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By Eileen Falkenberg-Hull
Senior Editor, Autos, Travel and Lifestyle
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In 2018, Electrify America (EA) opened its first charging outpost in Chicopee, Massachusetts. At the time, there were approximately 1.1 million electrified vehicles on the road in the U.S., and only one-third of them had a plug. Today, there are four times as many, and more plug-ins than ever. EA has responded in kind, operating over 5,000 chargers across North America.
The growth curve in battery-electric vehicle (BEV) adoption has grown slower than many anticipated, but charging providers and automakers need to plan years in the future.
"We really looked at the market in terms of what do consumers need and consumers want? Basically, if they're going to get into electric vehicles, they want to have the comfort that they can drive anywhere, no matter what their life situation is, whether they have own single family home, or don't live in an apartment or move around a lot or travel long distances," Robert Barrosa, President and CEO of Electrify America, told Newsweek.
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"The only way to do that, in our mind, is to really make ubiquitous ultra or hyper-fast charging and that really provides the comfort, right, and the trust the consumer needs to get into that electric vehicle. So that's been our mission, to really make this ubiquitous across the country, not only the U.S., but also Canada, through our sister company, Electrify Canada," he continued.
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Ultra-fast and hyper-fast charging are interchangeable terms that refer to charging a vehicle at speeds of 150-350 kilowatts (kW). Some vehicles on the road today, and many coming in the future, are able to regularly charge at those speeds.
"We built the infrastructure for the future. And that is really paying off well for us as a company. We knew where the automakers were going to go," Barrosa said.
Those automakers, and their vehicles, are expanding their footprint for battery-electric vehicle sales beyond the coasts. EA has made moves to keep up. "You can drive from West Coast to East Coast, from north to south, important corridor routes, vacation routes and things like that [utilizing the EA network]," he shared.
Today, the company services 47 states with 1,000 unique locations.
The future of charging, Barrosa said, is more civilized than a charger in a parking lot, and EA is already rolling that new model out in the U.S.
"We took a lot of those early lessons from the early years, and we then worked with a certain charging manufacturer to bring all those learnings together to help derive better operational efficiency," Barrosa explained. The company has installed new chargers that have "pretty high" reliability and improved its charger maintenance.
"We've also built, and continue to build out, our service network across the country, [to] respond more quickly to any type of issue that may happen, and jump to the next one," Barrosa said.
That progress is because of EA's technology laboratory outside of Washington D.C. "We've done over 45,000 hours of testing since 2018 with different automakers. A lot of automakers, before they release the car, they actually bring it to our lab to do a lot of interoperability testing... And then we have a development lab where we work on the next-generation products we're going to bring to market, or new features that we're going to bring to market, either an existing technology or a new technology that's coming forward," the CEO said.
EA is also working to lessen the impact of electric vehicle charging on the nation's electrical grid. The company has developed technologies surrounding battery storage. "We've deployed over 170 battery systems across 170 different sites," Barrosa said, explaining that the company is investing and deploying to "help keep costs down for the consumers, as well as mitigate impacts to the grid themselves." The batteries store energy during low usage points in the day, when the cost of drawing the energy is low, then expel the energy when it's needed.
Next-generation charging sites are also part of EA's future plans. "A lot of our early stations tended to be about four stalls... Now we're building much bigger. Some of our earlier sites, like Baker, California [is] a 12-stall site. Santa Clara is a 14-stall site. We just opened one up in San Diego, Mission Valley. It's a 20-stall location," Barrosa said.
The company's flagship location is an indoor charging site in San Francisco, just off Interstate 80 near the Bay Bridge. It's a 20-stall hyper-fast charging site that delivers amenities customers want alongside charging capability. A similar location is planned for Santa Monica, California, just off Interstate 10.
Barrosa doesn't foresee EA getting into the Class 8 tractor-trailer charging game, instead preferring to service clients from the passenger car and last-mile delivery vehicle space, including Uber and Lyft drivers.
Rather, he and the company he leads are preparing for a future in the U.S. that is foretold by technology developments in China. Barrosa believes that the future of electric vehicle charging is corded, via plugs, not induction, and that charging will happen at exceptionally high rates compared to what is available today.
"We're already seeing charging speed start to increase; many, many vehicles pushing 200-300 kW and higher. We're already starting to deploy 400-kW units to take the power a little bit higher. But I think as we get to the end of the decade, we'll see certainly 600-, if not 800-kW charging capability coming to market in vehicles," he said.
Though the future isn't clear, Barrosa is: "We need to make sure we're always thinking about the infrastructure and bringing the matching infrastructure to the market to be able to maximize that customer experience."
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