Good morning grid connections listeners.
And for those of you who may be listening for the first time, this is the grid
connections podcast.
This is the show where we unravel the complexities of electric transportation,
renewable energy, and our electrical power grid that ties all of them together.
I'm your host Chase.
And today we have a special guest joining us, Jason Goldfarb.
He's a partner at the law firm, Falcon, Rappaport and Berkman.
I think I already know what you're wondering, because usually we're speaking
with engineers or maybe people in the automotive or renewable energy industry.
And well, Jason actually is.
He has a very interesting, unique skillset coming from actually the real estate and
the telecom industry.
Believe it or not, this is actually all seriously needed in the electric vehicle
charging infrastructure space.
And today we speak with him about what he's doing to help people who are building
new facilities and charging locations really maximize the potential.
He shares his insights on the latest trends, challenges, and innovation shaping
the future of grid connectivity, including from the integration of renewable energy
sources to the electric vehicle charging landscape.
We'll delve into the critical issues and what can be done to simplify and help
guarantee much more consistent and longer lasting charging hubs.
You can find more details on Jason and his law firm with links in today's show notes
as well.
But before we dive in, we have a special request for our listeners.
If you find this episode or any Grid Connections podcast episode enlightening
and thought provoking, we encourage you to share it with at least one other person
you believe would enjoy and benefit from our conversation.
Together, let's spread the knowledge and foster a community of engaged listeners
passionate about the energy revolution and clean transportation.
So without further ado, this is the Grid Connections podcast with Jason Goldfarb.
Enjoy.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure to be here.
Really appreciate it.
I'm happy to be on the podcast.
So I'll tell you a little bit about my background.
So for almost the last 25 years or so, I've been involved in the real estate
infrastructure space.
I got my start in the wireless telecommunications industry.
And I've been doing that work, whether it relates to things like...
cell phone towers and rooftop installations for the cell phone business.
I've worked for a couple of different companies that also invested in the
infrastructure as well.
So in addition to working in the wireless telecommunication space, I've also had
experience with outdoor advertising, solar, wind, other things like that.
And in terms of getting into the EV charging space, our firm decided not too
long ago and
a push from me, frankly, that the EV infrastructure space might be a good
practice area to try and get into.
I've always been into cars since the day I came out of the womb.
You can tell by the poster I've got going in the background here.
So I've always been really into that.
Always been into real estate.
As an attorney, I've always focused my practice on the transactional
to what you would call the regular infrastructure industry to what's going on
right now in the EV infrastructure industry.
And so making that switch was sort of natural.
Still doing some work on the telecom side of things and with solar and without the
advertising, but the EV infrastructure space is really so much more interesting.
And there are so many opportunities for business, for improvement.
for education and so on and so forth.
So, we decided to go in full speed ahead and to use the non-electric version of
this, but basically we've been firing on all 12 cylinders, going really head first
into this.
Yeah, and I appreciate you kind of sharing that with everyone.
I think what's really interesting is just for more context, we originally connected
on LinkedIn.
That's how I kind of came across you.
And I'd even seen some of your posts and other things, I guess, in just similar
spheres.
But when we started talking, I think what was interesting, and I kind of had already
known this, but didn't really fully appreciate it, was how while the
technology that may be going in the ground is new,
or even not new, just different.
The actual implementation is very similar to things that have already been around,
especially in the real estate space for quite a while.
So could you share a little bit about that and maybe just some of the challenges that
for those who are new to the space might not have been expecting.
Right, so that's totally on point and very insightful.
I mean that in a really good way.
That's something actually that a lot of people do not necessarily pick up on.
So if you were to look back through history with the way that the wireless
telecommunications industry was 20 or 25 years ago, and you would see that the way
things were done then and how things are being done now.
and you would look at the EV infrastructure industry and see the way
that things are being done now and put on your time travel lens and see how things
might look in about 20 or 25 years from now, I bet you you're going to see a ton
of similarities.
So in that respect, I'll give you a couple of examples.
So when the wireless industry first got started,
you had a situation where towers and building installations were pretty much
put just about anywhere where you would find somebody who might be willing to have
that infrastructure on their property.
That's almost about as far as people went with trying to figure out where to put it.
They didn't necessarily have the data and the analytics yet.
They didn't have a massive customer base yet.
But they started to think, oh, it might make sense that in this particular city or
in this particular location, we might need to put equipment down.
And they did that.
And unfortunately, a lot of times when they did that, they did not necessarily do
their homework.
They did not necessarily do their due diligence.
They didn't always pick the most ideal locations for the equipment.
They didn't realize that in some of the places where they chose to put the
equipment, they
that they might run into issues with access or with maintenance.
None of those things kind of like went into the thought process.
And at some point in time, the wireless telecommunications industry really started
to realize not doing these things created some problems.
So I'll give you a hypothetical example.
Hypothetically, if you entered into a contract with somebody that didn't have
the authority to sign the contract,
or let's say you entered into a contract with someone that didn't actually own the
property where you were putting the equipment.
By the way, I'm giving you real world examples.
you say the way you said hypothetical.
I kind of feel like you're saying how they say in the old like cop shows the names
have been changed to protect the innocent or what?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
names.
Yeah, we're definitely not going to do that.
But so if you didn't do those things, or I'll give you another example.
Let's say that you didn't do a title search and discover that there might be
some issues with the property where you were going to put the equipment down, or
you didn't get a set of corporate documents from the person who signed the
documents to make sure that they had the authority to sign those documents.
Or I'll give you one other example, or let's say you didn't do a survey to figure
out where your land and where your property is located, because let's just
say that the survey, if you had done it, may have given you an inkling that perhaps
the piece of property you chose for the tower might be legally landlocked.
So leaving aside practical issues as to whether or not you could get a truck in
there for maintenance.
If you were legally landlocked and your neighbors decided that they didn't like
you and decided to put up a fence, how are you getting to your tower?
The answer is you're not.
And what's your recourse?
And the answer is you have not.
So what happened was that the telecommunications industry as a whole
started to realize that we made some mistakes, at least by deploying the
infrastructure that way.
without looking into that stuff.
I am seeing that kind of stuff happen left and right now in the EV infrastructure
industry.
And it's being driven by a whole bunch of things.
I think in terms of not doing the due diligence and not doing the homework
piece, people are cheap and they don't wanna spend the money to do it.
But it's sort of...
similar to not wanting to buy a health insurance policy if you're an otherwise
healthy person.
Because if you're a healthy person, you don't really need health insurance.
What do you need it for?
How often are you gonna get sick?
But when you do get sick, now you have the policy, and you know what happens if you
don't have the insurance policy, now you end up with a bill with hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
So people aren't thinking about it that way until they really need it, and then
they kind of have that light bulb moment and they say, oh boy.
What did we just do here?
I'm starting to see a lot of that and I'm trying to prevent people from doing that.
I'm trying to prevent my clients from making some of those mistakes.
Some of those basic things are really severely lacking and that's part of why
you are seeing so much trouble.
I'll give you another example.
I think another reason why we're running into problems that in terms of...
Let's just say right now, again, hypothetically, we didn't have those
problems that I just mentioned.
Let's just say that they did their homework and so they did a title search
and they did a survey and they asked for the corporate documents and they made sure
everybody had authority to sign everything so you had none of those problems.
But now you have an issue where you put your charging in and now it needs to be
maintained or it breaks and you don't have any language in the contract that covers
who is supposed to be responsible for that.
Or if you do have language in the contract that says who's supposed to be responsible
for it, there's no teeth to it.
So there is no incentive to be accountable because nothing bad will happen to you.
The easiest example I can give is that if you're supposed to pay rent by the first
of the month and you don't pay it, what happens?
Unless you have something in the contract that says you're in trouble for not paying
on the first of the month, nothing happens, right?
And if all the contract says is you're bad,
What happens?
Still nothing.
If it says you have to pay it by the fifth, what happens?
You can pay it by the fifth, but there's no penalty if you don't pay it by the
fifth.
Are you going to pay it by the fifth?
Sometimes, but probably not.
Right?
Why do you need to?
So we're starting to see those kinds of problems in some of the contracts also,
where you have language that should be in there that's missing.
It doesn't say who's responsible for maintenance or if it says who's
responsible for maintenance, it doesn't say how quickly they have to roll a truck.
It doesn't say within what time frame that they're obligated to provide spare parts.
It doesn't say what they're supposed to do if people need to get on the phone and
call somebody.
It has none of that stuff in there.
So if the contract is missing some of those things and then let's say you have a
charger in the ground that's broken and it's not being fixed and you have no
number where you're
or even if you have a number where you're supposed to call somebody, there is no
metric or timeframe within which they're supposed to respond.
And then even if there is that timeframe or that metric that you use to determine
when they're supposed to respond, if there's no penalty if they don't respond
in time, then you get the mess that we have.
And so we're starting to see a lot of those things.
So on a positive note, I think...
What started to happen way back when in the wireless industry is they begun to
realize that we need to clean up our contracts because we need to have
appropriate language in there.
We need to have some teeth to some of the penalties.
We need to incentivize accountability.
We have to lay out so that way it's clear for everybody who is responsible for what.
We have to make sure that we do our due diligence and we do our homework.
So that way we make sure that we're putting the assets.
in a safe place to begin with, in addition to all the other stuff that we have to do.
As that stuff starts to happen, the business and the industry starts to mature
and it starts to improve.
If you think about right now, what was your cell phone like 20 or 25 years ago?
We know the answer.
It was a service with Spotty.
You couldn't take...
a lot longer.
That was about the only pro.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, right.
all these apps that were just sucking energy out of the phones.
But the service was spotty, it wasn't so great.
You couldn't go from one network to the other, right?
The equipment kind of worked, didn't always work.
You had frequently, you had outages and you had all sorts of problems.
But right now, you pick up your phone, it works.
You make a phone call, you can talk to somebody across the world, it works.
If you have a problem with it, you know what you do.
You call customer service and for the most part, they're going to be able to solve
your problem.
If they can't solve your problem, what do they do?
They'll send you a new phone.
Now I'm not saying that people should send you a new EV.
That might be a little bit ridiculous, but you get the idea.
There's something built in to deal with some of those issues.
where those things weren't being done.
And when you add in the rush to do the deployment, and when you add in the fact
that there were financial incentives to deploy the infrastructure, but it didn't
come with similar incentives for uptime and maintenance.
you ended up with a situation where chargers were going in the ground where
they didn't really need to go or shouldn't have gone in the first place.
People were paid money just to deploy them.
Then they weren't being used.
And when they're not being used, then they're being ignored.
When they're being ignored, they're being vandalized.
And when they're being vandalized, they don't work.
And because the chargers were in places where nobody is using them and it's
expensive to fix them, the company that put it there doesn't want to spend money
to fix it because why should they?
Why put money into an underperforming?
real estate asset.
If you have a shopping center and the neighborhood isn't so good anymore and
people are not coming into the shopping center and nobody's coming in there and
your tenants are starting to stop paying rent because they can't afford to do it
anymore because business stinks, as a property owner, what are you gonna do with
that piece of property?
You're probably gonna look to unload it, but you're certainly not gonna invest more
money into an underperforming asset.
Right.
So the infrastructure companies are kind of looking at this the same way.
If it's an underperforming asset, we're not going to spend money to fix something
that it's not going to give us a return.
And on top of that, they don't even have an obligation to put money into it anyway.
So when you put all that stuff together, you almost have like a perfect storm.
For sure, and I mean, already this has brought up so many questions and just so
many, yeah, there's so many topics.
So I think even just for people who are listening, let's take it one kind of step
back.
So you've already kind of built a really good foundation to show how similar it is
to the traditional wireless energy industry.
Are there any differences that you could share or anything that you've noticed
about working in this industry that's really stood out to you?
Yeah, I would say some of the stuff that for sure, a major difference is I would
say number one would be the ubiquity.
In the sense that right now, just about every person that you know has a cell
phone, certainly in developed countries.
Who doesn't have a cell phone?
Everybody has a cell phone, right?
So...
In the EV industry, you don't have that right now.
You still have a very small percentage of drivers out there that have switched over
to electric vehicles.
Percentage-wise, it's a much smaller group of the overall, let's say, vehicle
population.
As opposed to right now, every person that needs to communicate essentially has a
cell phone.
Either they have an iPhone or they have an Android.
leaving aside the few others that are left, but they're so small that they're
almost non-existent.
So everybody has one.
So that's certainly something that's very different.
I would say also in terms of the amount of the infrastructure and the size of it is
also very different.
For the most part in the wireless industry, you have very large cell phone
towers where you have...
large installations on top of buildings.
We'll just use that as an example.
If you go, let's say we were to look in the solar business, rooftop installations,
but then massive solar farms.
So the size of the infrastructure, for the most part, it's big and bigger.
There's some smaller examples of that if you do like distributed antenna systems.
You might have just small antennas in a couple of different places.
You might have what they refer to as backhaul, which is generally just an
antenna to just supplementing, but for the most part, they're larger installations.
When you get into the EV business, you're a little bit all over the place.
You might have an individual charger in one place, and that might be the only
thing that anybody put in.
You might have, let's say, a shopping center where you have four or five of
them.
You might have brand new construction, let's say a brand new apartment building
where they're building a building where they want it to be as technically up to
date as possible and they might put in a whole bunch of it.
Or you might have a parking facility or a college campus or something like that
where you might see it on a larger scale or let's say in the fleet industry.
There are some pretty well-known companies that have switched over their fleets or in
the process of switching over their fleets to go all electric.
Probably the two biggest ones that everybody probably knows about or if they
don't know about would be like Domino's Pizza.
Most of their delivery vehicles right now are electric or let's just use Amazon
because they're doing electric vehicles for a lot of their last mile delivery.
So they're doing that on a very large scale.
So you really run the gamut.
in terms of just a little bit of EV charging, all the way up to really fancy
stuff.
And the other thing that you see in the EV industry that's kind of different is that
in terms of charging, you can have an individual charger that could be in
somebody's home, could be what we refer to as a level one.
It doesn't even have to be a level two because you can get away with hours that
it takes to charge overnight.
You don't need anything that sophisticated in your house.
other than something a little bit better than your standard plug, but that's the
easiest visual for people to understand.
We go all the way up to what you would call DCFCs, level three, fast charging,
where they can charge up your Porsche in 15 minutes.
You really need to have very specific infrastructure to be able to handle that.
So we do run the gamut in terms of the type of infrastructure, and the industry
is still at a point in time where what you deploy really needs to match the use case
of where you're putting it.
In the real estate world, what are the three most important things?
It's location, and location.
And you want to make sure that the infrastructure that you're putting in
matches to the use case.
The type of EV infrastructure that you
in a major mobility corridor along the highway is not the same kind of thing that
you might put in your single-family home.
For sure.
But when it comes to the telecom industry, it's pretty consistent in terms of the
stuff that's going in the ground.
There are towers, there are building installations, and that's for the most
part kind of what you see everywhere.
So that's something that's certainly different.
There's a greater variety of the infrastructure and the infrastructure use
cases in the EV industry.
then you might see in something like the wireless telecommunications industry or
what you might see in the solar business or you might see in the outdoor
advertising business.
Outdoor advertising, for the most part you're talking billboards in very dense
neighborhoods.
You're going to be putting in more of them assuming that the laws allow you to do it.
In other places, you might only have a sign up every couple of miles along a
highway,
The type of infrastructure that you're putting in really, really varies in the EV
world, really depending upon the location and really depending upon the use case.
That's certainly something that's different.
Interesting and that does make sense So I appreciate that kind of the context of
where those differences are in the spaces And I think that makes sense to a lot of
the listeners too my next question is can you I mean There's quite a few different
questions out right now, but can you walk through what would be like?
Maybe just a normal deal Like is it at least for ten years yada and I can all
that stuff or?
Yeah, can you?
so many layers to that question, Chase.
Oh my God.
Okay, so the answer is, is that I wouldn't say that there isn't something that you
would consider, that I would consider from my perspective to be a typical deal, in
the sense that we are very much still in the Wild West stage, in the way that
20 plus years ago in the wireless telecom industry, we're in the Wild West stage.
And by that I mean is that when they first started doing that you would see leases,
you would see licenses.
I know we're getting into a little bit of legal terminology but for the listeners,
there is a difference between a lease agreement and a license agreement and
let's just use the example of an easement agreement.
Those are all very different types of legal structures.
So you would kind of see things where that was a little bit all over the place.
What you would also see is all over the place would be payment structures.
Are they paying rent?
I can tell you the one thing that didn't come in the wireless telecom industry, but
if it was out there, I have not seen it yet, is some sort of revenue share.
I guarantee you that if you would go to any one of the...
Let's say you had a tower on your property and you went to the wireless company that
was...
leasing the space for the tower on your property, and you said, I want some kind
of a revenue share from all the customers that are coming through your antennas,
they would look at you like you're crazy.
Now they do some form of revenue share if they sometimes bring in additional
tenants.
So this gets us a little bit into the nitty gritty of this, but just for
purposes of example, if you had a tower company that was leasing the space for the
tower, their business model is to bring
other wireless tenants onto the tower.
So they might pay you, let's say I'll use stupid numbers, they'll pay you $1,000 a
month to put the tower on the ground, but then they in turn might make separate
agreements with three or four different wireless companies who will then put their
equipment on the tower, who will then pay rent to the tower company, not necessarily
to you as the owner.
You as the owner, you're still only getting your $1,000 a month.
You might be able to work out a revenue share with them.
It's kind of like a sublease.
Yeah, interesting.
you might be able to work something out with them, well, oh, if you bring an
additional tenant, you're gonna have to pay me an extra $100 a month.
But the reason why I'm giving you this example is that if you went to the company
and said, I want some revenue in my pocket based on the traffic that you are
generating and the money that you are making from your cell phone customers who
are using that tower, they would look at you like, they would tell you to go pound
sand.
They're not gonna do that with you.
Now, in the EV industry right now, that is one of the more common business models is
some form of revenue sharing for the people that are coming in to use the
charger on your property to charge up.
Whether or not over time that will be a sustainable model, I don't know.
It could be, it could be not.
The one thing that I'm not seeing so much of right now are EV charging companies
paying rent to the property owner for the privilege
putting the charger down on their property.
So not necessarily a revenue share, but hypothetically we'll pay you $100 a month
so we can put your charger here.
And then the infrastructure companies is getting all the money.
So in that same vein, besides seeing those different business and payment structures,
I've seen leases, I've seen licenses, I've seen easement agreements.
all over the place.
I've seen combinations of rent, I've seen combinations of revenue share and there's
a company out there who we will not name doesn't pay any rent.
And their game is that when we put your stuff there, our stuff's really good and
it's going to be great advertising by the way for us too, don't tell anybody, but
also for you and people will see that you have this high quality charging equipment
on your property and we will bring you more customers.
And so by the more customers coming into your shopping center or to your business
or to your parking facility, you will in turn be making more money because they're
gonna be coming when they see our equipment, but they don't pay rent.
So the models are really all over the place and it's really dependent on what
the use case is.
So let's just use the example that I gave you.
In the situation where they're not paying rent,
If you don't have a business where you can in turn make money from the extra volume
of vehicles that are now coming into your property to charge up, are you likely to
accept zero rent as an exchange for signing a lease and giving the company the
privilege of putting their equipment there?
Probably not.
If you're not sure whether or not you're going to consistently make money from more
people coming in.
Might you turn around and go to the infrastructure company and say, I want
some rent or I want some revenue share.
Now, by the way, there are companies that will do that with you.
They might be more apt to haggle and work those things out with you.
But again, it's going to be dependent upon what your use case is.
I'll give you one other just to sort of turn the entire thing on its head.
Let's just say that you're an apartment building and you want to be able to
provide this as an amenity to your tenants.
You might do that.
You may charge your tenants across the board.
Everybody in the building might have to pay a little bit more in monthly
maintenance because you're doing that.
You might decide you only want to charge the people in the building, you'll have
EVs, a little bit of extra money for the privilege of being able to do that.
So you might be comfortable without accepting rent or revenue share from the
infrastructure company because your tenants are gonna say, this is the
greatest building in the world.
I get the charge up here, this is awesome.
and it's really cheap and I love it.
We have great rules and we have no fights over who's using the charging.
So again, you really, you have to look at this.
And I think that my long-winded way of answering this question, Chase, is that
you have to look at this from a whole bunch of different directions.
You have to look at the legal structures to see if it makes sense.
You have to look at the business model to see if it makes sense.
You have to know your tenants and your customers.
to see if it makes sense.
You need to know if there's sufficient volume in the neighborhood where you're
living in order to put the chargers in.
One of my favorite examples of this, and we've all seen it, the picture of the
charger on a road in the middle of nowhere where there's nothing around you except
for mountains.
What's that doing there?
Who's charging up over there?
So you need to know your local market and whether or not it's going to make sense
for you to spend money on putting the infrastructure in a place.
Will people come?
Will people use it?
Will you make money from it?
These are all sorts of questions that people are asking on all sides of the
equation and it's not as simple as, oh this is great, we'll just put a charger in
and people will come.
It's not that simple.
as someone who has done a lot of EV road trips It is really nice when you do find
that random one in the mountains because sometimes that saves your butt but yes, it
doesn't seem like it's a long-term successful business if it's like one
person every few days, but I Think one thing I want to kind of ask you with You
did mention kind of koi that the there is this company that doesn't charge rent Does
this company use?
or yeah, it doesn't pay rent.
Is this company, are you familiar if they use a lot of data to present to these
people as to why they should be doing it to kind of make their use case?
so this is one of the great mysteries to which I am not necessarily privy to just
yet.
I would love to know a little more of exactly how they in fact pitch this.
I can say anecdotally based on stuff that I have seen, I have some idea about how
they're doing their pitch.
They're doing their pitch in a couple of ways.
Part of their pitch is we will bring you more customers.
Whether or not they share that data with you, I suspect not.
That's number one.
Number two, the other thing that they do is that they also promise a very easy
contracts process.
And their contracts are very simple.
I'll use that word.
They're very simple.
And simple can be good, except if you go back to the example that I gave you before
of the person that chose not to get health insurance.
What do you do when there's a problem?
When there's a problem,
You may not have anybody you can call.
For the most part, the equipment always works all the time.
But then sometimes it doesn't.
And then when it doesn't, what's your recourse if it doesn't?
How do you deal with that?
How quickly do they have to roll a truck?
How quickly are they obligated to fix it?
So and so forth.
So those things would be missing.
So it's an easy contract process.
It's an easy sell because you're not gonna need to mark it up.
They probably don't market up very much, if at all, so it's an easy sell.
That becomes one of those other issues, and that is the way in which they're
pitching that.
One of the things, and in fact, I actually have this on a slide that I'm using for a
CLE that I'm going to be doing next month.
One of the things that I try also to explain to people is that unless you as
the property
You are purchasing it for yourself.
And you are independently handling all of the maintenance and all of the upkeep and
everything else.
And essentially the infrastructure company is selling you the equipment and now
you're using it on your property, much like you might use, I don't know, air
conditioning equipment on your property.
Like it's yours, you deal with it.
Yes, we might have the maintenance and a service contract, so we'll come and fix
it, but it basically it's your problem, for the most part, right?
So unless you're doing that, you're not necessarily going to own the data and the
analytics that you are getting from all the people that are coming and using.
Now if you're putting that, let's say, into an apartment building, you pretty
much know who all the people are in your apartment building that are using it.
You might wanna know how often are people using it, who are using it the most often,
how much time are they spending on charging?
Do you have a tenant that is consistently, let's say you have a shared charger that
they're consistently not moving their cars when they're supposed to?
So you might wanna know some of that data and some of those analytics, and some of
that stuff might be shared with you, but it might not be.
And that might be completely dependent on, once again, what is in your contract?
What does it say about whether or not they're going to share that data with you?
How much of that information are they going to provide to you?
So for the most part, you don't get access to the data in general with any of the
infrastructure companies, they're getting it.
And especially for the...
sense.
I was just kind of curious.
I didn't think they would maybe be giving very concrete numbers, but I could say
like, this is what we're seeing average, what we predict may be average traffic and
the average consumer, if they wanted to get really is like of who drives an EV or
buys our products makes X numbers from what we can tell.
I do also have just another follow-up question in this company that we keep
alluding to.
Is this company, I think I know who we're talking about, but is this company also
one that has their own essentially team that goes around fixing these?
Because that has been talking about maintenance, that has been one of the big
issues is there's only a handful of charging companies that actually has their
own teams, most of the time they have to hire it out to local engineers.
Right, so some of them do their own maintenance, some of them are hiring
outside companies to do that.
If you as a property owner are working with any one of these EV infrastructure
companies, you would hope that they're going to provide you with a couple of
things.
You were talking about your point earlier about are there cars in the neighborhood,
will people need it, will they use it, and so on and so forth.
That becomes really relevant if you are making it available to the public.
I would hope that the infrastructure company, as part of their pitch to
convince you to put their charging equipment on your property, is explaining
to you, here's how we came up with why we decided that we think your property is a
good candidate for this.
I suspect in some instances, with some of the less reputable companies, maybe
they're not providing that information, or if they're providing that information,
they're not providing the whole picture, because...
It's not outside the realm of possibilities that some people were
focused more on the sale and the land grab and to get the infrastructure in the
ground somewhere, anywhere, it doesn't matter.
The really good companies, I would hope, are sharing that information as part of
their pitch to convince you that it makes sense for it to go into your property.
By the way, on the flip side of that, if it turns out that your property is not a
good location for this, you would think that they would move on and go to somebody
else.
but I'll leave that out there for the moment.
So that's gonna be part of what goes into that.
One of the things that's really good for the companies that do everything, and
there are companies that do everything, they do the charging, they do the
vehicles, they do the maintenance, they do the upkeep, they do everything, they
really have the ability to have consistent control over it.
And because of that, they also have access to all of the data.
So also when it comes time to figure out where might we need other charging
infrastructure, they probably know better than anybody else on the planet where it
makes sense to put their stuff.
Because not only do they have the cars, but they also have the chargers, they have
the maintenance, they do everything.
They have the data for everything.
They know how quickly, how much time it takes to repair in a particular place,
they know how often you have problems, they know where the cars go.
where they stop, how much time they're in them, so on and so forth.
You can slice it and dice it as many ways as you want, which by the way, is the
exact way in which the telecommunications companies determined where to put their
towers and their infrastructure.
How do they do that?
They know where their customers are.
They know where they need it.
And based on that, they decide where to put it.
What's happened a lot, and this is one of the things where we go back to sort of our
sameness and differences with the industry is that in a lot of instances, a lot of
the early infrastructure was just put wherever.
By the way, not necessarily in a bad way either because you didn't have the data at
the beginning to know where to go.
Now we're so much better at this.
Now we have millions of these cars on the roads.
Now we know where they are.
There are companies beside the EV infrastructure companies, there are
companies that...
specialize in providing this data and making it available to you so you can
figure it out.
If you think that your corner is a good spot for it, there are all sorts of
applications out there that can tell you where the other charges are in the
neighborhood, who owns them, how far away they are, how many people in the vicinity
own EVs, what are the likelihood that people will come and charge up at your
location versus the one that's down the block.
Do you need one at your location?
Is the one that's down the block or the one that's?
in the other direction enough for all the people in the neighborhood and maybe you
don't need to spend the money and to go through the trouble to put it on your
property.
So we have more of that information that's available and I think what will start to
happen is that over time as more of the data becomes accessible, leaving aside the
company that keeps it to themselves, but as more of the data starts to become
accessible, we'll be able to make smarter decisions about where to put the
infrastructure in the first place.
If we make smarter decisions about where to put the infrastructure in the first
place, we will have fewer and fewer situations where it's not working, it's
not being maintained, and we're not going to have the horror stories that we have of
people rolling up the chargers that just don't work for all the reasons we spoke
about before.
Right.
And that makes a lot of sense.
What's interesting is we've had a couple of people on as guests who have kind of
just said, you know what, uh, having the data is great, but it's the actual
building process, the permitting, all this stuff is taking so long.
And there is kind of just, it's just good to get it in the ground.
Cause once you have on the ground, then you can go back and update it later.
Is that you think still a worthy, it sounds like you bring an interesting
opinion and kind of experience with it, but you disagree with that a little bit.
A little bit.
There is certainly something to be said.
If you build it, they will come.
It's one of the greatest movie lines of all time anyway.
I mean, come on, Field of Dreams.
Any boy that's into baseball will know that if you build it, they will come.
So there is something to be said for that.
On the other hand, it does take a lot of time to permit, to make sure that it's
zoned, to get your electricity in.
do the actual construction work, to get all the equipment that you need.
So that stuff does take time.
And I think because it does take time, that goes back to why it is so critical to
do the homework in advance and to make sure that you're putting the equipment in
a place where it makes sense to put it.
So, you know, the example I gave you before of somebody not doing their
homework and not looking at title and a survey and all of that other stuff.
I have a real world example of that where somebody did not do that, put a charger in
somewhere where they were legally landlocked, and once they got legally
landlocked and that fence went up and people could not use their charger, they
had 18 months worth of work that went up and went poof.
You tell me, what do you think would have made more sense?
Build it so they will come?
Yeah, sure.
Get it in the ground.
Get it, and then we'll worry about the problems afterwards.
Or should we have spent a little bit of money and time in looking into this
property and possibly discovering that we were legally landlocked and maybe we
should have gone, I don't know, across the street, down the block, or maybe not in
this vicinity to begin with?
So it does cut both ways.
It does cut both ways.
Well, and I think the way you're approaching it makes a lot of sense.
And I can also see the argument like, OK, maybe due to supply chain, we can't get
everything we want.
But let's just get this location, get the stuff we can, and then come back later and
do it.
But I.
if you've done all your homework to determine that this location is an ideal
place, then it might make sense to wait, but for you to take the time that it needs
to take because when you're done doing all of that, you will have a perfect place
where the charging is needed, where it will be utilized, where it will be used,
and where everybody will consistently...
make money from it.
One other way that I think is helpful to think about this, if I gave you the
example of one company that did not do its homework and just put their chargers down
wherever and grab land and figured we'll deal with the problems afterwards versus a
company that took its time, was methodical about this, actually thought about where
it made sense to put it, did their homework.
discovered that this location is no good.
This location might be great, but the person that wants to sign this contract
with me can't.
So I don't think we're doing anything with him.
We'll go to a neighbor.
And so the company that did that or does that and then puts the infrastructure in
the ground, if you had a choice between investing in that company versus the other
one, where would you put your money?
I know where I would put my money.
All right.
So, God, I've got so many questions for you.
And I'm trying to be respectful of our time here.
But the variable of time is obviously the big one we talk about a lot when it comes
to these installations.
And we've talked about it today.
What do you find?
And maybe it's location and site specific.
But what have you found to be the biggest variables in the implementation process?
And maybe the biggest variables people aren't expecting?
that can kind of trip them up with that.
Yeah, I would say the number one mistake is not doing your due diligence and not
doing your homework.
I know I keep harping on that, but that's just huge.
That just saves you so much time and energy and money in the long run.
And it helps to have a long game focus.
So that is for sure number one.
As a practical matter, what can be the biggest problem?
It could almost be anything.
It could be your zoning process, it could be your permitting process.
It could be working with your local utility company to get it done.
It could be the negotiation of your contract and your service level
agreements.
It could be the sort of thing where, let's say as a business, you decide you're going
to kind of do the a la carte thing and you're going to get your own charges and
do your own service and do your own software and do everything because maybe
you thought that made sense.
but any one of the pieces in that cog can slow you down.
Whereas versus if you went with a company that's kind of a one-stop shop, you're
really doing one agreement, they're taking care of all of that other stuff on the
back end, that makes it a little bit of a smoother process.
Then the other thing also is that the maintenance and the upkeep, that can be a
huge problem if you don't deal with that from the get-go.
in terms of determining who's responsible for what.
I'll say there's another thing also, is also power load and power management.
That's also huge.
You need to look into that piece too.
Because I have heard stories of a building where they say you can only use, charge a
car for an hour.
That's it.
You get a maximum of an hour a day.
That's not gonna work for most people, even at a level two.
That's just not gonna be enough time.
And...
They're either making that decision because they're not knowledgeable, they
don't understand how much time it takes.
It could be they're making that decision because the way their contract is set up,
they are paying for all of the electricity and they don't want to foot the bill and
so they feel if they limit people to an hour, it will cost them less money.
It could also be there aren't enough chargers in the building.
It could also be that the building can't handle the power load because they didn't
think of all of those things.
There's just so many pieces to this that go above and beyond just putting the darn
thing in the ground and saying, hey, we did it.
So there's a lot of stuff that can throw you sideways, Chase.
For sure.
And I think to maybe reframe the question I've been asking indirectly a lot, I
guess, let's give in your experience.
Let's just walk through.
Let's just walk through what would be your ideal installation process, or what would
be your ideal installation.
And then one of the things we discuss a lot on this channel is, is there a
business model for EV charging outside of being like a Flying J or the traditional
one or.
like a Tesla that has kind of revenues from across the board.
So I think it'd be really interesting with the time we have to go through how you
would design kind of the ideal charging location and if you can share like
anything on round, even the ideal business model for doing such.
Right, okay, so before I answer that question, if we're gonna go there, let's
pick a particular type of location, and then we can have that discussion, because
the answer to that question is completely dependent upon the location and the use
case.
It's totally different.
call.
And to clarify, I'm thinking like level three fast charging.
So let's say level three fast charging maybe inner city or not inner city but
between cities for road tripping or something.
Okay, so that's good.
Now we have a vision in our head, and now based on that I can answer that question.
So if you're doing level three fast charging in a major mobility corridor, the
place where it would make the most sense to put it is along a highway or with very
close distance to a highway exit or off-ramp.
That's probably where you would be thinking to put it.
You would also want it to be an appropriate distance between two locations
where it would make sense that people might be stopping part of the way to
charge up.
So if you have an urban area and a suburban area and people are traveling
from a suburb into a major city, somewhere along that mobility corridor is a place
where it would make sense to put the DCFC fast charging.
People coming from work going to home
people going from home to work, somewhere in there makes sense to put it.
So that's how you have to think about that piece of it.
The only thing that you have to think about this ideally is again, you would
need to know, are there people in that suburban area with a lot of EVs?
And if there are, then it makes sense to now put the fast charging probably where
most of those people might be going to commute to work.
That's one part of looking at this.
You also need to know,
The power requirements for a level three DCFC fast charger, they're massive.
So you would need to know how close are you to the closest substation where you
can draw that power.
You might want to think about putting in fast chargers in that location that have
onsite battery backup and power storage.
Why would you wanna do that?
Because
At the most expensive time or busiest times of the day, not only you have more
volume and more people coming in to charge up, but guess what?
It costs more money for the electricity that you're going to use at that time of
the day because of course the utility companies charge you a premium for
providing electricity at peak hours.
So, if you have a battery system in that fast charger, you might be able to draw
power at cheaper periods of time.
That way you store the power in there and that way when people show up at let's say
four or five o'clock in the afternoon, power is available and it's not hyper
expensive because you pulled the cheaper power from the grid at different times of
the day.
You might want to think about doing a battery backed up fast charger in that
location.
Then you need to also, what are your contracts going to look like?
You need to do a title search.
You would need to do a survey.
You might want to see a photo sim of what it's going to look like.
That way you can visually imagine how that's going to appear.
You would want to make sure that the person that you're entering into that
contract with and that owns the land on the side of the highway, whether it's your
state, your county, or a private person, has actually the ability to enter into
that contract with you.
Then you would want to look at your contract terms from the get-go.
Who is going to be responsible for the maintenance?
What's going to happen when that charger breaks?
If it's in a location where a lot of people are going to be using this charger
and relying on it regularly, you probably want your maintenance window to be very
short.
Is there a company that...
and I know this and this is all great.
I'm just kind of curious.
Are there is there like an average length?
Term is it like three years and auto renews or what whatever you seem to be
kind of normal around them
I've seen everything.
Right now, what you generally get
ideal situation, what would you do?
Or what would you say that the term should be?
So, I would say that you would probably want, from the perspective of both the
owner on the property and the company that's doing the investment, you probably
want a lease 10 years, 15 years, something like that because you're both making an
investment in this.
You both want to know that you're going to be able to consistently make money over
time.
This is...
This is as much an investment for the property owner as it is for the
infrastructure company and as it is for the industry.
Typically what you will see in a lot of wireless agreements and you will see this
in outdoor advertising agreements and things like that is you will see something
like a five-year term or an initial, let's say, 10-year term, and then you'll see
five-year terms that will automatically renew after that, and you're looking at 25
to 30-year leases.
I think right now the industry is probably a little too immature for people to be
willing to commit to a 30-year lease because it's probably going to change a
lot over time.
At the same time, it might take five years to actually see a sufficient return on
that investment from both the owner and the infrastructure company for it to be
worth it for them to do that.
You want to know.
Certainly, if you're investing in the infrastructure, you want to know that
you're going to be there for at least the next five to 10 years without the owner
throwing you out.
From the owner's perspective, they also want to know that they're going to be able
to see some money consistently over time.
I think if you had a situation where you had leases for that five-year window and
they would automatically renew, unless there are reasons to not do it, then we
really start getting into the weeds as to how you would do that.
probably begin to make some sense.
That gives everybody the feeling that there's some staying power to this and
that it's gonna be a worthwhile investment from both ends because we know that the
infrastructure is gonna be here for a while and hopefully consistently paying
over time.
So in terms of the length of time, that's probably the sort of thing that you would
wanna see.
And the other thing also is that you will also wanna make sure that contract gives
you the ability to upgrade your equipment.
as it changes and as it improves.
That is something that you see across the board with solar and with wind and with
wireless telecom.
They always have that built into the contracts and to the agreements.
Yes, we might be putting this particular type of DCFC in the ground today, but it
could turn out that the equipment improves to such a great extent that we might want
to take it out and put something in better.
We might want to upgrade the internals.
of that equipment so that way it's charging faster and better and cheaper and
more efficiently and so on and so forth.
You would want to have the ability to essentially be able to freely do that
without necessarily being interfered with or having the property owner interfering
with you.
Of course, you're not taking more space.
You're not interfering with the real estate that they've given you, but you
want to be able to upgrade your equipment as you need it from both perspectives.
And there could be potential downtime or some other things to do that.
I got you.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Well, that's really fascinating.
Are there any other things you would say to that?
Or is that kind of it at a high level for fast charging?
would say that the other thing also is access is absolutely critical in terms of
maintenance and repairs, really critical, especially in our example of the DCFC.
That is why it's so important to do the title search and to do the survey because
really that equipment in particular is very expensive.
It costs money to maintain it.
There is a lot of work behind the scenes that has to go in.
In order to get that equipment going, you really have to have your agreement going
with the power company, with the power line.
There's way more work that goes into a level three fast charger right then your
typical at home level one setup.
It's a whole different ballgame.
And especially if you're making that type of investment, which by the way could
easily be six figures, it would be who view.
To do that and to know that you can consistently access it, that the contract
gives you the ability to maintain it, that you're going to be able to keep it there
for a consistent period of time, those are all the things that would really need to
go into that in terms of that, let's say, being an ideal situation.
By the way, we didn't even touch on whether or not it could be zoned and
permitted for that sort of thing.
You also would need to know that the spot that you pick that you think might be
ideal
that it's zoned and you would be able to get the permitting for that particular
location too.
Just a small thing to be aware of, right?
Just a few little things.
So yeah, exactly.
So in that example, we talked about DC fast charging between cities.
You know, there's been a lot of the news like recently Chicago, and I've heard a
lot about Brooklyn specifically.
If you have an EV, it's really hard to find.
If you don't have level two, you're pretty much, you're out of luck.
And especially DC fast charging.
And I realized once again, we're kind of, we've got so much we can talk about, but
like at a high level, are there any things for an inner kind of like,
inside of a city center when building DC fast charging to be aware of that we might
not have covered in that recent exam.
Yeah, I would say that in many urban areas, doing DC fast charging is going to
be incredibly difficult if not close to impossible because in dense urban areas,
you already have massive needs for power.
So to put that type of charging into a dense urban area does not necessarily make
so much sense.
And again, keep in mind that people that are coming to charge up quickly...
and to move on to go somewhere quickly, do not necessarily need that.
In an urban setting, it makes more sense to have level two charging,
hypothetically, in apartment buildings or in parking garages.
We won't even get into discussing putting it into parking garages in New York City
and in the five boroughs because that presents a whole host of other problems,
but it would make more sense to have level two charging where people live.
For the most part, and I think this is one of the stats that you've heard, I've
heard, we've all heard this, and I don't know where the numbers come from, but I
think everybody has essentially accepted this as this is the way it is, but
something like 80% of people are charging up their EVs in private homes.
That's where most people are charging up.
So if you can provide EV charging in places where people consistently leave
their cars for extended periods of time.
like in shopping centers, like in apartment buildings, that's where that
kind of makes sense and that goes back to the comment and the little discussion we
had before about the infrastructure matching up to the use case.
Totally.
The, I...
fast charging doesn't necessarily make sense in the middle of Brooklyn.
It just doesn't.
I totally agree with you on that.
I think the reason I bring it up, this wasn't kind of the detail that was getting
a lot of the attention, but obviously the big thing that was happening recently,
like Chicago, I think was everywhere in the EV news, was about people couldn't
charge.
And the thing that wasn't really being covered was the vast majority of those
people having issues were actually kind of Uber and Lyft and rideshare drivers who
don't have a place that they can charge overnight.
And because they're doing so many, they need, they need.
a DC fast charter so they can get back on road, make a fare, which totally makes
sense.
But I think that what really stood out to me and opened up the question going back
to fleets is like, in that sort of example, you would have like commercial
fueling usually for something similar.
And then that kind of begs the question of like, how are these companies especially
if they want to do like, how do they I'm trying to think of what the chain is, and
it might just be here on the West Lake, but like Pacific fueling, which is a
purely commercial fueling
Chain that trucks and other like businesses can go to get fuel it really
does seem like especially in that use case there needs to be a Commercial specific
charging which has it that it makes sense that regular people one may not need it
But to it just opens up the charges for those who really do and then they have a
place that they can go charge I'm curious if that's something you've seen or have
heard discussions around that.
Yeah
I have definitely heard some discussions around that and I have a couple of ideas
about how that might work well.
So I'll give you an example of what does not work well, and then I'll give you my
thoughts of what I think would work well.
So the example of what I think does not work well is I want you to imagine in your
head or our listeners should imagine a ride share pickup line in a typical
airport.
I'll be traveling to a conference next week.
I'll be going to an airport.
I'm sure I'm gonna get to see this, right?
Every time you travel, you see this on all the rideshare cars come and go this.
So if you were to put a level two charger in the rideshare pickup line, let me ask
you this question, Chase.
Do you think that would make sense when you know that your typical Uber and Lyft
driver is not allowed to sit and wait for you for more than five minutes?
Does a level two charger in the ride share pickup line make any sense?
No, it does not.
Yet I have seen this in an airport.
Now that to me is just, it's stupid.
It's a dumb, it's what I would call a dumb deployment.
Makes no sense.
All right, now.
Maybe.
you've got, you've got to have something that's like, right.
And even then that, yeah, I, I agree.
Even level three, they're not sitting there for more than five minutes.
Even a level three right now with the existing technology and not everybody has
a Porsche take-hand that can do it, but you still have to do it for 20 minutes.
It's a stretch.
All right, so now let me give you what I think is the way to solve that problem.
Now you have all these people that are coming to do the ride-share pickups.
They're coming.
They're picking up their passengers.
They can only stay for five minutes.
What if there was a place nearby where they could actually sit?
So I'll give you the example of, I live in New York and there is a cell phone pickup
lot at JFK Airport, leaving aside the fact that I don't know how many people actually
use it because when you drive by on the highway, you see dozens and dozens and
dozens of cars sitting on the side of the highway, waiting to get into the airport,
not using the cell phone.
pick up parking lot, which by the way, the advertise is free, but I guess people
don't use it because probably once you get into that pick up lot, it's a pain in the
neck to get to your terminal.
So people prefer to sit outside of the airport and wait for their friends and
family to call them and then they go in and pick them up.
But let's just pretend that there was an offsite parking facility where you could
sit, where you might be sitting as you wait to get your hails.
where there is room, where there is space, where there is infrastructure, where you
could put in chargers.
Would it make more sense to put them in that place and let the rideshare people
sit in that parking facility?
They can charge up while they wait.
And then when they're ready to go to the airport, they just go.
And not only that, they probably either charged up fully or close to 80% or
something like that.
And now they can continue to go about their day and about their business in
terms of being able to charge up.
So it would make more sense to have an offsite location where you could do level
two or maybe even level three charging that would match the use case there as
opposed to putting it in a place where it really makes no sense.
So I don't know if there are people out there that think that you might have a
piece of property where something like that makes sense, come and talk to me,
right?
Cause I know people that might be willing to work with you to do something like
that, right?
So those are the kinds of things.
So...
That would be an example of what doesn't make sense, but what could potentially
make sense.
And that would be a good way to kind of solve that issue.
Those people would then have a place to sit where they can charge up.
Hopefully it would be a place where there's light and there are bathrooms and
it's safe and so on and so forth, but where it would make sense for them to be
sitting and charging, as opposed to putting the charger in the pickup line
where it makes no sense.
Right.
And no, I completely agree with you and that makes a lot of sense.
I think one of the other interesting things I've seen, I think that makes
sense.
And then I was actually at a Sonic drive-through on a road trip and they had
one in Boise where there was like eight Tesla superchargers and they were kind of
the newer higher power one, but it also just kind of made sense.
People would come in, get food, they'd charge, but and I think this is another
thing I kind of want to talk to you real quick, but
Obviously Tesla has it so it's like you go in, you charge, they have fees if you're
there charging too long and all this stuff, which I think is great to help with
kind of forcing to move people through.
incentivize people to move their cars.
Yes.
And I think naturally just once again, that's kind of a good fusion.
I like someone gets lunch, they have their lunch, they're off.
And I think specifically what you're talking about for like the commercial
application, that use case even better, but you do see still from some of the car
brands, they offer the free charging, the free, uh, kind of like, okay, you can have
for like two years.
Have you dealt with that at all?
Or do you see that as kind of something that's a short-term sales push that.
really is gonna be probably not the best for getting that throughput and really
creating the best EV charging experience.
Yeah, I think as a short-term solution, it makes sense.
From the perspective of the car companies that are offering it, I think it indicates
that they are acknowledging that publicly available EV charging might not be so
great or easily available.
And if they, and at the end of the day,
They want their customers to be happy and excited about their product that they're
selling to them.
So offering that to them, I think, is a great idea because it keeps your customers
happy and as a practical matter, it keeps their cars charged up and do you think
that they're gonna tell their friends and family, hey, the experience with car
company so-and-so is excellent because I get the charge up for free.
By the way, there are people that are on that legacy plan with Tesla and they love
to brag about it because they're grandfathered in and wherever they go, it
doesn't cost them anything.
God bless them.
totally yeah, exactly.
I think that's totally true too, because like it's especially for people who may be
coming to like electric vehicle for the first time, the idea that not only am I
saving money by being electric from gas, the fact that when I go fast charge, it's
even free and saving even more money, I think kind of is a good incentive.
And obviously, they talk about a lot.
But it also is like almost creating the wrong incentives for the larger EV
drivers.
But at the same time, and in some ways between the
just general gas savings of even paying for electricity and not having to do the
oil changes.
That unto itself, I think is a huge plus.
But yeah, I totally get what you're saying there.
tell you what the problem is with that though.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
For sure.
When I think.
day, somebody is paying for that.
Whether that will continue to be viable over the long term, I don't know.
My hope is that the state of publicly available infrastructure for EVs would
improve to the point where you might not necessarily still have to provide that, or
it could be the sort of thing where you just might provide it as...
a premium service.
If you think about the way the airline industry works, you basically have the
same flight whether you sit in first class, business class, or coach.
But for a couple of extra premium services, people are willing to pay a lot
more money for something like that.
It's entirely possible that maybe for some of the higher end manufacturers that they
that might be something that they can offer to their customers.
But again, you'd have to be super picky and super specific about where you would
choose to make that kind of free service available.
Because I don't think that if you were to be doing that across the board, we'll use
Porsche for example, I don't think that Porsche wants to provide free electric
charging to every single one of its customers.
across the entirety of the United States.
That just might not be a good business plan.
But as a premium service in certain neighborhoods or in certain states or in
certain cities, that might be a good sales pitch.
when I think it comes back to the whole business model of it and like where I
guess real quickly, because I realized we were coming up on the time and this will
be the, yeah, these will be the final questions, but first, what do you, for
sure, for sure.
No, and it's always changing, but yeah, I'm kind of curious on what you think, if
you can share this, what is the best and what is the worst business model
for an EV charging company, I guess.
Because I still struggle with the margins and exactly what you're talking about
right now.
It's like someone has to pay it in the end and that comes at a different cost.
And whether it's costing the money or the service quality.
Yeah, I think right now it's pretty hard to answer that question.
And unfortunately, I feel as if I need to put on the lawyer hat a little bit and to
use something that as lawyers we say frequently, which is the answer to that
question, it depends.
It depends.
Because you can have an ideal business model.
An ideal...
legal structure in one particular place, but it might not be the same thing across
the street.
The example that I'll give you for that is I'm sure you've been to a Starbucks.
If you've been to any big city, I'm sure you've seen, especially in a place like
Manhattan, you may have several of them within a three or four block radius.
Each one of those stores is servicing a different customer.
different sets of return on their investment.
They might even be offering different drinks and different foods because in the
little market in which they inhabit on that spot on the block, it's all
different.
And so just because you have an ideal business or legal structure over here does
not mean that necessarily plays well somewhere else.
It's really gonna be
location dependent, it's really gonna be use case dependent, it's really going to
be power availability dependent, and when you throw all that stuff into the mix, if
somebody were to come to me, and let's just use the example that we used before
of the DCFC fast charging along the mobility corridor, I could certainly come
up with ways in which I can say, these are the ideal ways in which you would wanna do
this.
But if you were to flip that and you were to go into an urban area and say, here's
an apartment building, my answer to some of those questions and how you would
structure this could be completely different.
No, and I had a feeling that's what you're gonna say, but I wanted to ask it because
it's a question I get asked a lot, right?
No, it's, right.
Yeah.
a perfect answer and a perfect business model.
It turns out these are complicated things and that's why there isn't a perfect
business model.
no necessarily one answer.
One of the things that I think that I would really like to see and I feel like
that we will start to see this, I think as the industry matures and as the quality of
the infrastructure improves and as the quality of the vehicles improves and as
the battery technology improves and as the software improves and as we start to see
more standards and all of that stuff starts to get better.
I think what we will start to see is a situation where the business models will
start to be a little bit more consistent.
That will happen over time.
That definitely happened in the telecom industry.
Just to give you one little taste of that, from agreements from 20-25 years ago, you
would sometimes see where maybe they might be paying rent, but let's say they weren't
paying rent, but what they were offering.
was a free line of service and a free cell phone or for up to like three family
members or something like that.
That's what they did.
That is not a business model that would fly in 2024.
And in that industry right now, by and large and almost without exception,
everybody is paying rent to the people who are putting the infrastructure on their
property.
That is the way that industry has shook out.
There's very little of the revenue sharing other than the little example that I gave
you before, but that's what consistently works.
There's still some leasing models, still some licensing models, still some easement
models, still some combos of that, but that's generally what you see.
Right now in the EV industry, it's still too young and too immature where we don't
have a consistent model yet, but I feel like we will get there.
And the company that figures out what that model is, combined with consistently doing
their homework and doing their due diligence, those will be the companies
that are ultimately going to succeed at this enormously.
For sure.
And I think that's why I think there is definitely a model there.
But it's also interesting to me, like even the traditional fueling companies, they
don't make money on gas.
They, if anything, sometimes lose it.
They make all their, right.
They make all their money on concessions.
And so you're finally seeing some of these larger fueling companies kind of get in
that space, at least domestically.
They've already done that to some extent internationally, but
are a lot of startups that are looking at that very model, by the way.
They're all over the place.
for sure.
And I, I mean, I feel like I could keep talking with you about this.
We haven't even touched like the Neve funding and all of that stuff.
But
go for hours.
But we have to be conscious of time and everyone's tolerance.
I know.
I'll leave it at one final thing and then we will.
We will have to cut this off.
Unfortunately, one kind of general question I ask is of most people is just
like any recommendations they do have for government or for the public sector to do
better on these things.
But I think I'll tie it into the Navy thing where we're seeing a lot of these
Navy funding and other just kind of general state government funding being
tied with certain.
Now uptime things, and it kind of goes back to some of those terms you were
talking about and the experience that was created that they have those.
Is there anything that, like, if you had to choose one thing that you'd like to see
in that kind of stuff, like, it needs to have uptime or it needs to have some sort
of thing that we've obviously seen has burnt us that we need to have in these
things moving forward.
Yeah, this is a fabulous question.
We could probably spend an entire podcast on this topic alone, but I'm not going to.
I'm not going to, I'm gonna answer it.
I'll tell you the short and quick answer as to what I would like to see that would
really make a difference.
I think that if the funding for deployments was tied to...
utilization, uptime, and consistent maintenance over time using a standard
that everybody could understand or a metric that everybody could understand and
follow.
Plus...
incentives for accountability and you put that together, you'd have a much better
situation.
I'll give you an example so that way we can get past the little bit of legalese
there.
If you were to hand out money to people not when they put the chargers in, but if
they
and when they broke that you consistently fixed it within 24 hours.
And you only provided that money to the company that put the infrastructure in the
ground or to the property owner that was getting the benefit of the incentive or
the tax break, not at the beginning, but after they showed consistently that
they've been doing this over time, then what would start to happen is that people
would actually think that you
a lot more about where they were putting the infrastructure to start with.
Because if they knew that they're not going to get the money unless we show a
certain level of utilization, uptime, and maintenance, then they're just not going
to put it in the middle of nowhere where it won't be utilized, where we won't fix
it, and where we won't be providing spare parts.
They just won't do that, right?
And the situation that you have right now is that you have none of that.
So here's one of the problems.
is that if I'm not mistaken that the new Neve funding requires 97% uptime and the
companies that are now let's say fixing the broken chargers, which again we're
going to have a whole discussion on that, fixing the broken chargers has to provide
five years of maintenance.
But let me ask you this, what happens when it's not up 97% of the time?
What happens when they don't provide five years worth of maintenance?
They've already gotten the money.
So are they going to write?
Therein lies the crux of the problem.
So if we tie the incentives and we tie the funding to something like that, people
will make much smarter decisions about where they deploy the infrastructure to
start with.
And secondly is that if you are going to have a requirement like 97% of time and
five years worth of maintenance, you have to have a metric.
And then you also have to have a way to incentivize people to actually follow
that.
If you have a rule for anything, pick and choose whatever it is that you want.
But if you break the rule and you never get into any kind of trouble for breaking
the rule, are you going to break the rule?
Yes, you're going to break the rule because nothing happens to you if you
don't follow it.
So we need to have rules and regulations in place.
That.
require people to follow them and if they don't follow them, they get into trouble
for not following them.
And not only that, but we also have to have rules and funding in place that
actually incentivize good behavior versus poor behavior.
So if the money is only handed out after you show that it's being used, it's being
maintained, and you're fixing it quickly, then you will put it in a place where you
know it will be used, where it will be maintained, and where you will have the
ability to fix it quickly.
As opposed to what we have right now.
We still put it right down in the ground and by the way, we might be putting money
back into chargers we never should have put into the ground to begin with.
But don't worry, we have 97% uptime and we have to give five years worth of
maintenance.
So we're all good.
We're not.
I think that's a great point and probably the best place to end this.
But I think you're totally right.
There needs to be an element of like maybe some of the, at least some of it upfront,
some of it over time, because we've talked to other people on the show too that we're
expecting to see a lot of consolidation in the space.
There's all these people that have gone money, that have had things and now
they're being caught off guard with the long-term kind of actual maintenance of
this business.
So I think...
I think we're going to be seeing a lot more in this and I think that's a great
idea and I hope that is what happens if anyone's listening.
That has influence?
Yes.
the federal government or any of the lobbying firms out there that you're
listening to this, we have a great idea.
You just got to do it that way and then maybe it will work.
Or the next time that funding comes out, that's how you have to set it up.
for sure.
But Jason, we definitely have to have you back soon.
I just want to say thank you so much for coming on today.
And with that, we'll let you get going.
Thank you.
Truly, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you, Chase.
This has been awesome.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us on this insightful journey through the intricacies
of electric vehicle charging and the decisions that need to be made when
planning them today with our guest, Jason Goldfarb.
We hope you've gained valuable perspectives on the ever evolving energy
and electric vehicle charging landscape, along with the crucial role grid
connectivity plays in shaping our sustainable future.
If you want to learn more and reach out to Jason, please check today's show notes.
He's a great resource and always.
posting new ideas and sharing some of his updates on LinkedIn as well, which you can
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