrastructure. This concern is reflected in the infrastructure bill's call for an additional 500,000 EV charging piles.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are about 50,000 Class 2 charging piles (at night or weekday) in the U.S. and Canada, and about 7,000 Class 3 fast charging piles, of which 1,400 are part of Tesla's Supercharging network. The Current and future generations of Electric Vehicles are using Tier 1 charging piles, charging speeds are painfully slow.

Fox, who founded Charge in 2003 with Craig Denson and Kenneth Orr, compared the current charging problems of electric cars to those faced by cellphone makers years ago.

"Electric cars today are like when mobile phones were first used, with relatively low usage and novelty," he said. Over the next 30 years, we believe that the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles will cover as much as the mobile phone industry. ”

Samuel Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights, a consultancy that specializes in infrastructure, agrees with the assessment.

"There's definitely a big potential market for this type of service, which will be crucial for the industry as automakers all have grand plans in place to build and sell millions of electric vehicles over the next 5 to 10 years," he said. ”

Absamid noted that while many current EV owners are wealthy and can charge them in their garages with slower Level 2 charging piles, "the vast majority of Americans will not buy a new car in their lifetime — about 3.5 times as many used cars sold each year as new cars." ”

"When you develop electric vehicles, more vehicles will enter the used car market, and a lot of these customers will not be able to charge at home, they will need public charging infrastructure, so you need to build charging infrastructure."

"Companies like Charge will be very important – to help you figure out where you can set up charging piles, especially for DC fast charging piles, where you need to place quite a lot of power supply where you are charging."

Ensuring regulatory approval and reliable local contractors is also necessary, he said.

Bundle with other related businesses

Fox, 49, said the decision to bundle the charging business with Charge's cellphone communications business was a key move.

"Eviction charging is a separate infrastructure, but we didn't want to waste a lot of investor money to build this business, so we acquired a company that provides infrastructure services for telecommunications because it turns out that maybe not the same workers, but they are doing the same kind of work, all of which are laying cables."

Charge,which had revenue of $357 million in the first three quarters of 2021, is now trading over the counter, but is preparing to go public on the NASDAQ. In January 2022, Charge also added EV Group Holdings to its portfolio, a company focused on providing real estate assets to commercial fleet operators that need charging stations.

Like Lanif, who came from a working family in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Fox, who grew up in Queens, New York City, attributes his approach to blue-collar workers whose father was a union electrician.

"We want to serve the whole country and pull it into the electric vehicle business," he said. So we have this humble work to do. ”

Fox and Lanif expect that over the next 15 years or so, the United States will install 8 million to 10 million charging piles. They expect new technologies to continue to change and charging stations to be more extensively laid out, including hotels, supermarkets, health clubs and office buildings.

"There will be a lot of interesting partners and models coming up," Ranif said. But if you think about a gas station with 10 tankers, when will they take action to turn two of them into fast charging piles? ”

Current problems

Executives readily admit that many of today's charging stations are imperfect, site selection is inconvenient, equipment is damaged, and power outages are frequent.

Fox said, "As a Tesla owner, I can tell you that there are a lot of problems at non-Tesla charging stations. It's like 30 years ago, if you had to travel around the country with your phone, you had to pay expensive roaming charges, and the phone often dropped. ”

The company acknowledges that EVs critics often worry that the U.S. grid will struggle to power EVs across the country, but believes there will be solutions emerging.

"Renewables will help, but I think another important part of that is that there's a lot of energy waste in the current system," Fox said. ”

"If we can solve this problem, the grid will provide sufficient power." But that's not to say the idea will come to fruition tomorrow, it's going to happen over the next 25 or 30 years. Advances in battery storage technology are particularly important, he said.

Looking back again at the original idea, they had further ambitions.

Fox said: "What we are doing is premised on creating high-quality jobs. You can't outsource the work we're doing to a foreign country, it has to be done locally. This can make life better for our stakeholders. ”

"We've created very good jobs at home for people who want to trade and don't want to go to college. I love creating jobs that don't have to do three jobs at the same time to support their families. ”

He hopes his company will provide the "gold standard" in the charging industry. If the job has to be done correctly by a professional, then only a particular type of client will want it, so there will always be work for other people at the bottom to do.

"In terms of the kind of service we provide in the electric car space, we are not competing downwards." He said.