Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Will charging infrastructure be a bottleneck for electric vehicles?

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Electric vehicles (EVs) are moving quickly toward mass adoption. So how do we make sure that charging infrastructure keeps up? The people who own, operate and install chargers have some big questions to answer:  Can public chargers run a profit, and how do business models need to change to accelerate deployment? Why is it so hard to repair broken stations? Does it matter where we install new ones? When will chargers be as ubiquitous and easy to use as gas stations? In this episode, Shayle digs into these questions with colleague Cassie Bowe, partner at the venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners, where she focuses on mobility. Cassie outlines the trajectory of charger deployment over the years, comparing charger accessibility in the U.S, China and Europe.  Shayle and Cassie cover smart charging (also known as V1G) and V2G, as well as the commodification of charging hardware. Plus, how soon we might see wireless charging and why Shayle doesn’t have an EV yet.  Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15. Register here.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst. Whether or not there's some magic number for charging infrastructure that in reality would make this whole system work, it doesn't matter what that number is. It matters what the consumer perception is. We've finally reached the inflection point with electric vehicle adoption. But what will it take for EV charging to avoid becoming a

bottleneck as we roll out more and more vehicles. And what needs to change with the business model of who owns, operates, and maintains these chargers? When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure,

but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shale Khan. I'm a partner at the venture capital firm, energy impact partners.

Welcome. All right. So we all can agree, I'm sure, that we are at the front end of a massive transformation of the world's vehicle stock from internal combustion engines to batteries and electric drive trains. And clearly, in order to execute that transformation, we're going to need widespread, ubiquitous, reliable access to electric vehicle charging. So that's clearly a long-term goal. But in the meantime, the rollout of EV charging just has so many interesting questions embedded within it, ranging from the types of chargers that we need and are deploying, where we need to place them, who should own them, and

operate them, how smart they need to be, what the technology should look like, and of course, the business models that will and are underpinning their deployment. It's still very early days in this market, and so as a result, with any nascent market, it is changing fast. So let's explore. For this one, I brought on my colleague, Cassie Bow, like me, Cassie's a partner at EIP, and she's been focused on mobility and especially EV charging for years. So she is definitely the right person to have this conversation with. And with no further ado, here's Cassie. Cassie, welcome.

Thanks, Shale. Happy to be here. It has taken altogether too long to have you on the podcast, but nevertheless, there's a lot to talk about an EV charging world. So let's start with kind of the lay of the land. Where would you put us in the sort of EV adoption cycle and particularly the, I guess, the pace of rollout of EV charging so far? Like, where are we in that trajectory?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I kind of think about it in three different waves. And so the first wave was when we were super early adopter days on EVs. The idea was just, let's get the infrastructure out there, let's learn from it. You know, no one really knows how EVs work. No one really knows how EV charging works, where it should go, how fast it should be. And it was a lot of learning and, you know, that's super early adopter phase. And I think there was a fair bit of room for error in that phase because those first consumers, you know, were folks that really wanted to go electric.

And there was a lot of understanding from those people on where and where charging infrastructure would be and where it wouldn't be. And I think we're firmly out of that wave. It depends a little bit on the geography. You know, we're almost up to 30-ish percent of new vehicle sales in Europe, our EVs. We're more kind of five, six percent in the U.S., but I would argue we're still in the second wave in both places. And that wave is we need to make sure all the infrastructure works reliably out there with very high uptime.

And we are very far behind on where we need to be for those metrics. So there's not enough infrastructure. We can get into the stats of that. But there's not enough charging infrastructure out there and it's not working well enough. So that's phase two. So third phase, I think, is going to be very much akin to everything's as easy as the gas station model. So the infrastructure is out there and working in all the right numbers, but it's also in all the right places. It's working seamlessly and it's working interoperably for the drivers so that everyone, you know, it's not even a concern for anybody where they're going to charge.

And that phase, I think, is a lot farther out. One of the things I always wonder when, you know, you hear a lot that, like, we don't have enough, we're behind on deployment of charging infrastructure. is like, how do we know that? Is it that consumers, like consumers who have EVs complain that charging is their biggest problem? Is it that perception of insufficient charging availability is what's stopping people from buying EVs? Or are we just doing some modeling that's like we need, you know, X number of chargers of Y

types per vehicle that gets deployed and we're behind on that metric? Yeah, well, I would kind of put that question back on. you shale because I learned yesterday to my shock that you do not have an EV. And so I'm wondering is one of the reasons that you don't think that there's charging infrastructure or that you don't feel that you can charge at home. Wow, Cassie. Wow. We have been immediately prior to this recording. You got this reputation as this big clean energy guy. You live in Berkeley. And you don't have an EV. What do that heck? You're going to call me out this early in the pod. It's true. I don't have an EV yet, but it is not because of charging is because I've been waiting for the right models to come out. We really want it. I'm,

I come from a long line of Subaru Outback owners in my family and, uh, I love that vehicle. It's like perfect for everything that I want to do with it. And Subaru is woefully behind on going electric. And there just, there weren't as of a couple years ago, like very similar models to the Outback that were pure electric. So we are kind of waiting for that to come, which I think is coming in the next year or two. Anyway, we don't need to talk about me. The super is very on brand for you, so I get it. I know, I know.

The point is, though, it's not about charging for me. My perception, I mean, I'm obviously not the average consumer, but my perception is that there's probably plenty of charging for my needs. Like, I would be able to have a home charger. I live in Northern California where I think there's pretty good, you know, public charging available for the road trips I'd want to. take. I suspect I get DC fast charger. So that's not a big issue for me, but I guess the question is for the average consumer or for the second wave consumer that we're talking about. Like, what is it

that makes us confident we're behind on that rollout? Yeah, it's a good question because we don't know, there's no magic number that can be proven to be the right number of public fast chargers, public level two chargers, what have you. We can look at it a few ways. So one thing that I like to look at is where is EV adoption the highest and what is their ratio of, let's just say, public chargers to EVs? And then where are we at in the U.S. today? And that could be one metric because presumably if penetration is a lot higher in another country, then something is working on the charging side. So if you look at the U.S., we're at about 120, 125 EVs per public fast charger, and China is at 15. and China has much, much higher penetration of EVs. So that's one metric.

I don't have the metric offhand for Europe, but it would be a much lower ratio of vehicles per fast charger. So that's one way that we know we can say behind, that we're behind. The OEMs also seem to have a lot of their own internal metrics of where they think the industry should get to in terms of public charging infrastructure or fast charging. charging infrastructure per EV. Again, I don't think that we know that those are the right numbers.

To me, the number one most important thing is what are consumers saying? Because whether or not there's some magic number for charging infrastructure that in reality would make this whole system work, it doesn't matter what that number is. It matters what the consumer perception is. And so consumer reports just did a survey in 2022, which is interesting because I know, Shale, you and I have been seeing these surveys for the past many years. And so I was curious what the 2022 numbers would come up with in this regard in terms of, has consumer sentiment changed at all? Historically, the number one barrier to consumers saying why they wouldn't buy an EV

had been charging. No surprise in this past survey. It's still the number one reason is charging logistics. And then if you break down within charging logistics, okay, well, if you could have your charging solved, what would be your top asks? Number one is free public charging. Number two is the ability to charge where you live. And then number three is fast charging in 30 minutes or last. So free public charging or even just any public charging, it's still the number one reason that consumers aren't adopting EVs. And in the U.S. where we're only at 5% of new vehicle sales, that just means we have to solve it, period. That's fascinating. I get the sense that there may be some. some divide between consumer sentiment and then the reality for EV owners in general.

I mean, certainly there's, I mean, we should probably separate out categorically, like people who can have at-home charging and people who cannot because of where they live. Because I think they have like a very different experience of EV ownership. But for people who can have at-home charging, which I think is, correct me if I'm wrong, still the majority of EV-purchasers, at least today in the kind of early days. for them, you know, my understanding of the majority of charging behavior is most people charge almost exclusively at home. And then they need the DC fast chargers when they're taking longer road trips and things like that. And so this perception that like we need ubiquitous public charging apart from DC fast chargers or, you know, chargers on highway corridors and things like that.

Like, is there evidence that that is actually a problem or is it a. consumer perception problem that gets solved once people have vehicles? Yeah. I think it's a problem if you are living in an only EV household and you are taking lots of longer trips or if that's something that's important to you. So I think it is sometimes a problem for consumers. It's also a problem by geography. But I think the point is that it mostly is perception and that when you're at the purchasing decision point, you can come up with a thousand reasons that your EV might not get you there and that you might not have access to the right charger to do so. And so I think it's ultimately a perception thing for most people,

but there are some strips that can definitely be more complicated if you don't have the right public charging infrastructure in area. That sort of relates to, I guess, the other question people ask a lot about the current breakdown of the roll out of EV chargers, which is, are we deploying the right kinds of chargers in the right places? Obviously, there are residential chargers, there's public chargers that could be level two. They could be DC fast chargers. There's workplace charging. There's a sort of endless debate over what the split of all those different things should

be. What's your take on, like, do you think that we know? first of all, what the split should be. And is it even a relevant question at this stage? Right. Yeah, I hear this debate a lot. And from the investment standpoint, so at EIP, we've invested in a number of EV charging companies. And so we've been a part of a lot of these conversations. And some of the debate on the investment level or on the policy level or just on the consumer level is, well, is everyone just going to charge it home? Should we even have public fast charging infrastructure? Well, why are people, why are we even rolling out at workplaces? Will people really

charge at grocery stores? How fast is fast enough? I think that's an interesting intellectual exercise that we could have here and we could debate what percent we think is going to happen where and what percent of Americans have access to a home charger, things like that. But it's just so clear across every metric that we're behind on all of those. We're behind on public level two chargers. We're behind on workplace level two chargers. We're behind on DC fast chargers. And we're behind on resi charging. So I think that that's really a question for the third wave. And I don't see that as a question for the second wave. We need to roll out much more infrastructure than we currently have. And so I actually kind of think it's a counterproductive debate to be having

when we're thinking about where should we be putting policy dollars and where should we be putting investment dollars. We need it all. So that gets to, I guess, the next category that I think I'm most interested to chat with you about, which is the business of EVV charging. You know, we sort of agree we need more of it. But I do think there's been a big question in this kind of early wave of like how how exactly can you build a profitable business, either making or deploying and owning EV chargers of whatever stripe? So let's talk about, I guess, public EV charging first, since this is probably where the business model question has come up the most. I think in the early days of the market, the general wisdom was you couldn't really profitably operate a public EV charger

just by selling the power. So you couldn't operate an EV charger and be profitable in the way that a gas station is profitable. Today, you needed some other, you needed to be subsidized by Whole Foods or something like that to put the station at their premises. You needed some other kind of subsidy because the utilization wasn't high enough.

You just weren't, you didn't have somebody charging at all times because there was this chicken or egg problem with chargers and vehicles. Is that still true today? And how much does that vary? buy location and type? Yeah, it's interesting. We've been talking about this chicken and egg issue for a long time where you need to roll out the charging infrastructure, as we said, number one reason why consumers aren't adopting EVs, so we know we need to roll it out. But then,

in terms of those charging stations, penciling, it's hard to roll out the charging stations unless you know that you're going to have a certain amount of utilization. And as you said, that has been the state of the industry for a while where either it's confirmed very low utilization for a lot of these chargers or it's just really unknown. And so that had been the state of the industry. We are seeing increasingly charging stations in a lot of places, penciling from a utilization standpoint.

And so some of the large owner-operations, post some really tremendous statistics, especially in cities or in certain DC fast charging corridors for travel, where the utilization does pencil. But part of the problem is still, and we'll talk about this maybe later when we talk about the project finance side of things, it's very hard to know what the utilization is at the time that you are installing the charger. And so while we certainly have a lot of chargers that are penciling today based on utilization, at the moment that you are installing the charger, it's really hard to know if it does. And so we've seen a couple ways to deal with that. One is, like you said, supplementing utilization

revenue with other revenue. So that could be ad revenue like Volta or other players that are doing ads or other potential revenue outside of just the charging the consumer for the kilowatt hours. The other way is partnering with the folks who have a vested interest in rolling out and paying for and working with folks to be the owner-operator of charging infrastructure today. And where we've really seen people coming in to fill the gap is utilities, cities, auto-o-eems, look at what Tesla did because they knew that it was critical for the future of EVs for their vehicle to succeed. and then other strategics like oil and gas companies. And so I think we're in this in between, where we still need folks who are willing to be the early movers on paying for and owning this charging infrastructure

with a significant amount of uncertainty on the utilization. And also some of the stations definitely are penciling today. Last point on that, you have a lot of stations that maybe don't pencil, today in terms of the utilization, that absolutely will in the future. These are pretty long live to assets, and so that can change pretty quickly. Yeah, I mean, we could talk about project finance for a second, because I do think that's a key and a really interesting point, right? Typical project finance for energy infrastructure of whatever kind, you know, you are going to

produce some amount of something. You have a known customer who's going to pay a fixed amount. maybe it's indexed to something, but you have a pretty clear sense of how much of the thing you're going to be able to sell, which is just not true with EV charging, generally speaking. Maybe it could be true for fleets or something like that, but for your classic public EV charger, you don't know utilization immediately, and you definitely don't know utilization eight to 10 years out in the future while the asset is still alive. So is there a, I guess to your point, you can supplement with other revenue, but has there been, has anybody sort of been willing to bear the risk of financing EV charging through a project

finance structure with that utilization uncertainty baked in? Like, is anybody willing to take a view onto your point if I put an EV charger in location X? I'm going to take a view that EV rollout will accelerate in this location and so utilization will go up over time or anything like that? Yeah, I think people are willing to take risks when it comes to this underwriting relative to, say, a utility scale solar project or a utility scale win project. And it's fascinating to think about the early days of project finance for those assets and how it still did take a while for the industry to get behind underwriting those projects from a project finance perspective relative to the uncertainty that we see in EV charging. So I think that, you know,

the infra players are super hungry to invest in these assets. We're seeing them invest a lot, actually, in the corporate equity of a lot of these companies. So there are tens of deals that have happened in the past two years from the corporate equity level. But I think they are willing to take a bit more risk than they would for other projects when it comes to EV charging. But there's a limit to it. And so you really, the holy grail is to have either guaranteed utilization. So you could have a counterparty who's willing to guarantee a certain amount of utilization. And if they don't hit it, that they'd be willing to make up the difference or a partner who you can get comfort with that they would provide enough utilization for the assets. So you could think of, for example,

like a Lyft or an Uber agreeing to be the charging partner for a fleet of charging stations. That's going to go a huge way to the underwriting from a project perspective. Or you could have a different fleet customer like UPS or FedEx or any of the other large fleets where you don't know exactly how they're going to charge, but you can get comfortable on the project finance side of underwriting that. And so, to summarize, I mean, I think it's a little more risk, but you really need that that holy grail of some more amount of certainty that you can provide on the utilization side. That gets to, I guess, what ultimately is the long-term question, which is what will be the

business model for EV charging in ultimately, or, you know, over five or 10 years or more. you know, there's an existing business model that is extremely mature, which is gas stations. But the EV charging world feels like it's at least a little bit different today. Do you think that that's still true in a world where EV deployment is much more widespread? Because as it stands today, you know, operating a gas station is fairly straightforward, in part because I think it is a lot more predictable what the utilization. is going to be, though gas stations open up and shut down all the time for various reasons. Do we end up in that same situation, or do you think it's always with EVs a little bit more

complicated because utilization patterns are going to be different given that at-home charging is a thing? I think it will be different, and I think it should be different, and that's a big opportunity ahead of us. We just ended up in 15 years or whatever the time is from now, and all times, you know, all charging infrastructure was, was home charging and EV chargers at actual gas stations that exist today, where similar to in the current gas station model, it's a commodity product, you make very little margin on the actual gasoline sales, and then you have, you know, things like concessions

and whatnot. If that were the end state, I think that would be such a wasted opportunity for what the EV charging landscape could look like in terms of, you know, deploying chargers in places that are a lot more convenient for consumers in places where it makes sense for the grid and then in a variety of business models like we're talking about. And so I do think it will be a potpourri. I think it'll probably be pretty messy to start. It already is messy. It's going to be a combination, as I said, of a number of players who are strategics or who have incentive or grant funding, plus folks who have the entire business of being owner operators, plus fleet infrastructure.

And I think there's a big opportunity for it all to come together in a much more seamless way than actually the gas station model. There's no reason why for EV charging it's going to have to be a centralized model like that. I mean, I really hope we start putting some more EV charging stations on gas stations, but I think it's going to be a combination of people charging for EV charging in the way that we charge for gas, people giving it away for free in exchange for other grid services, and then some other unique ownership models too.

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how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I want to talk about the technology side, since we talked about the business model side a little bit as well, clearly, I mean, not to overreaching. draw the comparisons to gas stations, but clearly, you know, a gas pump is pretty commoditized.

Is there any reason why an EV charger ultimately should not be commoditized in the same way? Like today, we're obviously still in the early days, and there's a lot of differentiation amongst the products. Do you think that that persists into the future? And like, what are the things that you think will ultimately differentiate EV chargers against each other? of so. Yeah, it's been fascinating to follow this over the years. At EIP, we first started looking into EV charging six, seven years ago or so. And at that time, our hypothesis was probably by now the hardware would be commoditized. At the very simplest level, you're like, is it just a plug in the wall? Is it just like a gas station? You know, this probably shouldn't be too hard. And

by the time that, you know, we were reaching this level of EV charging deployment, a EV deployment, that it would probably be pretty commoditized on the hardware side. And that's just absolutely not what we're seeing out there. If you look at chargers that are deployed right now, 20 to 50 percent can be having substandard performance. And that is both on the hardware side in terms. terms of the hardware operating like it's supposed to, but you can also have things like weather, performance, vandalism, all sorts of things like that. But then also how the software works with

the hardware. So that's to say the embedded software that is operating the hardware. And then also the communications layer between communicating to the software and having high uptime there. So we've been shocked to see that absolutely there is not commoditization. There is hugely variable performance out there on the hardware and software side. And that's been shown in the margins that folks are still getting on EV charging hardware. And we're seeing big leaps and bounds in terms of the actual chargers that are coming out. How fast are they? How reliable are they?

And so we're just not even close to a commoditized hardware environment, I don't think, out there yet, especially not for DC fast chargers. What is it that makes it so difficult to achieve high reliability and uptime for EV chargers? And in the outside, you think it's a fairly simple piece of electrical equipment. Clearly, it's not in real world conditions. Like, what is it that has caused, has plagued so many of these suppliers? Yeah. Well, I think part of the reason is exactly what you're saying about the real world's condition piece.

So there's any number of reasons why a charger can go down in the wild. So that could be whether, as I said, there is a lot of vandalism. You know, there could be a wasps nest, whatever it may be. And when charging stations do go down, historically, there just hasn't been a network and the maintenance infrastructure to deal with that. So we invested in a company called Charger Help, which is doing that for charging stations. And they're pretty much the only company that we know about there that is actually focused on the maintenance and operation of the chargers and getting that uptime up because they did a survey of about 5,000 chargers and found that, again, 30 to 50% of them had substandard performance. So I think part of the problem is when a station is going offline, regardless of the reason, it takes a really long time for that station to come back online because there's a lack of options in terms of getting a technician out there.

The other reason is it can be hard to understand why that station has gone offline. So it could be that the communications layer is not working or the communications could be online and every signal says, hey, this is a go, this station is online, but something's not. working with the hardware and software on the ground. And depending on who your provider is, it may be hard to figure out what is actually going on. So those are a lot of the reasons that we have. I think that's really low-hanging fruit. It gives me optimism that we could solve that through deploying the right, you know, chargers from the right providers and then also just really improving the maintenance of it. I think this is pretty, pretty maker break in terms of where we are at in the industry. If there's a reputation that's developed for EV charging infrastructure broadly that it's hard to have it work, then I think that's really

going to risk the stage that we are at in EV adoption. Yeah, I think it also gets to like where, you know, Tesla is this sort of closed-loop system has a bit of an advantage relative to everybody else who's sort of deploying on their own and then trying to be interoperable and all this kind of stuff. There's many reasons why that's ultimately a better model overall, but at least Tesla can sort of control its own destiny with regard to performance and reliability and uptime, and as long as it deploys enough resources toward that problem, it sort of can solve it within its own ecosystem, whereas if you are, if you're in the open ecosystem, you can do your best to solve it for your own deployments, but that doesn't necessarily solve it for the consumer

experience, which is going to have a, which is going to have broader applications for a bunch of different, a bunch of different charger types and, you know, hopefully interoperable systems and payment methods and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, completely agree. So the other sort of world of the intersection of the technology side in EV charging is the question of how EV chargers should interact with the grid. and the degree to which, I guess, they need to be smart chargers. What smart charging means?

The degree to which we think EV chargers need to be smart and kind of who needs to be operating their intelligence, which is a big set of questions, and we could have a whole conversation around that. But orient us on where we are today. Like, to what degree are the EV chargers that we're rolling out today are, quote-unquote, smart? What does that actually mean?

So we absolutely need to have managed charging. I probably that's not a controversial statement, but if you just think about, for example, a typical grocery store peak load there is 500 kilowatts. If you have a 60 kilowatt hour battery, which is not that big, you know, most of the Tesla's now are 100 kilowatt hour batteries, and that you're charging that in five minutes, that's going to be over 500 kilowatts of load. So you've got more than a grocery store of load for the ultra, ultra, ultra fast charging that we're going to see in the future. But even if you don't have ultra fast charging, if you have a fleet of vehicles that is for one of these mid or heavy duty fleets or even just a neighborhood where everybody's charging at once, we are rapidly getting beyond the load that any of, that's, the grid is prepared to handle in those places. So we need to manage the charging. The question is, how do we do it? To your point, we do need smart networked chargers. So, and I know that seems obvious, but just having chargers that can communicate and can be controlled and are doing that,

or have a high up time to be able to do that is something that we're not able to do everywhere today. especially in residential, we're not able to do that. So, you know, you have some companies like EV Energy who are working to communicate both with the vehicle and home and other chargers to just make sure, all right, we need to be able to talk to these vehicles and we need to be able to control them. So there's a lot more work to do on that front. But we'll get there. And I think there are a lot of companies that are making great progress to address that. But then the question is, presuming that you can talk to all these chargers and presuming that you can control all these chargers, what should we do with them and where are we in terms of that cycle?

And the answer is we're super, super early. So we're basically not doing, I think of it as V1G, which is just turn it on or off at certain times, let alone the V2G, which we can talk about, which is taking actual energy from the battery. But we're doing very little of that across the board. And so there's going to be a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and there has to be. To me, I think we should really be addressing that low-hanging fruit of the V-1G today. So that is get every vehicle enrolled in a demand response program for the grid events where this could really be catastrophic and where we're already calling load to curtail itself today. And then number two, let's have time of use rate scheduled charging, which is going to help the consumer in terms of them getting a better rate for their charging and is also going to help the grid.

And I think if we can do just those two things, which we're largely not doing today, that's going to move the needle very far in terms of where we need to go. And then when we ultimately get to higher penetrations, that's where I would think we would start really seeing the V2G from a grid perspective, which I see as different from a vehicle to home perspective. Yeah, let's talk about vehicle to grid. It's been a topic that has been – people have talked about – okay, first of all, I like that you – we're separating out three things here. There's managed charging. That's, I guess, V1G, which is – I hate that term. but whatever, it's managed charging. I think let's dispense with that.

We agree. Everyone should agree. I don't think there's any really good argument that we aren't going to need some form of managed charging for at least some meaningful portion of EV chargers. Otherwise, it's going to be a huge problem from the grid perspective. Okay, so we're agreed there. Then there's vehicle to home, which you talked about,

which I think is very cool and very exciting. and seems real, and I'm pumped to see all what's happening with the Ford F-150, lightning, and all this other stuff around vehicle-to-home. Then there's vehicle-to-grid. Some people put vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid in the same category. I personally like to separate them because I think a vehicle-to-grid as being specifically discharging your EV battery into the grid, as opposed to using it as backup for your home or whatever else you might use your your EV battery for like the F-150 lightnings that are charging Teslas and things like that. So let's talk about V2G discharging the vehicle battery into the grid. How do you think about that opportunity or market? I guess it's not really a market yet, but what do we see coming there and how bullish are we on it? Yeah, I think it's definitely an opportunity and it depends on your time frame. But if you look at the rollout of stationary storage that we're seeing on the residential, commercial, and utility scale level, clearly we need grid storage and we need it at every level.

And if you look at the growth rate of storage right now in the U.S., I mean, it's just a tremendous space. We've invested in a bunch of companies in it because we know that it's going to grow so much. And so on the one hand, it would be such a shame to have all these. batteries out there that folks have already paid for that are sitting there and most of the time are theoretically available to be used as a grid resource. On the one hand, that would be such a shame to have that not be leveraged for the grid in conjunction with our fleet of existing stationary storage. But on the other hand, to your point, there probably needs to be a market for that, or at least an economic incentive to do so. And where we are seeing vehicle to grid happen

today, it's where there is an economic incentive to do so. And the reason that we aren't seeing it yet on a huge scale is because it doesn't necessarily pencil for, for example, the homeowner to participate in a significant amount of V2G. I think there's also some just folks are working through it when it comes to how OEMs think about it and when it comes to consumers thinking about it about what they would want to give up in terms of access to their battery and the possible degradation in exchange for what. So I think vehicle to grid is absolutely going to happen. To me, the question is on what time scale and what's it going to take for this to be something that the consumers and OEMs are excited to do with their batteries? Right.

All right, I guess final question. Back on the technology side, what do we see in terms of technology innovation for EV charging? Obviously, there's tons of technology innovation in the batteries and the vehicles themselves. But in the chargers, is there a next wave of technology coming? What does it look like? What are we missing today? Apart from obviously your points earlier about reliability and uptime challenges, which need to be solved. What else might be coming?

And is there some future where EV Chargers experience some kind of tech breakthrough? So at least the way that we think about it from an investment standpoint is that we had a big first wave of companies that were really focused on building EV Chargers, software, and getting that infrastructure in the ground and doing it really well. So we've made a number of investments in that space, flow, green lots, Volta. These are folks that are building really great chargers, getting them out there, making sure they work. And now we're coming up on the wave of two things. One is, what is that possible next-gen charging technology like you're talking about? But two, what is technology that can now happen because we have a lot of chargers out there and because we have a lot more EVs out there? And on that point, I think there's going to be a lot of innovation that happens.

on driver experience. I think anyone who has an EB, which wouldn't include you, Shale, but they know that the driver experience has to improve. It needs to be interoperable. You can use your credit card for everything. It all needs to work. A bunch of companies will pop up in that space. And we're going to see a big proliferation, as I said, of the companies that are making sure all these chargers are networked together and they can be managed as a fleet. I think it's really exciting to see what will happen there and we're investing actively in that space. In terms of the actual charging tech, we're seeing a few things that are interesting. So one is pairing storage with chargers. And so as we've talked about, these are huge loads

that are coming up to the grid. That's not controversial. And so probably we're going to need to co-locate storage with a lot of these chargers. We're seeing some companies that are doing storage, integrating a storage solution from another provider and other companies that are providing a storage and charger product. And I think that that's something that's going to happen a lot more. We're also seeing just super fast charger technology happen. That's from a lot of the existing players like the flows and the charge points, coming out with faster and faster chargers. And then some other companies that are trying to leapfrog and come out with ultra, ultra fast charging. You know, the key there is that you have to make sure that the vehicles can actually

handle it as well as the grid. We're also keeping our eye on wireless charging. I get asked this question a lot of where we're at with wireless charging. I think we absolutely see this as being part of the solution, and it'll just come down to when the wireless charging will be fast enough and how much that's going to cost. So those are a few things that we're looking at when it comes to charging technology, but I do think it's going to be a little less about totally fundamental breakthroughs on new kinds of charging. And as I said, just charging that gets out there is cheap, affordable, and it works. Yeah, that seems right. All right. Well, those are all threads we can pull on another day.

I like that we started and ended this conversation by you giving me for not having any me yet. Thank you for that. I sort of knew that was coming when we decided to do this. episode, it won't be true for long, I promise. But Cassie, thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for having me. Great to have this combo. Cassie Bo is my colleague and a partner at Energy Impact Partners, where she focuses on mobility and vehicle electrification. So what did you think? Let us know, as always, you can find the show on Twitter at At CatalystPod. You can also find me there. If you like the show, go over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating or review. We always do appreciate it. This show is a co-production

of PostScript Media and Canary Media. You can head over to canarymedia.com for links and more info on today's topics. And as always, PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, which includes EV charging, advanced materials and manufacturing, and advanced computing. This episode, was produced by Daniel Waldorf and Delvin Abouaji, mixing by Greg Vilfrank and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. Our managing producer is Cecily Maza Martinez. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.