sound better.
But to kick it off, I'll just kind of do a little mock one and then hand it to you
for an overview to introduce yourself just in case anyone hasn't heard us.
So with that...
Looks like we are all good.
Okay, cool.
Good afternoon.
Great connections listeners.
I'm excited to be speaking with Lew Cox today.
I know we've had him on a previous episode, but I feel like even though it's
only been a few months since we had you last on, there's been so much that has
happened in the space, good and bad.
But I think it's been really cool following some of the really great
products that your team has been launching.
In addition to everything else going on that we're talking about today.
So I'm really excited to have you back, but just in case anyone's not familiar,
Lew, can you give a...
little information about yourself and what your team does.
Absolutely, Chase.
It's a pleasure to be back on Grid Connections.
The last time we had a discussion, I think we really got into the nitty gritty about
some of the benefits that not only our products provide, but a lot of the
companies in this space are working on.
Just for those who are new to who I am and who X -Charge is, I'm Lew Cox.
I am the Senior Director of Business Development for X -Charge here in North
America.
And X -Charge is an EV charging OEM where we design...
and manufacture DC fast charging products kind of across the gambit, including some
products that have integrated bi -directional batteries.
We really thought that there and still do believe that there is a space currently
for very grid constrained areas and providing infrastructure for them to
provide DC fast charging.
I think if EV adoption is going to go where we all want it to go collectively,
we have to attack all of the issues kind of at the same time and that...
that doesn't involve leaving behind those areas that are maybe a little bit more
difficult to attack.
So batteries help us get that done.
Yeah, I think that's what I've really enjoyed about, even our last conversation
and my apologies to anyone listening, if they hear a dog panting, that's a dog I'm
currently watching.
But, yeah, I think our last conversation, we just barely scratched the surface on
this topic specifically, and really talked about the state of like EV charging and a
lot of, we're seeing in that space.
And I think that's what I love about why you start this podcast is you kind of get
that trifecta of like renewable energy and new just energy challenges.
to obviously electric vehicles and electric transportation.
And then there's kind of the third component, which is actually making all
these work together through the grid, obviously.
And then really what we're seeing the big need is through newer and smarter grids,
like what is leveraged with microgrid technology, and then obviously how energy
storage plays into that, kind of making the system we have even much more
efficient and ideally have a higher uptime.
So with that, I'll kind of, I know you wanted to talk quite a bit about it, but
like, like we're, let's take a step back just in case I feel like the last couple
of episodes have been pretty electric vehicle heavy.
So for those who may not be as familiar with micro grids, what's a good way for
people to think about how that is different from the current American grid
here in North America?
Yeah, I mean, in its simplest terms, right, when we talk about a microgrid,
what that is, is a localized community of not only generation, but storage and
distribution.
that doesn't rely solely on connection to a larger generation source further away
from where you're using the energy.
The concept behind why a microgrid makes sense is that you can take a small
community or a series of buildings or even a specific property almost entirely to
self -sufficiency through the use of distributed energy resources.
And when we say that, we talk about things like battery support.
We talk about generation on site like solar installations, and a combination of
those things will allow you...
to remove what otherwise would be a load on the grid, you know, and what could be a
grid constrained area and localize their usage and their generation and
distribution to one specific subset of properties or types of infrastructure,
which typically makes it more scalable for what you want to do in the future without
having to rely on the utility company so heavily.
You know, I think one, that was an awesome summary of micro grids, but two, I think
one of the things you mentioned there is a really great point that I think a lot of
people, it seems like some people when you start talking about micro grids might just
know enough to be dangerous.
And so they think that micro grids means that it's kind of its own removed kind of
off the grid completely.
And can it be?
Yes.
But it's the idea is actually that it's working in kind of in tandem with the
power grid.
and ideally improving it and making it a more resilient resource for everyone.
Yeah, I think it's really important what you said there and that, you know, while
it can be totally self -sufficient and not take anything from, you know, the greater
grid, I think the more appropriate use of a microgrid is to provide support to
neighboring properties, to the grid itself.
And in order to do that, right, I mean, if you can take your load almost entirely off
of what you're relying on from the utility and then you have excess.
When the utility needs it, being able to provide that excess bi -directionally to
your neighbors, to your neighborhood, to the utility itself in the event of a
demand response sort of situation, those are all very helpful.
And I think the utilities more recently have gotten really on board with
supporting initiatives that help provide them with the more resiliency that they're
looking for during the electrification of the United States.
For sure.
And I think it's a really cool thing that we're there.
There's obviously a lot of politics that kind of involved in kind of maybe
misperceptions in the space, but I I've always thought that there's kind of two
really cool things that micro grids really help unlock.
And one is redundancy.
Should there be a blackout or something?
but also then kind of that, resiliency factor and being kind of a net positive
and then almost kind of flipping around and being coming a, very strong business
case.
for that microgrid, especially if like in the example you just taught me, like a
small housing community possibly having their own microgrid that depending on how
it's set up, you can even sell that excess energy back and find some really great win
-win scenarios for a lot of different use cases.
So I know one of the things you kind of wanted to talk about was on the kind of
status of microgrids.
In your exposure at X -Charger, what have you, and my apologies, how long have you
been now with the company?
So I've been with X -Charge both as a consultant and then now a full -time
employee for the better part of two years.
My prior role, I was in at a large EPC or engineering procurement and construction
company where we did a lot of design, engineering and construction for all kinds
of public infrastructure, be that cellular telecommunications, satellite earth
station, power substation were necessary as well as EV charging infrastructure.
And over the last four years, I've moved specifically into EV charging.
And then I was consulting with X -Charge as they were migrating their business from
Europe to the North American market.
And then it made sense, you know, about a better part of a year ago to bring me on
full time and head up business development for them here.
Yep.
I'd be kind of curious.
I've definitely heard a lot of things as to where the status of micro grids were
during COVID and before COVID.
I would be just kind of curious to hear like, and probably good, maybe a
background information for like listeners.
Like the last two years you've been doing this, like where have you seen the changes
and kind of the opportunities?
Absolutely.
I think when we talk about
microgrids and the growth and proper the popularity for them, we have to talk about
the price of batteries, right?
Because battery technology is essential to the microgrid creation and removing that
peak load off of certain properties off of certain, you know, high demand resources
like EV chargers where you can quadruple or maybe even 10x the amount of power
coming out of a property that wasn't designed for that originally.
A microgrid or battery solution helps really smooth that out.
But a couple of years ago, thinking back to 2020 when I was in the space, right,
and we were working on infrastructure projects, most people I talked to were
saying, that's so far in the future, batteries are cost prohibitive, it's
really not scalable, you know, what are we gonna do with the batteries when they're
dead?
And then very rapidly over the last four years, we've gotten much smarter about,
you know, the cell costs.
And I'm sure you've seen the charts online where it's like exponentially less
expensive, you know, to get some of it.
it went, it was starting to go down.
Then went exponentially more expensive because of COVID and supply things.
And now we're, for multiple reasons, but a big part is supply.
we're now seeing it really go down, which I think if you're in that space, it can be
a little scary.
But I think for others, I think just for micro grids and a lot of those reliant to
technology in general, this is a huge, step four that's really kind of helping
accelerate this.
And I think, just one thing that it is kind of.
Yeah.
Innovation in general typically drives, you know, efficiencies and costs and
you're starting to see that with microgrids and battery technology where
it's now much more accessible for types of projects and folks who maybe aren't the
utility directly, right, to start to provide these resources to the projects
they're working on, to start to think about load management in a more
intelligent way than just make a 7 megawatt request from the utility and wait
for the right transformer.
Now you can...
dramatically speed up a project and increase its profitability if you have the
right kind of solution designed from a battery and a bi -directional microgrid
perspective, especially if you take advantage of some of the rebates that are
offered through the federal government, not only for the batteries, but for any
sort of generation via solar.
Yeah, and I think we've talked about EVs and it just kind of shook free of my mind
by you saying like the experiences microgrids and what people were thinking
just a couple of years ago about like, these are so far out.
And well, one of that technologies, I don't think it's mature as quickly as
microgrids have is kind of like vehicle to grid or vehicle to X technologies.
And we're starting to see some of that develop and good and some of it shake out
that it still might be a little ways away, but.
I'm curious if there's been any, I know we've talked about vehicle to grid
potential a lot on this podcast.
I'm just curious if that's something you've been having more conversations
about lately in your own discussions.
We certainly have.
I think where the most use from a V to X or a vehicle to grid use case comes into
play is when you talk about fleet vehicles that are parked, you know, for long
periods of time after they complete their routes.
These could be last mile delivery vehicles.
These could be a series of school buses.
You know, there are several companies in the space.
that focus on that bi -directional AC level two charging, where you can tap into
these vehicles substantially larger battery than commercial or than passenger
vehicles, right?
And you can use that energy to not only offset the charging of other vehicles, but
potentially even offset the entire utility bill for getting them up and running in
the first place.
If you can get battery connected resources, interacting in a way with the
utility that helps them out in a demand event, it can be a very profitable
adventure.
And I think if we're talking about electrifying every vehicle in the country,
at some point, it's probably a necessary venture, right, to be able to use those
batteries as resources more than as strains on our grid.
No, that's a great point.
Kind of going back to microgrid specifically, where are you seeing the
most, I guess the interest or like when people, because with vehicle to grid, I
think it was always just to use this kind of an example, people kind of got the idea
quickly, like, that's a cool use case.
But then the practicality of it and like the execution of it became a lot more
complicated.
Sure.
then when you start like actually looking about the technology and what we need to
do, a lot of it's already there.
Whereas vehicle to grid, it's kind of, you need the right charger, you need the right
vehicle, you need the right software, all this stuff.
Whereas the others, it's still new, but a lot of it's already there, kind of, and
something you can kind of take off the shelf a lot easier.
Sure, and I think when you're the utility and you're looking at various projects
that are coming through your development pipeline, when you have a dedicated
distributed energy resource, that's a lot more attractive to you because you can
depend on that, right?
You can depend on it.
You can pull energy from it much more quickly.
You can have a one hour system dump several megawatts, whereas
In a vehicle to grid situation, you're limited by the capacity of the charger
that it's plugged into, which could be 11 kilowatt from a bidirectionality
perspective.
On a really fast one, yeah, some are even slower at seven or lower.
So you would need hundreds of them at the same time in order to get any tangible
value as a utility company.
So what we have seen, at least in our space recently, is projects that have
these dedicated distributed energy resources or batteries or microgrids, et
cetera.
they're getting prioritized by the utility because it's not creating demand, it's
solving a problem for them.
And that allows them to serve more of their customers more efficiently by not
having to dedicate a transformer to this project that otherwise could go without
it, right?
Specifically related to DC fast charging.
I'm curious.
I mean, you mentioned you live in San Diego.
Like if I'm listening to this and I live in a larger city like a San Diego and what
might be an example of a micro grid implementation that like a utility would
be doing in a larger city right now that I could see if either I could become a part
of or something that might actually impact me on a day to day basis, for example.
Yeah, you know, I think what's a really fun use case is we have a project in
development right now in downtown San Diego near the airport where there is a
donut store, you know, with a drive -through that doesn't have a huge load and
it's in a very condensed, you know, older infrastructure type of neighborhood.
where bringing in new three -phase 480 power is extremely cost prohibitive.
So we looked at all the various methods on how to electrify this parking lot because
of its location.
And when we got down to it, our Net Zero Series products, the bi -directional grid
forming batteries, allows us not only to take the entire load of that donut shop
off of the grid, right?
But we get to skip what would otherwise be new line drops and several hundred feet of
run from the point of connection for the utility for SDG &E.
And that's a project where sure it's a very small microgrid and we're helping a
donut store, right?
But we're also providing DC fast charging to the neighborhood without dramatically
stressing out SDG &E in the process or waiting two and a half years in order to
get the right infrastructure to make that project happen.
So that's an example, a real world example that I'm working on right now where using
batteries, using intelligent infrastructure or distributed energy
resources allows us to speed up the process, help out the utility and moving
forward.
that donut shop no longer pulls from the grid during peak times because we have
that bidirectionality incorporated into our design.
No, that's great.
I feel like I that was completely incidental or like kind of unintentional
of that example, but I don't think I could have teach you more up for that.
That's great.
with that, I guess, I mean, there's been talk about it.
And I think especially as someone who's been dealing a lot more with the EV
charging space, like one of the big things right now is like permitting and getting
transformers.
it's really all of this stuff before anything, any shovels.
It's all that stuff that takes a lot longer.
Can you share a little bit about how, obviously like the reduction of
transformers and some of these upgrades, but are there any other things that kind
of help make a micro grid solution a better and kind of faster project for
people who might be listening to think about like, maybe I should approach it
this way instead of doing the more kind of traditional way with a project they might
be working on or areas in addition where it saves time in that process.
I mean, I think saving time in general comes from not needing some of this
extremely limited infrastructure that we're talking about.
You know, 2000 kVA transformers, switchgear.
There's such a switchgear shortage in the country right now that many companies have
resulted to alternatives like H -Frames where you just bolt on the exact same
components.
get that certified at the field level by the utility and then use that instead of a
switch gear.
Not as clean, not as neat, but it speeds up the project.
I think when you start to look at using batteries to bridge some of that and then
connect directly into house power, which otherwise would not be possible to power
multiple DC fast chargers, you're using the existing infrastructure as it is and
then not only kind of skipping the line for waiting for all that additional
equipment.
but you're taking that load like we talked about in the donut shop example, we're
taking that load off of the grid moving forward so that those resources can be
redirected to places that need it by the utility.
And that's, I mean, that's pretty cool.
And especially in this example where I've had people who kind of listen to the
podcast, kind of reach out to me and they, they may be new to the whole idea of EV
charging, but they think it's kind of a cool thing.
It's like, I own a building, I have this, what can I do to like actually do it?
And then they start looking in the logistics and the cost of it.
And it kind of understandably sometimes scares them off.
Whereas like, this is a great example of kind of a project that speeds it up.
brings down a lot of the costs and still makes it a very feasible operation for
both the business and then the addition of adding charging to the location.
Yeah, what I think is also really important to focus on and what we focus on
at X -Charge not only internally with our deployments but with our partners is that
EV charging needs to be a profitable adventure, you know, without tons of
subsidies, without waiting a decade to get an ROI.
And in order to do that, you've got to find a way to get the most amount of
margin you can per kilowatt hour that you're trading, right?
Because all we're doing is essentially we're selling kilowatt hours to vehicles
with our technology, right?
And...
Depending on when a vehicle is plugged in, and we know through untold amounts of data
points that most people are charging between four in the afternoon and nine p
That's considered peak.
Most people are doing most things that involve the grid between four and nine p
So if during that time your utility rate is twice as much as it is at midnight,
you're substantially less profitable in the time where you're dispensing the most
energy possible.
So if you use batteries and you can schedule when you want to fill those
batteries, like during super off peak, midnight to four a
And then during those peak times when you start to get hit, you're selling energy
that you paid substantially less for, sometimes half for, right?
And you're still able to service the customer.
You're more profitable in the distribution of this energy and that it gets you much
more quickly to ROI, which actually starts to make EV charging investable.
Some of the most sophisticated investors in the space right now look at EV charging
at scale and say, it's a little too risky.
There's utilization risk and it's too expensive from the utility.
when you introduce alternative distributed resources like batteries, you can start to
solve some of those objections, you know, at its core.
And it just takes time in order for you to get the adoption that you need to make
this a very profitable adventure and make it investable.
Yeah, and I think there's definitely a couple different parts of this.
We're talking about the batteries in this case, but also then there's the actual
charging infrastructure.
And I think there's some really cool products that your team has been actually
delivering.
One of them is the North American charging standard.
I want to say it's a 200 kilowatt model that Kyle Connor actually, who we've had
on the show is technically like demoing at his place in Boulder.
Not in Boulder, but yeah, and I'm trying, it's not, I always want to call it Fort
Worth.
It's Fort Collins, correct.
And I think that's just awesome to see that.
And so I'm kind of curious, can you tell us more about that product and kind of the
interest in that?
Cause obviously there's been a lot of headlines about the North American
Charging.
And that's a whole different thing.
We can talk about that too, but obviously that's where a lot of automakers are going
towards that standard.
And they're kind of looking for options out there in the space.
for effective EV charging.
So yeah, I'd just love to learn a little bit more about how that's been going and
some of the projects or kind of ideas that have been unlocked with this new product.
Yeah, you know, I think at X -Charge we focus primarily on the driver, right?
We want to make sure that if you pull up to an X -Charge station, no matter what
vehicle you've got, you should be able to take energy if you really need it, right?
And we started deploying the North American charging standard before it was
even certified by the SAE for J3400 back in March of last year.
And the reason we did that and went through the UL certifications to get that
done was to selfishly prove that we could charge
Teslas as well as CCS vehicles.
And then about two months later, after we had already secured our supply chain, the
entire industry decided to adopt the standard and within a week.
I mean, I think you remember that time.
It was a bit madness when it happened.
And we just so happened to be sitting on already fully integrated, you know,
publicly deployed infrastructure with the North American charging standard on it.
The first one we deployed, the first two we deployed were at a facility for MD7.
in Dallas, Texas, and then another one for a C store owner in, Harahan, Louisiana.
Both of those had Tesla plugs on them natively and we deployed those as the
first in the country from an OEM that is not named Tesla outside of ChargePoint,
right?
So ChargePoint was a couple of days behind us and they did it at their testing
facility.
We deployed these to customers in March.
So we were really proud of that and we got a shout out on LinkedIn from PlugShare
because we had the first check in on the North American charging standard and we
celebrated a little bit as a team.
but it also reminded us that, okay, we really do have to continue to look ahead
of the curve and continue to innovate to be more effective with the technologies
that we bring to the market.
And the unit we sent to Kyle Connor is actually an example of that.
That is our Net Zero series, our battery integrated, you know, DC fast charger,
where he's able to install that on level two infrastructure and still provide, you
know, up to 200 kilowatt output to vehicles, two at a time, you know, on an
ACS or CCS or some combination thereof.
We provided that to them because we feel that the space really needs to understand
that this is possible and that there are more options than paying a ton of money to
the utility and waiting a ton of time to get this done.
And we're ready and rocking with deploying that to customers today and have been
doing it globally since 2020.
So with that, I mean, have there been kind of the change to the NACS or J34 and
whatever we want to call it now from CCS, have there been any kind of surprise
learnings or I mean, is it other than just switching over and getting a different
supply chain for the plug?
Has it really been pretty straightforward or I feel like there's probably got to be
more to the story as far as maybe new discoveries or challenges by just going to
a different plug.
There certainly are, right?
A supply chain was the first challenge we had to overcome.
And, you know, and full disclosure, I'm no engineer.
I simply play one on television.
But in talking to my team, as we started the implementation of that connector, we
wanted to make sure that it did work.
And the first thing that we found out is when you plugged in back then, it doesn't
happen now, but when you plugged in a Tesla, you know, in 2022 into an NACS
charger that was typically a CCS charger, not made by Tesla.
It only charged Teslas that had CCS communication chips in them, right?
Because we didn't have the language.
Nobody in the space had the communication language or the protocols to speak to
these older Teslas that were designed exclusively for the supercharger network.
So when some of our customers in 2016, you know, Model S's would come and plug in and
their cars wouldn't recognize the charger, for a little while we're scratching our
heads.
Couldn't quite figure out why, because everything we rented from Hertz and some
of our personal cars would plug in and charge right away.
These were all 2023 vehicles, 2022 vehicles.
And then we started to piece it together.
And that's why it's so important as an OEM to go through these interoperability tests
with all manners of vehicles and all years of vehicles and not just the ones that are
on the market today or the ones that will be released tomorrow so that we catch
those things and don't have frustrated customers at the plug.
sure.
With kind of, I mean, are you seeing with a lot of these chargers that have kind of
the battery backup system allowing for level two installation locations, is that
becoming like a majority or is what there's definitely a need for I'm just
kind of curious if this is like really opening up like 25 % greater or is it like
all the sudden this is like a lot of people like, this now makes way more sense
for me.
Right.
uptime and everything else really makes it a much more straightforward answer.
It definitely depends on the use case, right?
I think if you are a charge point operator, a public charge point operator,
trying to bring this infrastructure to somewhere where you otherwise just can't
do it, battery integrated solutions are the right call.
If you are someone who has an excellent location that has tons of power available
from the utility, we make other products that I think would probably be a better
fit if you plan to turn over 25 or 30 cars a day through two units.
It's tough for a battery to keep up unless that battery is several megawatts large.
So we do make products like our C7 that is a direct 480 connection.
It's a 400 kilowatt liquid cooled, you know, simultaneous charging unit with
dynamic load balancing, all the fun words that you want to use in EV charging.
That is your unit.
If you really want to just sell as much energy as quickly as possible and you have
the power to do it, more power to you.
We have products for that.
Many great companies in this space have products for that.
What differentiates us is if you don't have that amount of power and you still
want to do DC fast charging, you're basically required to use a Net Zero
series product or some other battery integrated solution.
And we figured if you're going to go as far as to include a battery with the
charger to make it easier to install, you might as well make that charger and that
battery bi -directional.
It should have a direct solar input DC to DC like ours does so that you don't lose
any energy converting it from DC to AC and then back to DC to use it to charge cars.
This is the most efficient way for you to not only offset your need from the grid,
but in theory, if you had enough solar and enough time in between cars, you could be
totally grid free, right?
And provide energy that you didn't pay per kilowatt hour for.
And instead you were able to generate that on site and distribute it to cars.
That's the best case scenario from a micro grid perspective.
I mean, yeah, that's like about as ideal of a situation as it gets for that use
case.
Yeah with like obviously the Inflation reduction act always keep calling it the
IRAs.
I have to remember what sometimes what it How have you seen that kind of impact
Obviously before that there were subsidies for charges there were subsidies for solar
and stuff, but it seems like part of the goal was
Hopefully it also make it so these could be packaged things together to kind of get
a lot more of these products.
Not only just implement, but implemented as a package thing instead of maybe having
to do multiple phases of the installation.
Are you seeing that as kind of an outcome of this?
Or are you also maybe just, is it just word of mouth?
This is just something more people are hearing about so they're kind of coming to
you naturally.
Sure.
I believe the IRA has had a great impact on battery integrated technologies.
And the reason for that is typically with...
Nevi funding or Baba compliance, you know, you're looking at some portion of the,
just the chargers that will be reimbursed or in some cases, if you went in Nevi
project, it could be the whole project, but you have some large number that you
must contribute to that.
When you add a battery, you know, the IRA allows for you to take a tax credit of 30
% of the entire project.
And if you're using battery integrated project or solutions, that number can be
pretty large.
It could be a million dollars in hardware.
that $300 ,000 kind of off the top, you get to throw to the bottom line as a tax
credit, which is tradable or a rebate of some sort if you're a tax -free entity.
And that dramatically brings down the capex of a project.
So you have the batteries, you brought down the capex, and now you can use the
batteries to peak shave, right, and pay less for your energy, or you install solar
and can maybe even circumvent it entirely in certain use cases.
Now you're going to be much more profitable over time as you sell energy to
cars that you either don't have to pay for or you can subsidize dramatically.
by taking during super off peak.
I think that's the most important impact that we've seen is just CapEx to the
project itself because like I talked about, most investors are pretty wary of
the EV charging space because of how crowded it is at the moment and how long
it takes to ROI.
When you start to add batteries and then you add a large tax credit to that, you
get way more competitive much more quickly for the long term.
Now do you know if it is just batteries or is it if the project has batteries or
solar, technically it can count for the 30%.
So I think you just need batteries to get to the 30%.
Right.
And, and, you know, again, I am no expert in the tax code, but you just need
batteries to get to the 30%.
And if you do have solar, there are additional drivers to help get you to like
the 40 % range.
If you have generation and storage on site, you know, we've seen as much as 40 %
of a project get funded.
And that's not, you need to try and win, right?
You can just.
send in your details to the IRA and say this qualifies and you earn that money.
Sure.
when it's, I get it, like if the parking lot's already there, but like there's so
many of these projects where they're building a whole new facility and then
parking.
And if it's going to be all new anyway, it adds a bit of cost, but the Delta is so
much less.
If you just plan it all at once and then you can start unlocking so many cool,
Right.
I think.
It's mostly price has been the challenge, right?
That's the toughest thing for people who invest in EV charging to overcome because
it requires a little bit of faith, right?
This is an asset class that has yet to kind of shake itself out as reliable.
And we're starting to see the reports from EVgo, Electrify America, even Blink.
You know, these companies are up nearly a hundred percent year over year in revenues
and that number doesn't go down next year, right?
So now that they've started to see the adoption rate get where we need it to be
to see that growth continue.
It's more about how do we optimize every site that we've got and adding solar,
adding batteries, adding technologies that work on 208.
Like we make a charger that's a direct 208 connection so that you don't need to bring
in 480 new power and some properties.
These are things that help just incrementally increase the profitability
of a site.
And I firmly believe that once EV charging gets to the point where it is investable
by all the largest entities that do this type of infrastructure investing.
you will see so much of it that it will provide that consumer confidence that we
need to get to the next tier of EV adoption.
When you talk about someone who's kind of on the edge or like looking to go and
become one of these people that wants to invest in it, how are they, what is, in
your experience, like how do they come to you?
Is it like, I'm curious about this or I'm looking to do X thing and since I'm
building a building, I'm gonna throw in EV charging.
Or I heard about these tax credits in the IRA.
Can you help me there?
I'm just kind of generally curious about, in your experience, if there is kind of
like a ideal customer that comes to you fairly regularly with just like, yeah, I'm
looking to do X and can you help me get to this end product?
Yeah, I think our most common customer arch types, there's three of them, right?
You've got the folks who have fleets that have electrified and they're looking for a
more effective way to charge their vehicles.
Sometimes that's level two, if their fleets have significant periods of
downtime or overnight, et cetera.
Whereas if you do have like a black car service that we service in Vegas, you
know, their vehicles are in service 24 seven and they're all electric.
So we had to provide a solution for them that kept them going, you know, with DC
fast charging in their garage where they could not get more power from Nevada
energy.
So we had to make do with what we had and that dynamic load balancing is a good
solution for them.
The reason they found us is they went to Nevada energy to request more power for a
typical DCFC install and they couldn't get it.
So then they started looking at alternatives.
Well, what can I do with the power that I've got?
You know, and X -Charge provides solutions to do that.
And then the third type is, you know, the property owners or the charge point
operator who wants to take advantage of the EV revolution and start to provide
this infrastructure sort of as a service, you know, and be the broker in the middle.
Those folks usually find their way to us through trade shows or through word of
mouth or...
or they went to go and install a charger and realized how long the lead time for a
transformer was.
So now they're backpedaling trying to figure out what the solution is that
doesn't require 2000 kVA.
And you know, that's where X -Charge comes in to fill that gap.
Interesting.
Yeah, one of the things you meant, and I'm kind of surprised we haven't heard more
interest in kind of that.
I haven't been really able to come up with the right name to describe it, but
essentially commercial EV usage.
Like, I mean, all the headlines we saw coming in the news in the winter, like in
Chicago with all these EV charges are overwhelmed and said, well, majority of it
was just understandably like usually Uber drivers or others that needed kind of that
commercial use.
and you look at the traditional combustion engine gas industry and You go up and down
anywhere on the west coast.
You'll see the pacific commercial fueling Gas stations are specifically for either a
town car service or large trucks and so it kind of inherently keeps The different
traffic flows when someone goes to refuel and there just hasn't been quite that yet.
It seems like for EVs
It just seems like everyone has to go to the local supercharger whichever charger
is closest to them instead of like having that distinction of This is a private one
that X company has just for theirs or it is Whether it's X charger some business
that just sells only or charges only for commercial use Evies and I'm curious
that's great to hear that someone has done that but it is that becoming more of a
thing or have you seen anything?
kind of larger scale than that, instead of it being like a one -off business, there's
someone, there being the business case where someone's gonna say, I'm gonna be
the Pacific commercial EV charger along the West Coast for Uber drivers or
whoever.
Sure.
There are a couple of companies that do it now and, you know, using an example
without naming any companies specifically in the San Diego area, the airport has
electrified its people movers and those are in operation, you know, 20 hours a day
until the quiet hours in San Diego.
And they, they,
you know, either leased or bought up a large portion of land adjacent to the
airport.
And then they put in a ton of DC fast chargers with a new power request from SDG
&E.
And those chargers are specifically for these people movers.
They're for the electrified taxi fleets to try and keep them off of the very
constrained local infrastructure from the EV goes the electrify Americas, the Tesla
superchargers.
And they're not designed to handle these large buses.
They don't have pull through stalls.
It's very inconvenient when someone's going to block three stalls of charging so
that they can get their truck recharged.
Now, you can't really blame the truck driver.
He's working with what he's got, right?
So in my opinion, that just needs to be a space that's more mindfully attacked by
the folks that provide this level of infrastructure as a service or as a
business.
Those who provide ChargePoint operation as a professional business, they know that
there is a specific customer type that they're after.
And if you're after just public charging,
you pick the right parking lots for that.
You pick the commercial lots that have the VOMs, the Starbucks, those sorts of
convenience features and amenities in them.
And if you're charging fleet vehicles, you're talking to your in -customer first
and saying, where would we solve a need for you?
And in this case of the San Diego airport, it has to be within a half mile of where
these things are typically on route.
And they did find that piece of property and then they fenced it off and added RFID
cards for gates so that only they could access it.
And that solves both problems.
You're not congesting the public infrastructure and the people who need it
on a commercial side are able to get to that quickly without running into
challenges in stall design and how to turn their vehicles around.
I've seen lots of medium class vehicles charging at Electrify Americas because
it's all they had and they take up half of all the stalls and it's really
inconvenient and they have 200 kilowatt hour batteries that take forever to
recharge to begin with.
So.
It's good to see that the industry start to differentiate itself in those various
use cases and not just say all chargers are good chargers in the right place.
For sure.
And I figure that is happening.
I just hadn't heard too much.
And like, there are obviously, usually it's kind of like city or a county level
that might have like a bunch of electric buses.
They'll have their own Depot or something, but then you kind of start getting into
that medium use case where, you're getting the negative headlines that we saw with
like a lot of Uber drivers and just trying to find out that what that right balance
is.
so that that's great to hear that it's probably not going to happen overnight,
but it is.
being solved, which I figured it was, yeah.
it's important because there are certain types of public services.
Let's take police departments, for example.
You typically don't pull up to a gas pump and see several cop cars refueling there,
right?
It's very rare when they do that and it's on a need -by -need basis.
They have gas pumps at their depots.
You know, as these vehicles electrify, because they're going to the vehicles or
the shops, as they call them, go from shift to shift, right?
They don't really get a whole lot of downtime and, you know, the police
department is open 24 -7.
So they're starting to look at DC fast charging infrastructure as well, because
level two doesn't quite do it for them when those vehicles need to be back out on
the road in half an hour.
So giving them their own DC fast chargers behind the fence at these police
departments is something that we're contacted about quite a bit actually to
help make that happen.
And that's going to provide the confidence not only to the department, but to the
officers themselves and having the ability to use these vehicles for all the various
use cases that they need every day to keep our communities safe.
Yeah, I'm kind of curious with that kind of use case where it's a pretty frequent
DC fast charge, is there, and this is obviously probably kind of model specific,
but I'm just kind of curious, is there like a speed you've been, or like a
charger you recommend, maybe not all the way at the 200 kilowatts, or maybe just
site specific, like maybe 50 or 100 is good enough for these, or?
I think it depends on, I mean, most departments have very good data about how
long their vehicles will sit in soak time, we call it.
Gotcha.
it typically requires almost a consultation from a charging company to
look at your fleet.
How many are you electrifying right now?
Okay, well, here's the plan.
Because if you want to go with 16 stalls of DC fast charging at a police department
now, no way you've got the infrastructure for that.
So you would start with two to four stalls, and then you would say, as you
start to get to 20%, 40%, 70 % of their fleet is electric, this is how we would
expand upon that, you know, and use some dynamic load balancing.
Maybe all the chargers are capable of 200, 300 kilowatt.
But when they're all plugged in, you can ramp that down substantially to 50 to 100
kW each.
And that way you're not putting such a strain on the resources that you've got in
order to make this happen in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely been an interesting topic is for so long, people
said, DC fast charging ruins the battery over the lifestyle.
I like life of the battery.
And it's like.
The more data we've seen of it, it surprisingly is pretty minimal.
If any, depending on the, it's like, since most are now thermally managed systems,
any V's that's really gotten rid of it.
So you can see these super, I think probably the most common is just because
of the volume of this Tesla is that were used as like Ubers and stuff that were
pretty much exclusively DC fast charge.
And it, it's like, maybe it's a couple of percent extra degradation of that, but if
the number is so small, it's so, you can't, you almost can't even tie it to DC.
It could just be that battery.
It could have been some other use case or like it was in the cold a lot more or
something, which is really cool to see that that's kind of.
Sure.
might not be practical for some use cases.
So it's turned out that if you need an EV, more likely than not, there's a way to
make it realistic for your business.
I think in the industry, you know, those of us have been in a while and know quite
a bit about the battery technology in the vehicles.
We are willing to say, you know, I'll go out on a limb here to say that DC fast
charging is not inherently harmful to your battery, at least not to a measurable
degree.
that over the life of ownership of that vehicle, you will notice in your day to
day.
I think there's several studies on some of these 2014 through 2016 Tesla Model S's
that were primarily DC fast charged.
And you're seeing degradation of sub 10 % over the course of a decade.
That, you know, I think that would be what we consider an acceptable loss, you know,
whereas with an internal combustion engine over the course of a decade, the wear and
tear on the motor itself usually will be more significant than that of, you know,
the electric vehicle equivalent.
And the cost to replace a motor is probably about the equivalent of the cost
to replace a battery these days.
I've had several less than ideal ICE vehicles over the years that I've liked to
own and drive it until it explodes.
And when they do explode, I have never gone through the effort of replacing the
engine.
Turns out I've always just replaced the car.
Right, right.
Well, it's you bring up a really great point that I don't think a lot of people
realize is yes, evs are warranted to like have a degradation level and stuff like
that and and then within that degradation level like we're telling the impact of dc
fast charging is like Potentially a small percent of that.
It's even hard to tell to what extent?
but combustion engine vehicles lose power over time as well that I and I don't think
enough people fully appreciate that one of my
favorite like top gear things they did was they all went out and got like the goal
was to get like a I think it had to be at least 20 years old or something some sort
of random european car and they had to find out who still had the most power of
the what the car came with and I don't think any of them crossed even the 50 mark
right which is such a wild thing that I just don't think most people fully
appreciate even if you are a mechanic I think I
Sure.
Right.
There's a reason you have a break -in period and there's also a reason you have
to rebuild the engine and replace them eventually too, so.
there's a reason they make high mileage motor oil, you know, and when these
vehicles get older like that.
Yeah, they get substantially less fuel efficient in the process too.
So it's not even just less reliable or less power, but you're literally less fuel
efficient.
So I don't see how that's any different than less efficient from a battery
perspective.
For sure, for sure.
Well, I think we've talked a lot on that, the commercial.
But no, this is super fascinating because it's been one I've been wondering quite a
bit about.
And so I think you are in probably as deep in the EV charging realm as it can be.
And there has been a lot of kind of shakeout in this past year, it seems like.
And I think personally, it's unfortunate, but not kind of surprising.
I feel like there's just been a lot in the space that had kind of been
built up and maybe good or bad, there've been a lot of people kind of rushing into
and like we had been talking about, just with any technology, there kind of is that
rush kind of fall out and then what is left is what kind of grows to become a
long -term and sustainable industry.
And so I'm kind of curious with what you've seen because there's so many
negative headlines, has there been kind of people are now kind of taking a step back
because they're, I don't know if these EVs things are going to be.
forever or is that more instead of like a commercial mindset that's more like maybe
a biased personal one -off mindset sort of experience if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think I know exactly what you're saying and I think most people I'd be
willing to say that the overwhelming majority of people who are even remotely
familiar with the space does not believe that EVs are a fad I don't think that this
is something that's kind of passing in the wind I think that these vehicles are
coming I think people will adopt them when they get to the price point that makes it
financially reasonable for their household
and they already provide numerous benefits from a maintenance perspective, from a
safety and reliability perspective, and a technology perspective, the cars are here
to stay, which means the infrastructure has got to get built.
So when you see some of these headlines and the things that Tesla does and some of
these other companies where they start to fold due to insolvency, consolidation in
this space was necessary.
There are some very sharp people in this space, Lauren MacDonald being one of them,
that talk about this ad nauseum.
So I'm not going to rehash their points, but I think consolidation was necessary.
And I think that those of us, and I know many obviously in the space who are
already after the deployment of this hardware at mass, some of these news
headlines and some of these players kind of pulling out of the space full speed
have only incented us to go faster, to do more.
I've seen more investors come into the space over the last two weeks than I had
seen in the last two years because they believe that a large gap is being left by
people like Tesla slowing down their deployment plans from a rollout
perspective.
And I believe that Tesla will support their network very well.
They're in first for a reason and it's not close.
But them doing anything other than stepping on the rest of our necks gives
everybody else an opportunity to grow.
And you're going to start to see this democratize a little bit through other
companies who are coming into the space with fresh capital and new perspectives.
No, that's great to hear.
And I kind of agree with you.
I think in a lot of ways people were kind of freaking out because of the Tesla news.
And I think, I don't know, I remember there's always something people are
freaking about when it comes to Tesla.
And I think they'll only ever be in trouble if there isn't something good or
bad done by themselves or not that people are freaking out about.
If it just becomes, it's Tesla doing another thing and they're not a news
cycle, then that's probably when Tesla's company needs to be worried because
they're no longer the Apple or the special kind of shiny thing that they have going
for their space.
Right.
they're saying they're hiring some of these people back and they had had the
massive layoffs like a year or two ago and the sales department, no one was like, how
are they ever going to sell cars?
And obviously they survived.
And I kind of think there's, an element where you can have to separate tests and
leave them out from it.
But at the same time, it is just the also element of like, that's kind of the short
-term mindset versus.
I kind of taking the temperature of like one random day and you can do that for
pretty much any industry.
Absolutely.
a really bad temperature or something you take for that day because that was the big
thing that happened that week.
But looking at it long -term, it just seems like there's still so much
potential.
And I do agree with that.
I think maybe it's slowed down some of the EV adoption by car buyers.
But it's so fascinating to me at the same time because so many of the people who are
saying it slowed down 36 months ago would have said, EVs are never going to
get to 10 % and then like 12 to 18 months ago, they're like, I think it's going to
get to like almost 50 % within like a year.
And now they're like, well, it's slowing down.
It's maybe it'll be 30%.
And so it's like, it's still like taking a step back and sure it's slowing down, but
I really do think it's a short -term thing and it still is really interesting and
surprising me just even though people are like kind of taking a step back.
Some of these people have been very conservative and have a lot of industry
experience in the automotive space.
their projections still aren't even I would say more of the doomsday numbers
aren't even as bad as those numbers they used to say or others of a similar mindset
only said a couple of years ago.
And you still look at while there's been some slowing down the Chinese EV market.
I don't think it's like slowing down so much as it's almost what we've seen in the
North American headlines about the EV charging space where it's they're slowing
down almost for consolidation.
Not and some market stuff, but It seems like majority is that is where they are
going and then some and the evs they have for sale in that space are In a lot of
ways light years ahead of what's especially when it comes like you look at
the charging capabilities of some of these and what is even on the market in here or
europe I i'm curious if with like some of the numbers that had been mentioned
because I mean
Some of these Chinese companies are claiming that they have cars now that are
much bigger battery pack wise than like, let's say 100 to 120 kilowatts that can do
anywhere from 300 to, which isn't crazy, but like almost 500 kilowatts charging.
Just sometimes some of these cars are closer to like 75 kilowatt hours.
So it's like crazy.
C numbers that we haven't really ever seen before as far as charge rates.
I'm curious if there's been any, has it, does that.
ever come up in conversations when building a site for like future proofing
or how to look at maybe 200 kilowatts as fast now, but a couple of years ago, 150
kilowatts have been mind blowing and now it's kind of like at best table stakes.
You know, I think you're absolutely right.
A lot of the discussion that we have now with customers is how do I get
infrastructure in now that can be upgraded later?
Right.
And when you talk about the difference in infrastructure, just for context, right,
for a lot of the listeners that may not be in the space every single day.
The difference between what's required for 150 kilowatt charger, which is considered
average these days, and a 400 kilowatt charger is more than double, right, of the
amount of grid connection.
You know, a 400 kilowatt charger is, you know, with the headroom for NEC, you're
looking at 600 amps of power for a single unit.
So if you want 10 of those units on site for any reason, that's six megawatts worth
of power and then some.
The infrastructure to do that is unbelievably cost prohibitive.
So while you do want a future proof where possible, the way you do that is by larger
conduit in the ground so that you can pull more wire when you do get to that stage of
upgrade two, three, four, five years from now.
But I think the vehicle market is a good way to kind of use that as a predictor for
where you need to be in the nearby future.
Most EV charging infrastructure is good for about 10 years of service life before
it needs a refresh or replacement.
And when you look at a vehicle using the Porsche Taycan as an example,
These vehicles aren't charging at 500 kilowatts, 600 kilowatts right now, right?
And when you buy one, I bet you want to keep it for six years.
Of course.
Yes.
Absolutely.
And I don't see that one becoming not relevant from a charge speed, you know,
over the next.
decade, I would be plenty happy to own one now, you know, and I think I've never met
anyone who looked at a Porsche and said, I really don't like the look of that
vehicle.
Never heard it in my entire life.
You know, the pan...
what's funny, I liked it.
Yeah.
Yup.
It was polarized.
biased.
That was the only thing that they ever made.
I was never a big fan of.
But everyone I've talked to has had the chance to really drive one, enjoy one, and
the interior just swears by them.
Tell you what though, you pull up in a Panamera to a restaurant and somehow the
Valley always leaves you out front.
It does.
I'm, and I, I don't mean wrong.
It's still, it's still a nice car.
It's just personal, personal taste.
That was just one I aesthetically, I thought was a bit of a mess.
but I think the Tycon, which was almost like the second take of that style of car,
11 out of 10.
but yeah, I guess that, that, that is kind of interesting.
Like, do you see, well it's sometimes cost prohibitive on the site, the site side.
Have you seen costs and some of this obviously is still kind of like almost a
supply chain from COVID hangover.
Do you see their becoming scale and costs associated with larger charging locations
on the utility side coming down at all?
Or is that still kind of a ways out you think?
Yeah, okay.
think, I don't think we're there right now.
And I think that there are some programs for, you know, Southern California
utilities where you can like Salik Lenniford Edison's rule 21, where they
will pay for all the behind the meter infrastructure.
That's great.
That's well and good.
but when they pay for it, you're sitting in line waiting for them to bring it.
And that could be three years.
It has been three years on many projects that I'm aware of now.
I don't think that we're to the point where we have gotten ahead of the
infrastructure deployment curve just because outside of EV charging, there are
many other industries that are, you know, requiring substantially more power now.
Data centers is a big part of that.
The amount of energy a data center uses is staggering.
you know, and I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert and quote it, but they
require the same infrastructure, the same kinds of switch gear, the same kinds of
transformers, and then some.
So those projects to the utility are very important because they're part of the IOT,
the internet of things, right?
In order to get our communities moving more efficiently and more intelligently,
but they also are a much larger customer of the utility than the donut store and
the DC fast chargers there, right?
So the utility has got to be mindful of its constituents funding and its resources
as to what
provides more revenue for the utility that will then provide them more opportunity to
provide power to everybody.
Right.
No, that's kind of interesting.
Living here in central Oregon, it's the, I'm trying to think of how many we have.
We have Google, Apple, who else?
Facebook.
Surprised, like all of the big tech companies have opened up data centers
about like 20 miles east of here, just due to the cheap power.
And each of them pretty much have had the ability for them to work with Pacific
Power and BPA and just have their own.
And you're totally right.
It's a fascinating dynamic where it's like, they only have.
maybe a couple of locations across the US that need this power.
But the scale of it is so significant that it buys up not only just so much of their
own resources with the utilities, but also the custom lines and power lines and
everything that has to be built to just go to these kind of random locations and the
upgrades associated with it that I get the business case and some of the other pros
of doing that.
But it's like,
the scale is a bunch of, or a few very, very, very large sites versus with what
you're kind of dealing with.
It's like maybe best case, some medium sized cases, but a lot of them.
And I know that's even just a thing that, especially with solar and people who are
trying to do some of these smaller installations, like feeding into the grid,
trying to fight for the bandwidth almost to get on there.
So yeah.
That could be unto itself, its own podcast.
Yeah.
Complaining or trying to discover ways how it can be improved.
Maybe let's put that way to be more positive about it.
But I realized we're also kind of coming up on the top of the hour here of our
conversation.
And I just want to say thank you so much, Lou, for coming back on, hoping to have
you again on soon.
And it's well to me how many.
Things have happened in the last few months since we last spoke.
So I'm sure we'll have you on soon again to talk about hopefully the all good new
things that have changed until next time.
Well, the pleasure has been all mine Chase.
It's awesome to be on Great Connections once again.
I really enjoy the conversation and the breadth of your knowledge on all these
various topics and you let me nerd out a little bit with you for an hour.
So I appreciate the time.
I mean, X -Charge appreciates the time and if you need anything from me, you know
where to find me.
Looking forward to the next one.
You too.
All right, we get it.