Good morning, Grid Connections listeners.
Today we're joined by Bill Ferro the CTO and co-founder of Paren.
Bill brings decades of experience in software and EV innovation, and he's here to share insights into how Paren is revolutionizing EV charging reliability, making EV road
tripping easier, increasing the reliability and transparency of EV infrastructure, and the data connecting all of these systems together.
If the company sounds familiar, you may have seen in the news that Paren recently acquired frequent guests, Loren McDonald's company, EV adoption.
Bill shares with us everything from his early career at IBM, where he worked on transitioning critical systems to becoming an early EV adopter and advocate.
Bill has a wealth of knowledge about the future of electric vehicles and the challenges that come with scaling up charging infrastructure.
In this episode, we'll dive deep into Paren cutting edge API that aims to ensure EV drivers are always routed to a working, reliable charger, taking into account safety
amenities and much more.
You won't want to miss this conversation about what's next in EV technology and how data can accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with at least one other person who you think will appreciate the content as well.
And don't forget to leave us a positive review in our podcast page.
Your feedback helps us grow and bring you more conversations like this.
With that, enjoy.
I'm really excited to be speaking with you about the technology that you guys are offering.
Cause I think it's definitely a much needed service, not just for drivers, but a lot of the people in the space trying to build the front end and, infrastructure and the hardware
and the software side of it.
So I think this is a really great way to bring all these different areas that need improvement together.
But, Bill, guess before we get started first, I guess, could you just share a little bit about yourself and kind of your background and we can kind of then.
dive deep into it from there.
to and thanks Chase for having me on.
And yet recently, as I think you know, Loren McDonald joined our company and it's fantastic, even in the first couple of weeks, just to have him kind of side by side to
chat with every day.
But we can get to that more in a bit.
But yeah, so I started my software career in the Boston area in 1985, really shortly after the first PCs became popular and I had
senior leadership positions at several companies throughout the years, ending up at IBM through an acquisition of a marketing software company I worked at called Unica.
And at IBM, I led the team that successfully transitioned the Federal Reserve Bank's ACH system from this old cobalt-based behemoth to this modern software architecture.
And that's notable for a couple of reasons.
One is that that system was so old and fragile, and I can kind of talk about this now, I couldn't then, but it was actually a national security issue that ended up on the
president's desk.
Not because the talent had retired, but the talent was dying.
And it really became a problem.
We were the third or fourth team that actually tried to attempt this replacement.
I this system is monstrous.
Your paycheck, your parents' Social Security check, all those COVID payments we got, all flow through this system every day.
It moves over $5 trillion a month when I last checked.
So it's the kind of system that if it ever goes down, it's front page news and it has major market implications.
So no pressure at all.
That's kind of how I sort of ended my career at IBM after that went live and after about a year of successfully supporting that.
And then along the way, I developed this hobby in 2012.
That's when I received this postcard in the mail.
And it was from BMW and it said come and drive this all-new electric car for two years closed-end lease it was called the active E and there were only 700 of them that were made
and available in the US and two years unlimited miles be a guinea pig in the EV revolution and I was hooked and I got one and I've been driving EVs ever since so so when I left the
corporate world in after 37 years I
wanted to do something in the EV space to kind of build on my passion and this hobby, but I had absolutely no idea what would be next.
Yeah, I think what's really funny is, mean, not to go down a completely different rabbit hole, but cobalt itself.
mean, what has that been around since the fifties?
I think it's a, is truly an ancient, software and it is funny how dependent a lot of.
Core, American infrastructure and kind of things that people take for granted and assume that have been updated have been running on that for so long.
Yeah, there's a ton of stories.
There's a book in the making, I'm sure, on that project.
was four years of 20-hour days for a long time to making that happen.
And it was actually a great team effort.
It was a project that won awards internally at IBM for me and my team, as well as has had major market implications.
The Fed has been able to expand.
They've been able to add new features and products based on actually having modern software to work with.
Well, I mean that unto itself, like you said, it be its own book, but, that's really interesting.
didn't realize he had been one of the early users of the activity either.
because that's about the time I think it was probably around 2011, maybe 2012 in San Francisco.
I had been hanging out and they, I was actually just watching her down, kind of trying remember where it was, but it was somewhere along the waterfront and.
There were just a bunch of these BMWs and a little Mini Coopers out and there were just some people and I was like, what, what's going on?
And they literally were just letting people just get into the car and do a drive around the city.
And it just seemed like, this is really cool.
This is the, this makes so much sense.
Even though I think the BMW, I think both of them were probably 150 miles range, but,
100 on a good day.
In the Northeast, in the Boston area where I was, I had a 60 mile commute and there were days where I had 55 miles of range.
So we got creative.
Yeah.
Well, like I said, I, what they say, I completely understand that.
think they said a hundred, maybe it was like one 25 and that was in the Bay area.
So you add any temp or anything up or down from there.
And yeah, I'm sure it probably would have been closer to that number easily.
That car was a blast to drive.
I literally got pulled over the first day I got the car.
And it actually was so fast that BMW had to actually bring them in and break them down and fix this spline thing that was part of the rear axle because the force and pressure was so
much on the motor driving the rear axle that it was actually too much for the equipment they built.
It was a test car.
It was made to be driven hard and broken.
Yeah, that bill from the, when I got back after they made that change, it was a $30,000 bill to make that fix in the car.
Of course, I paid nothing, it was, they had to show me what it cost.
That's wild.
No, and I mean, that's that was what was so interesting me at that time.
I was like, Okay, there's definitely room for improvement.
But it was such a fun car to drive.
And so like, this is just going to happen that this because it was based on the one I had driven was the one based on the I guess at the time, I think was called the one series.
And yeah, and it had kind of the bulge in the front.
I mean, it looked like the version of a one series or something.
such a cool looking vehicles like, yeah, this isn't for everyone.
But like, clearly, this is the future and they're going to start selling these and it'll take off and
That'll be the end of it.
And that wasn't it.
had people in traffic jams that would roll down their window and say, well, what is that?
And we'd have a chat as we're inching up to the robot.
Well, so that that's really interesting because yeah, we, had a couple other people on previously who had said they had been test drivers of it.
I believe Tom Malogny was one kind of in the Northeast as well.
And so you drive this, you seem to love it.
even with it's kind of challenges, what, were your thoughts when it kind of came to an end?
Did you expect, there'd be another one I could lease or would be available or something or
We got first dibs on the BMW i3 and Tom Malogny was kind of our East Coast leader.
So we all knew Tom.
I actually saw him a few weeks ago.
it was one of those things where, you
I didn't want an engine and BMW was coming out, I didn't want a gas powered motor, right?
And BMW was coming out with two versions of that i3.
So I actually got an early i3 because I wanted the Bev-only.
It made absolutely more sense to get a Bev-only in the Northeast, but I did it anyways.
And that had about 120 mile range.
But it was, again, an absolute blast to drive.
I took that one on a track near me.
people just kind of lining up to ride with me as I was going around the track just to see what it was like.
So I stuck with that for a bit.
Couldn't afford a Model S at that time.
So I kept up with the BMW line for a bit.
No, those I threes were a lot of fun.
And I think, people understandably would kind of see this little crossover thing and just think, it's kind of a city car, which it was, but at the same time it could still
accelerate pretty, it was quite torquey.
And just with kind of like the wheels and everything on it, it was such a fun little car to drive, especially on some twisty turns.
So you get the I three and obviously now at this point, you're pretty sold on electric vehicles and that whole kind of experience, but
What, what leads you to kind of continue following it and getting into actually maybe not so much a hobby, but now actually wanting to be a part of it and have influence over kind
of electric vehicles success professionally.
Yeah, so like I said, I left IBM after that project was done.
Didn't think there was much more to do there.
And just sort of started with a blank sheet of paper.
And I started doing research on fleet electrification.
It's still a passion of mine.
How are we going to electrify all of the, especially small fleets that are floating around either for...
HVAC and roofing companies and lawn care companies.
That eventually has got to get electrified.
How's that going to work?
During that research in early 2022, when I was studying the EV charging infrastructure at the time, reliability became a big problem.
Twitter was a...
bursting with people saying chargers were broken and they had bad charging experiences.
The network, two years ago, it's come a long way in the last two years.
every two years it makes these incremental leaps.
Two years ago, it was not good.
And there was a nonprofit called Cool the Earth in San Francisco.
And they came out with a report along with a team at UC Berkeley.
They basically went out and tested 600 DC fast chargers.
by hand and said that 25 % didn't work.
And then they released this report.
They didn't expect anything to happen with it, but it blew up and it became something is still actually coded today.
So I've been doing this research on charger reliability.
And so I called Carlene Cullen, who heads School of the Earth.
And we began kind of a year long conversation about, you I asked her the question, what if I, instead of going and manually collecting all your data, what if we could collect that
data automatically and report on an automatic
And along that way is I developed this algorithm for measuring charger reliability in what I consider to be a unique way.
the algorithm has been proven in a couple of different ways.
But that's kind of how I got started.
Once I figured out that the reliability algorithm actually worked, what actually happened is
the Cool the Earth team gave me their data, their manual data.
They put it in a spreadsheet and they gave me their data.
I ran it through my algorithm and it was 92 % accurate, meaning my algorithm found the cases where charging was successful and it found the cases where charging failed.
And so once I knew that algorithm worked, that's when I decided I had something I needed, I wanted to focus on that.
And so this charger reliability thing became
A focus for me, it's different.
It's a driver-focused metric.
It's different from charger uptime, which I consider to be a CPO-focused metric.
And so that's kind of where the data trove that we've built over the last couple of years.
And now under Paren, which is a merger acquisition that we did earlier in the year, we're expanding upon this original idea for charger reliability to work on an API that assists
route planners.
in guiding drivers to not just any EV charger pin on a map, but to a working EV charger pin on a map.
But it also meets their other criteria around pricing amenities and safety and some other data sets that we're adding to the mix.
it's kind of a long answer to kind of the question, but it was just sort of this idea that became something that I was able to validate and then
use that validation to reach out to other folks in the industry and continue on the journey.
No, that's really fascinating.
Cause yeah, you're right.
That Berkeley study is one that's been quoted by all sorts of different kinds of outlets about the effectiveness of chargers.
But I think what's really interesting is especially someone like yourself who's been driving an EV since around 2012.
mean, I feel like there's been so many different waves of like charger and charge reliability.
mean, back then it was great to find like 2012 through 2015, even just like find a level two charger.
So, my God, there's a charger here.
And that was even seen as like such a great thing.
And then I feel like pretty quickly after that, you started seeing this wave of even just simple level two chargers, just failing pretty consistently.
And then there would be a wave of like the blink chargers of the world that got acquired and kind of went away and became something else.
And then it was really like you were talking about a few years ago, we have this there'd been Tesla, but then there really was the electrify Americas and this kind of second big
wave.
But I guess first of the DC fast chargers, and then those start going to the ground finally.
And then you started seeing, unfortunately,
those failing as well.
I, I think unfortunately, so much of the discussion, like you're saying is really around the CPO side of it, which kind of makes sense logically, because they're the ones that are
responsible for a lot of these.
But at the end of the day, now that especially like Nevi funding and all this stuff, it's really about what's the driver experience.
And so many of these times you see kind of in the data, or what I guess maybe the data that's presented to us by ChargePoint operators that
They're having so many successful charging experiences.
Everyone's driving.
There's no issues, but then it's an EV driver or you really don't have to go too far to say like, well, that's not exactly what I'd consider a success or just because the station
was up.
It doesn't mean all the ports and everything else were, delivering the experience that you would want for someone who's either an EV driver, especially if someone's new, like coming
from a gas vehicle.
So for sure, for sure.
Even in a perfect market.
And you can use, on the East Coast, you can use the last month worth of storms as an example.
West Coast, you've got fires, right?
But with the hurricane that came through last week in Florida, Electrify America did a decent job of notifying folks which of their stations were offline.
No problem with that.
You're not going to survive a hurricane on day one.
But then they did a decent job of showing you when the stations came back online.
I'm not sure that other...
CPOs were doing the same thing, but again, that's just one piece of the puzzle.
I've been driving down the street on a road trip and in my Tesla, and the Tesla pops up a message that says, your destination charger is offline.
I assumed it was a power outage or something.
It rerouted me to another place, which was fantastic.
Right.
Tesla can do that because they have a closed loop system.
They could do that yesterday.
Today, it becomes a lot harder now that their network is open up, and they don't know actually who's coming to the stations.
And so they can't really control the experience the way they could up until last year.
So there's a need for this sort of neutral central API capability that can feed all the route planning groups in the country to let them know that
charging stations are working or not.
Accidents happen.
The devastation, unfortunately, that happened in the mountains where I live in North Carolina is, it's gonna be years before some of those stations come back online because
the roads and infrastructure are just gone.
Is there any, I mean, it, since you brought up, I'm just kind of curious with the recent hurricane, obviously in your area, but just with the ones we've seen kind of just all
along the East coast, back to back there, were there any interesting like trends or things that kind of stood out to you from your team that maybe you were seeing that you're able
to share about?
I mean, I think that's a great example of like electrify America and Tesla being the ones that are usually pretty good at trying to communicate and being able to kind of get back
up in time.
And obviously let's just say it.
There's a lot of gas stations that were also down.
this isn't just a electric vehicle problem, but yeah, I'm curious if there's any other kinds of things that maybe you saw that stood out to you and the team.
A couple of things.
I mentioned Electify America being very proactive.
I thought that was good.
I think everybody should be doing that.
I was curious.
So I have family that lives in southern Georgia, and they were impacted by the first hurricane and lost power for a while.
And so I know there's a supercharger down in that area.
So I was kind of following it to see how long it was going to be offline for and whether...
my sister who lives about a mile away, was she going to get power first or were they?
And so it became a little game, right?
And of course the supercharger got power first, but it's in the industrial area, so it makes the most sense.
But you could tell that there was a focus on getting the infrastructure back up.
And even in North Carolina, similarly, there were some posts that were done on the state of charging in the mountain region, well as posts on LinkedIn, as well as some of the data
that we were tracking.
Most charging stations, most of them came back online relatively quickly.
So I was surprised at that.
I was expecting that some of them would be down for a longer period of time.
Well, that's great to hear.
guess, obviously again, that through your API, and I know that's something you wanted to talk about today.
And I think something that would be, definitely interesting to talk to you about, especially in that comparison to how Tesla leverages their kind of information messaging.
It seems like there's so much potential with what you guys are working on, but yeah, let's, let's, let's just start and kind of talk with about, Paren API and what, are some
of the things that your team's really excited about with this new launch.
So we're excited about bringing that capability, that Tesla capability to the rest of the market.
And I would argue as well that Tesla is already potentially having the problem.
Now it's only going to get bigger.
They obviously are the best when it comes to reliability.
A lot of it has to do with just the pure number of stations that they have and stalls that they have at those stations.
they also do a very good job of maintaining and keeping them active.
But they are losing the grip on who is coming to their charging stations and when are they going to be there, right?
So.
anybody on a road trip, you've got two Fords, two Rivians, and six Teslas all headed for that same supercharger.
Tesla would have rerouted some of them in the past, and now they won't.
So it's as much about availability as it is about reliability as well.
And stuff happens, right?
Power outages happen in the middle of road trips.
It can't be stopped.
And it doesn't happen to just superchargers.
It happens on an IV network.
We've seen, especially in the West, we've seen cable cutting being an issue.
Again, it's not the CPO's fault necessarily that the cables are being cut.
But if I'm on a road trip and I'm heading to that thing and somebody comes out with some wire cutters 30 minutes before I get there, I'm on the road.
I've already got that mapped into my navigation.
How do I actually, now what do I do?
I'm going to bring up PlugShare.
on my phone while I'm driving and I'm looking at my phone and unless I've got Blue Cruise or whatever other feature is out there that's self-driving or helping to drive, then it's
dangerous.
So we want to feed that data into the route planning, into the routing applications that are already in the vehicle and guide folks in the way that Tesla was able to in the past,
guide folks to working charging stations.
That's really interesting.
no, continue.
Yeah.
sort of a switch in Loren and I were having this conversation recently, which is when he goes on his road trips in California, he bases his charging on what he feels like eating,
right?
And so you can do that in California because of the density.
You can't do that in most of the rest of the country.
And so, but we feel that over time that is also going to change.
So being able to route based on other preferences.
whether it's pricing.
I'm cheap.
I want to go to the cheapest price option that I have in charging.
My wife might care more about safety.
So we bring all this data together.
Now you've got options as a route planner to say, me pull in whoever's driving, let me pull in their options.
Maybe they're a...
name any food places, maybe they want fast food versus sit-down dining, and they can base their route options on that and potentially reroute, right?
So if the stations are busy when they're going to be there or on their way there or if something happens when they go down.
Yeah, I think that makes so much sense.
mean, one of the things that I kind of talk about a lot on this podcast is for, and this is true of any technology, but for a new technology to kind of supplant the existing way,
it doesn't have to be just as good.
It has to be better.
And I think with gas stations, we're kind of spoiled with just choice and options for the most part, we can just kind of go wherever without too much of a hassle.
And then obviously swipe a card and it works.
And then we fill it with gas pretty quickly.
And I think one of the really cool things, obviously kind of in that whole experience, especially on the Tesla side, and now you're seeing this with more odd makers, you kind of
that plug and charge, you just can't plug it in, walk away, don't have to think about it.
But the bigger thing is kind of moving from, I need gas.
I'll just go to a gas station versus like being more proactive about it on your road trip.
Or like you're talking about like being routed to a supercharger.
mean, I've used that all the time where I can now see how many people are at a supercharging station on my way there.
And how many it says are going that way.
And while, yeah, you're right.
That's really just pulling, Tesla's that are going to that one.
And that's obviously changing, but being able to give that experience for more EV drivers, let alone, let's say I'm in my Tesla now, Tesla's able to kind of pull that information to
say, Hey, now that there's not just seven Tesla's going, there's actually seven Tesla's and eight non-Tesla's and it's a eight stall station.
Maybe you should keep going.
And
That really creates that better experience for everyone.
So I've had, I mean, and the other thing, I think there's a lot of talk about like waiting in lines for EVs and yes, that does happen.
That's really unfortunate, having this kind of technology and data while you're driving really makes it a lot easier to avoid those things.
And I was able to do something similar, over the recent, guess it wasn't that recent, but over Labor Day weekend, I was trying, I was driving a few hours and saw one of the ones I
planned to was just load it.
So I went to the next one.
And was able to kind of dodge all of this weight.
And at the same time in my gas car, I think it's interesting you bring up the cost part of it too, because I would go to Costco and that was the cheapest.
And I never really complained about waiting 20 minutes in this massive line to even just get gas.
And now you can kind of actively find a cheaper one or quicker one, or try and do both with this present to the driver, which I think such a great opportunity.
And we envision sort of in the future, I envision when I pull up to the stoplight in my neighborhood, right?
And I look left and I look right and I see two different gas stations.
And I see the prices on the sign.
I'm envisioning that.
And we see this in Europe already that you're going to see some kilowatt price.
Hopefully it's still under a dollar.
you'd be able to kind of look left or right based on both utilization, is it busy, as well as price.
And so that kind of thing is coming in the future.
We're nowhere near there yet, but that's kind of the vision that we have about ways to use this data.
again, it's not just for...
know, casual drivers going on road trips, we see the same for fleets, right?
You look at ride shares.
And I think Uber recently was talking about how they, you know, they have technology that will potentially not give an EV driver an option to take a ride because they know their
state of charge and they know they can't make it there without stopping the charge or make it back, right?
So if we can add
capability to that kind of route planning that basically says, you can drop off that person at the airport and then turn around and go and charge two miles away at this
station because it's not busy at that time and it has good reliability, then that's an option for them to potentially give more options for ride share drivers.
Well, I hope that information's also available to ride share writers.
I bring that up because I, I guess that's a little antidote.
A couple of months ago, I was a speaker at the electrify expo in San Francisco.
So I get off the airplane.
It was kind of in the evening and I decided to go with Uber and I choose the Uber green option.
like, I'll just see what there is.
I get in, the guy was really nice, but I get in the car, we drive and he's like, Hey, can I stop and charge?
you
And as an EV driver, kind of like understood that, but I was also kind of like surprised as an Uber rider.
That's really not a great experience.
And then I, I look on his screen and he has 5 % on his battery and it says we'd get to the hotel with 2 % and part of me was just like, no, I just want to go to my hotel.
But I decided to just say, yeah, sure.
Why not?
Cause I just thought it was such a surreal experience.
And of course I was texting my wives.
You won't believe what's happening to me right now.
but no, that, that, that's great to hear.
And that's kind of the thing that.
especially if you are a newber or electric company, you want to create that premium experience and kind of avoid those issues proactively.
So with kind of what your team's working on and like how you're looking to, I mean, can you share with what the company's kind of looking to expand into, even maybe what your
company is looking for right now to kind of help grow.
Well, the growth is, well, it's around a couple of different areas, right?
We think we're, we know that data is helping the market and we have, especially with the acquisition of EV adoption, we have a ton of data that really covers what I would say is
the full life cycle from RFP, from an idea, right?
From an RFP through the build out, through, you know,
essentially post-deployment utilization and reliability.
So it's kind of this loop that we've created.
And we see data being a really important factor into the growth in EP charging.
So the kind of thing that we're looking to do is expand upon our data sets as well as expand upon our customers using that data while we build out the APIs and add to those
data sets so that we can improve the driving experience.
But we know that I think some of the growth that we've seen in EV charging, there's stations now that are at or approaching profitability because they were cited well.
And why were they cited?
Well, really good data was used to cite them.
so that raises up the profitability, which raises up everyone's hopes that, we can build up these systems and make money off of them.
And so it takes data to do that.
And I really think that that's one of the key things that's been helping here.
And we were talking earlier about there's range anxiety.
There was range anxiety, I would say.
And now there's charger anxiety.
And I would say the OEMs have built
better cars to help eliminate range anxiety.
It's not completely out of the picture.
There are use cases that don't work.
But they've done a fantastic job both with new vehicles and improvements on existing ones.
We want to eliminate that charger anxiety.
So that's kind of the tool set that we're building out.
that's any fleet routing application.
And there are our
dozens of them out there that are looking to improve that experience.
So those are the kinds of folks that we're either talking to or looking to talk to, but how we can improve their driver experience.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of really cool and that's part of the reason I'm so excited to talk with you guys today.
But I think what's really interesting is
I think the way your team is going about it is definitely probably one of the more advanced ones, but there are others that have kind been the space approaching the data and
charge of reliability.
But what's really interesting, I think that you're providing is now with kind of the API side of it too.
It's kind of the full life cycle.
So you have a really good understanding of what makes really effective sites to put the chargers at to hopefully increase that uptime to increase that profitability.
So they stay open and they stay reliable.
but then also kind of working on, I'm sorry.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And then you have the charge point operator.
So there's kind of the charge point operator side for the hardware, the planning, and then also the software to making sure that they stay reliable and they have kind of accurate
planning looking forward.
but then there's also the driver's side and having that kind of information when it comes to what their experiences going on in EV road trip and kind of planning what that's like.
I'm curious, talking about kind of site planning, are there any interesting trends?
mean, I feel like probably the obvious ones would be for ones that are effective are on interstates really close to, the highway or something.
So they have, they're easy and active for drivers to kind of get off and on the highway and have probably a higher usage than having to drive further off the interstate.
But I'm just kind of curious if there's anything that your team has noticed that you can kind of share of what makes an effective.
site for fast charging.
Yeah, there's certainly having them placed in the Neve corridors of well populated areas is going to instantly make for a good charging experience, right?
And a decent station to own and operate.
There's more than that though, because there's been a lot of chat recently about just the effect of
ride share drivers on the overall charging aspect.
EVgo has said 25 % of their charges are now from ride share drivers.
So the ride share drivers don't need the stations in the highways, in the highway corridors.
They need them in generally either where they live or generally where they're driving a lot around.
typically, that's
in the outskirts of cities or inside the cities.
And so we did a couple of things, studies recently.
One is we were looking at Texas and we saw the utilization rate in the state of Texas went up.
And so we narrowed it down to three of four, four well-placed EV charging stations that like...
immediately went from zero to 60.
They just went, they just became really busy, really fast, and they rose the whole state from a usability standard, reliability and usability standpoint.
And they were well placed around the outskirts of Dallas, the outskirts of, I think Houston, San Antonio, and I think Houston may have had too.
So.
And that, believe, those were data-based deployments.
Put them where you know they're going to be.
And those stations are in use.
They're not in use 24 hours a day, all the time.
But if you go there at 2 3 o'clock in the morning, they're very heavily used.
And just like there very heavily used stations in LA and San Francisco areas, where, of course, EV rideshare drivers are more popular.
But as that becomes an avenue for building more profitable stations.
I think there was something recently with, what's it, Revel in New York is opening up one of their stations to ride share drivers.
And so it just makes sense to put them where the drivers are going to be.
Yeah, that's kind of an interesting topic around ride share drivers who use EVs too, because one of the things obviously there's kind of some news and media about it in the
past winter where it turned out a lot of these stations are kind of being overrun work.
Just mostly a lot of the time it was kind of ride share drivers using the stations.
But one of the things I've kind of proposed is you look at actually combustion vehicles.
And for a lot of large fleet operators and stuff, there are, there's kind of like, what is it?
A Pacific gas or the, there are commercial specific, gas station operators.
whether you're anything from a police car to a taxi to even, a large semi would pull into this specifically refuel versus like using one of the gas stations that, most regular
people would use.
And I'm, kind of curious.
you, it to me, it seems like there's a pretty large business opportunity for you guys at least to go to the Ubers of the world and these other kind of commercial companies that
would have these fleet needs and kind of propose a commercial specific charging station charging station location.
It sounds like maybe that is already happening like with this case in Texas, but I'm curious if that's something that you're seeing more of.
It's not something that we're necessarily seeing more of, but there are definitely some ideas that we've had in this space, right?
And certainly if the public charging infrastructure is overused to the point where your business can't be satisfied, then it may make sense to put private infrastructure in
place.
There's one location in San Francisco.
It's near the Transamerica Tower, and I've got that right.
And it's a Waymo charging station.
It's interesting because there are, think, eight chargers behind the fence and three chargers, three or four chargers in front of the fence.
And behind the fence is for the self-driving vehicles to drive up and charge.
And in front of the fence is for the public.
And it's interesting because a couple of things.
One is there's a human there at all times.
So it's the human feeding the machines because somebody has to currently plug them in.
They don't have wireless charging.
They don't have auto plug-in devices.
So we were chatting with that guy recently.
It was interesting to learn what his job is.
It's both security to prevent people from going beyond, but they have a dedicated private space for their EV self-driving vehicles to charge.
That makes sense in their cases.
And it may make sense in our city as well.
for a lot of these rideshare companies to set up shop, something similar to that.
If they're using them already, rely on them to help pay for the infrastructure.
So I think that kind of idea is going to become more and more, but again, it's more infrastructure.
Finding a place to do this becomes challenging.
Well, I think, I mean, the whole conversation around autonomy, obviously, Tesla just had their big thing recently.
But yeah, it does seem like there's so much opportunity.
And then the charging needs of what that looks like and where that would be is a whole different experience and kind of commercial layout.
I guess to maybe keep it focused more on drivers right now.
What, do you think are some of the things that you're most excited by with kind of what you guys are working on right now that you think it sounds like a big part is reliability,
but I'm just kind of curious to hear what are some of the things you're most excited that your technology will kind of help improve for the average EV driver that might be
listening to this today.
Yeah, so I think that our mission is to further accelerate the adoption of EVs.
So that's kind of our guiding path.
What can we do to make sure that happens?
And when you look at EV sales growth, and regardless of the media spin, there's a great EV sales growth story going on right now.
And with that, you're seeing
sort of used EVs go down market, and then you're seeing the next set of owners coming up the adoption curve, right?
So, you know, we're seeing where, you know, I would say initially, you know, the EVs were driven by, you know, fanboys and early adopter geeks like me, right?
And we're moving into sort of, know, everywhere from the soccer mom to the retired pickleball player, who's a real guy who I know just showed up to pickleball with a new
blazer, EV, and everyone in between.
And we just have to make that whole process easier.
the good part that I'm seeing is we're moving up that adoption curve.
are getting EV drivers who don't, who wouldn't have bought an EV two or three years ago, or, when they purchased their last vehicle.
doing, now it's an option for them.
And I think the opportunity there is how do we then improve that process?
How do we improve for them the acquisition process, the learning curve that they have to go through, and then when they first embark on that first road trip, how would they know
where to charge and when to charge?
So a lot of that comes from education, a lot that comes from sharing, as much as you
stopping people on the pickleball court or starting, you know, having the chat with them at the dealership or at, you know, when they're out public charging.
So I think that to me is one of the most interesting things is to see the change in demographics of the people that are driving EVs today and, you know, the continued growth
story, both as a percentage of, you know, just as the EV, just in raw numbers, as well as just the percentage of vehicles being sold.
Yeah, and I think that that is a story that has got a lot of media hype that Kind of EV sales have slowed down but in reality they're still growing and I think the bigger story
that's been really fascinating that hasn't been kind of told is just the surprise and how much the Overall automotive market is actually shrinking this year It was expected to not
be a great year and it's turned out to actually be an even worse year than expected and so that the EV portion of it's still even growing and
It is actually a pretty impressive thing to see because of how the large automotive market, how poorly they're doing this year.
I'm kind of curious with that.
We've been talking about like for the person who has the EV, are there things that you're already seeing as far as potential for like in dealerships or other kinds of things that
OEMs could leverage with what you're kind of seeing and trends to actually make it easier for someone or to kind of help convince those
Not necessarily skeptical, but maybe curious about EVs as to what, I mean, I think the probably most famous quote or kind of, data point that everyone always refers to is like
80 % of drives are 40 miles or less a day.
and I'm sure that's probably what you're seeing more of already, but if there's any other kind of things like that, that, you think would help get people who are curious about EVs
across the line to see how easy it is to kind of get into one.
I think one thing that happened just yesterday, actually, is we study data on a new data comes in on a regular basis and new things happen.
So we noticed yesterday that Ford Charge put
did a data dump of all their chargers into the government's AFTC database.
And that's really one of the places that we go to get some information.
And so in addition to seeing that, they've been around for a bit.
If you look on PlugShare, you'll see some posts of folks charging in September or even as early as August and July at some of these stations.
But they just did a data dump and put in 121, 141 charging stations.
So to me, having
that experience at the dealership can help to sell the car because you can literally just now have the customer walk over and have their first fast charging experience right at the
dealership.
And I think that's a phenomenal thing.
Now, if we can just get the dealers to stop parking their ICE cars in those parking spots, that would be great.
But talk about
finding the best location.
But to me, having that experience, not, what we see a lot is these little 24 kilowatt chargers that end up in the back corner.
And technically they're a fast charger, but they don't count.
Or they're small 50 kilowatt system, so there's one of them, right?
To actually have two or four, or I think a couple of many of them are six charging plugs available to folks at the dealership.
I think is a game changer.
kudos to Ford to rolling out that network and making that happen.
I think that's going to help sell folks on EVs because they don't understand the new way of charge, the new way of fueling rather.
I know you've had Matt Teske on the podcast before.
He's a big promoter, big fan of the work that he's doing in trying to promote how to make the change from one fueling system to another.
And to be able to show them, I think is fantastic.
Yeah, that's a really good point about just even if they don't plug into it just to know.
Sometimes I think a lot of people forget that it's such a new space for most people, especially for the ones that are kind of coming to this that are like you said, the later
adopters in the buying curve that sometimes they don't even know what the charge of DC fast charging looks like or the difference between a level two or a fast charger.
And so having that kind of example.
to see not only in person, actually be able to use if they need to is a pretty big thing to have kind of in that full ecosystem of getting into an EV and experiencing it.
I'm kind of curious with what you're seeing.
I mean, it's funny you mentioned those kind of like in between, I don't know, anything you're right from like 25, really anything, a hundred kilowatts DC or so under a hundred
kilowatts DC.
I feel like whenever I've had to use those, those are usually the most unreliable.
They're the biggest pain in the butt to get started if they do even work.
And it really is the ones that I would say kind of create the most unpleasant charging experience as an EV driver.
And I can obviously share my antidote, but I'm kind of curious if there's any things that you've been seeing with that size charger on your side, if they are the most unreliable or
it, cause it does seem like it's a sadly self-fulfilling, issue when now that we have a lot more higher fast charging things that if you can go to one, if you have to drive
another five to 10 minutes for 150 kilowatts or more, you're probably going to go buy that.
And it's really only in extreme cases when you're a remote error, which is usually why I've had to use them, that you get to these smaller ones that have kind of been left
alone.
And so I'm just kind of curious if there's anything around that, that you're seeing, or I can agree with.
look at those as opportunity charging.
You could put an L2 in or you could put, if you have enough power, you could potentially put a 50 kilowatt system in or a 125 kilowatt system that's hard wired to be 60 kilowatts
on each side or 62 and a half kilowatts on each side.
So there's options there.
Obviously, it's cheaper to do that.
The hardware is cheaper.
But in the long run, is it the right thing to do?
Well, the answer is it depends.
So Shell recently bought the Volta network.
So the Volta charging network is primarily a bunch of, I think they're 55-inch TV screens mounted vertically inside of a charging station that are an ad ploy.
And where are they located mostly?
Outside of grocery stores or outside of shopping centers.
it's having a convenience charge at 50 kilowatts is actually better than having a level two charge, because you're likely, for me at the grocery store, I would rather have that
because I'm only in the grocery store for 20 minutes.
I've got my list and then I'm out.
And so if I want an opportunity to charge on a level two, like my Whole Foods used to have one, they took them out, but it was really...
It was nice, but it was useless.
I got nothing out of that for those 20 minutes of charge.
Now, at a 50 kilowatt makes a lot more sense, right?
It's not something I'm going to charge some 100 % at, but it's something I'm going to opportunity charge.
So I think there's room for all of this equipment in various areas where it makes sense.
Well, it's interesting.
You can bring up the Volta ones because yeah, I think what's unique about, maybe not unique about them, but one of the things that they have fleet focused on was, they're not
going to be always the fastest chargers, but they're in high visibility and, high usage or high travel there is.
So that's kind of led to them being high usage.
And I completely agree with you.
That makes a lot of sense, especially when you're kind of working on that anywhere from 15 to maybe 45 minute range at the most for like, shopping.
And I think, that's spot on.
it's just generally like when you go, at least in my experience, I'm like on my way to a national park or something that's a lot more in a more of a remote area.
And so you don't always have that kind of consistent, usage.
And so it's more infrequent and kind of leads to that, but no, I, I completely agree with you.
Those are kind of the perfect use cases.
And I think have a really sec, a large secondary benefit, which is once again, it's in front of people, people are walking by it.
They're seeing it that these things are out there.
They exist.
And so it has a really positive impact in addition to just being a high usage.
And again, think experience kind of over time has led site hosts to understand now, and hopefully sales teams, selling the equipment to understand now the better solution, right?
Putting an L2 outside of that Whole Foods was not the best solution.
But putting an L2, and Vivian's done this quite a bit, right?
Putting an L2 at a trailhead, where you're to hiking a trail.
be there for probably an hour or two at least.
Yeah.
makes absolute perfect sense, right?
And so let's put the equipment for the job rather than just sell it, right?
So the government recently had this thing about a year ago that they called the RAA.
I forget exactly what it stood for.
But it was basically giving a billion dollars or more to folks to fix existing charging stations that were listed as temporarily unavailable.
So you're basically paying people to go fix the problems that they created in the first place, paying companies who sold the equipment, never maintained it, to go fix and replace
the chargers in the first place.
I have continued to have a lot of problems with that program, but they've got a plan, they're rolling it out, and we'll see what comes of it.
yeah, think putting the right...
Having the right tool for the job is just as important.
Yeah.
And I, I, I completely agree with you on that.
It's, one of the other things, unfortunately, especially when Tom, I think he's that I bring up a lot is the, old saying of the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
And I kind of feel like that exactly is another kind of example of that, but I, I realize we're kind of coming up a little bit on the end of our time here.
So one of the things I did want to ask you about that, kind of indirectly related with what you work on is you're in North Carolina and it seems like there's so many different.
EV, even, like we were telling before we started here, there's a lot of electric bus, there's an electric bus company there, but there's Alpetronic.
There's a lot of other electric vehicle infrastructure things in the region.
So I'm just kind of curious as to what you think has made North Carolina and just kind of that area is such a big hub for them.
and any other things that you might want to share and why you're so excited about it as well.
Yeah, so I moved down here about a over six years ago now, I think, as part of this IBM team that was trying to help the Federal Reserve Bank.
And what I found here is over the last six years is there is a growing community of understanding around how EVs work and infrastructure.
But really, think more broadly, the state has friendly business rules.
The state government has really
really good climate policies.
The climate itself is temperate, you know, it's not Florida.
We thought we were hurricane proof up until about a few weeks ago, but
Well, I was laughing that not to cut you off there, but because I have very low tolerance for humidity.
And unfortunately, like, yeah, I've been to Florida.
I love Florida, but way too humid for me.
then to kind of hear the comparisons like, yeah, that that part's still too humid for me.
But it's it seems like such a beautiful area.
I've always wanted to visit more.
Yes, yes.
yeah, but you can always, like 10 months out of the year, you cut the humidity with a knife there.
So I think that temperate climate, I think also there's great public and private universities, both in the Raleigh area.
Charlotte draws from Clemson, which is to the south in South Carolina, which is Columbia, which is not far away.
So there's just this atmosphere, right, that reminds me a lot of the kind of the early days in the 80s and 90s in Boston.
And there's just this atmosphere of companies coming here because the talent's here to be able to build out the kind of companies that make sense.
And yeah, you mentioned a couple, right?
So, ChemPower and Alpatronic are here from the charging hardware side.
Toyota's making batteries in the northern part of the state.
Vinfast is building car manufacturing.
I'm not sure where they are in that process.
So there's big companies that the state touts every time they bring this out.
But there's a lot of small companies too.
The one I bring up is actually in my hometown, which is a company called Atom Power.
Atom Power makes these digital circuits that they were trying to find a really good use case for these digital circuits.
And essentially,
they can control them at the nanosecond level.
And they found that level two charging, especially level two, like apartment level, parking lot level charging, was a great way to leverage their capabilities, their
technology for getting EV charging, again, right place, right time, without as much of an expense cost from bringing in new power.
They can really work with the power that's already there and share it intelligently and quickly across the work there.
And then you mentioned, of course, my favorite, which is my favorite topic out of all of these.
And I have nothing to do with it other than it's just one of my pet peeves that every school bus in America ought to be electric.
And so Thomas built buses.
You probably rode in one.
I rode in one when I went to grammar school and high school, a Thomas bus.
And they're now building EVs.
They're up in High Point, North Carolina.
They're building these EV buses, which is, in my view of the world,
you should not be able to buy a gas powered or diesel powered bus unless you have been able to provide a valid reason.
By default, all bus purchases ought to be electric and we need to be doing whatever we can to support that effort.
That's my soapbox.
Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of really good data showing out as to, especially with kids, kind of the health reasons why to do it alone.
but it's also been really interesting because that seems to be where a lot of the, there's been so much kind of hype and talk around like V2G, but that seems to be where actually
there's been the most interesting and like actual pilots and stuff actually happening with the implementation of it is with electric buses.
And of course the use case of it, they're not usually being used too much in the summer.
And so the need for that really well aligns.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, Bill, I want to say thank you for coming on today.
This has been really fascinating.
I hope to have you get on soon.
But I guess just for anyone listening, what's kind of the best way for people to follow up with you and kind of learn more about Perrin and some of the stuff that you're working on.
Yeah, so again, thanks for having me.
I've had a blast here this morning.
You can follow us on LinkedIn.
You'll find Paren on LinkedIn.
You can follow Loren McDonald.
If you don't already, you should.
You can follow me on LinkedIn as well.
And you can visit us on paren.app.
today on our website, which is paren.app,
We actually have a bunch of interesting data that we post on a weekly basis and update around EV charging infrastructure and growth in utilization and reliability across the US.
so we're going to be building on that site both from a paid perspective as well as a free perspective to give away some of the data that we have just to entice folks to dig deeper
as well as to share what we have with.
with folks like yourselves, with journalists and other folks that we talk to on regular basis.
Well, thank you so much, Bill.
And we'll be sure to have a lot of that in today's show notes.
So anyone that does have questions or wants to check that out, they can just kind of tap onto and go straight there.
But thank you again, Bill.
And we'll have you back on soon.
All right, thank you.
Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Grid Connections.
We hope you enjoyed our conversation with Bill Ferro, CTO and co-founder of Paren and gained valuable insights into how Paren is tackling the challenges of EV charging
reliability and transparency with making these systems more accessible to everyone.
Bill's deep experience in both the software world and the EV industry highlights the critical role data plays in shaping the future of electric vehicle infrastructure.
If you found this episode informative,
Be sure to share with someone who might enjoy it as well and leave us a positive review on our podcast page.
Your support helps us continue to bring you these important discussions to the forefront.
Thanks again for listening and until next week, this is the Grid Connections podcast signing off.