Contentious Curbside EV Charging in Urban Neighborhoods

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It’s Electric Product

Top ten takeaways

1. Curbside Charging for Urban Areas: Nathan King’s startup, It’s Electric, focuses on providing curbside EV charging solutions for urban areas where residents often don’t have access to driveways or private garages for charging their vehicles.
2. Innovative Design and Business Model: The charging stations are compact, untethered (bring-your-own-cord), and designed to minimize their footprint in the public right of way. They are powered by nearby buildings, avoiding the need for complex connections to the city’s electrical grid.
3. Equity and Accessibility: The mission is to ensure equitable access to EV charging, especially in urban areas. Nathan highlights that urban residents who rely on street parking should have the same charging opportunities as suburban residents with private driveways.
4. Future of Urban EV Charging: Nathan envisions a future where only a few strategically placed curbside chargers on city blocks meet the needs of residents. He emphasizes that EV charging will not require every parking space but will be a regular part of urban infrastructure.
5. Decarbonization and Pollution Reduction: Curbside charging in dense urban areas is seen as a way to address both pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, targeting neighborhoods that can benefit the most from a reduction in vehicle emissions.
6. Addressing Charging Deserts: Many low- to middle-income neighborhoods in cities like New York are “charging deserts,” meaning they lack accessible public EV charging infrastructure. Nathan argues for focusing on areas that lack such resources to maximize impact.
7. Challenges of Fast Charging Stations: Nathan points out that while DC fast chargers are needed, they are expensive, use a massive amount of electricity, and take up significant space. His company’s model uses slower, overnight charging, which is more feasible for cities’ electrical capacities.
8. Curbside Charging’s Role in Urban Design: Nathan sees EV charging as an urban planning and design problem rather than solely a transportation issue. The challenge is finding a balance between vehicle infrastructure and public spaces.
9. Modularity and Future-Proofing: The It’s Electric chargers are designed to be easily installed, modular, and removable. If the technology changes, the chargers can be upgraded or replaced without significant disruption.
10. Holistic Approach to Public and Private Collaboration: The business model involves partnerships with local property owners to install chargers, fostering community support and easing the permitting process. The goal is to provide charging infrastructure without relying on continuous public subsidies.

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The offending Tesla

This Tesla owner has a street-accessible charger, and drapes the cord across the street using a non-ADA accessible wiremold (I measured). This street leads to two schools, a NYPD precinct house, and is on the same block as a subway stop which sees at least 16,000 straphangers use the stop per day. It isn’t clear if this is legal or not, as the DOT and NYPD haven’t taken action when I asked them. It’s probably in a strange grey-zone where this isn’t expressly prohibited, but not necessarily allowed.

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Guest Bio

Nathan King, Co-Founder, CEO

Nathan is an architect with a passion for sustainable cities. Over the last two decades, Nathan has designed and managed numerous large-scale and complex construction projects, with particular focus in New York City. Before co-founding itselectric, Nathan was the senior technical architect for SOM’s Health and Science practice, and led the team designing the new NY City Public Health Laboratory in Harlem.

Transcript

Nathan King: [00:00:00] This is our basic product offering. Curbside charger. So the idea is that this is what would get installed next to a dedicated EV charging space on a city street. And in other contexts as well, but this is our primary focus right now is EV charging for people who don’t have driveways.

Welcome

Journey with Purpose: Welcome to the journey with purpose. My name is Randy Plemel

last year, it snowed in Queens, New York. It’s a normal thing that happens. And like any normal weekday, I was walking the kids to school. What wasn’t normal today was seeing a backwards parked Tesla. With a charging cord in a wire mold draped across the sidewalk. I was originally very angry that this person decided to obstruct the public space for their own private means using a non ADA wire mold, which was both very tall, not very wide. If you [00:01:00] were pushing a stroller, you would bump into it. If you were in a wheelchair, it would have obstruct to you. I was really unclear if there’s legal or not, or how safe it was because electricity and slush really don’t mix well. And really any intrusions into the shared public space by cars always raise my blood pressure.

We already allocate too much space to cars, especially in New York where less than half people actually own cars. Now my starting position is that we should not cede any additional space, the car infrastructure in New York, because we are a neighborhood of dense buildings. And we have some of the best public transportation in the world. Now long island city, less than half the people own cars.

Most people actually walk or take the subway or bus. And generally my point of view is that we need to take back the streets for people, [00:02:00] not just give it over to cars.

So I asked around about, you know, whether or not it’s, it’s legal, what’s the standards. And it’s really not clear that this driver was doing anything illegal or unethical. And this is how I met Nathan King. He’s the founder of a Brooklyn based startup called it’s electric. He and his company is trying to find a balance between the virtuous decarbonisation in both mobility and in our life. And urban living through the creation of new electric car charging systems that aim to reduce the footprint, but allow people to charge their cars overnight.

Now I started this conversation with him being really open to my skepticism of curbside charging.

And I think Nathan did a really good job of, of hearing me out and having a really good conversation. So this conversation is edited down from about an hour and a half And this is episode 25 of journey with purpose. So I met Nathan at the Brooklyn Navy yard [00:03:00] at his start-ups office. So Nathan’s really great to meet you. Can you introduce yourself?

Nathan King: My name is Nathan King. I’m co founder of It’s Electric. We’re a Brooklyn based EV charging startup here in New Lab. And what we’re doing is bringing EV charging to cities for people who park their cars on the street. And we have a unique business model and hardware configuration that lets us use buildings to power EV chargers.

So the Tesla driver in Queens, they would be able to use this charger rather than stretching out a cord and putting up cones.

We really thought about EV charging from the perspective of being an urban design and urban planning problem and not a car problem and not a transportation problem.

And so the charger itself, doesn’t look like what you would normally see as an EV charger in North America. It’s just a 7 inch by 7 inch stainless steel extrusion with a sort of cap on top of it. And a little light, a little ring light [00:04:00] with its electric logo. This is actually the RFID reader. And then there’s a socket with a little hinged door on the front of it, shaped like a circle. this socket is what’s different about our charger hardware. There is no cord that’s permanently attached to the charger.

So it’s what we call a bring your own cord or untethered cable model. one end goes into the charger post. So I’m just putting this one end of this two ended cord into the round socket. And then the other end goes into your vehicle and then you have an app or an RFID card and that starts your charging session. And then you use the same app or RFID card to end the charging session. this unlocks the cord from the charger post. You put it back in your car.

Vision

Nathan King: What the EV charging actually looks like is an important part of imagining the future and thinking about what it should be The vision of the future is to make owning an electric [00:05:00] vehicle easier for drivers than owning a gas car. And also a more sustainable and cleaner future for the cities that this is happening in, right? So that, that’s the reason we’re doing it. what we think is in the next couple of decades, you will start to see this kind of charger configuration appearing on city streets. And it will become part of the urban landscape.

It’s not going to be every single parking spot because people don’t need to charge constantly. you’ll see Maybe two, maybe four, maybe six of these on a given city block. And that’s where those drivers who don’t have off street parking, so they don’t have to stretch extension cords over the sidewalk, that’s where they will park their car and plug in and charge.

This is not the only way electrification. There will be other sort of models. There are different ways that people can charge a vehicle. But this is trying to target the [00:06:00] areas where, right now, there’s the least amount of available charging, and where it will have the biggest impact.

Alternatives

Journey with Purpose: So we’re, we’re a new lab right now, which is an incubator in the Navy yard, and there’s a bunch of different charging systems. Can you talk us through this?

Nathan King: These are two other companies that are operating in the curbside EV charging space. This company is based in North America. They’re called Volt Post. And you can see their solution is a bit different. They wrap this charger body around an existing piece of street furniture. So This is a lamppost, and this charger wraps around it. able to utilize some of that conduit that’s already there. And so this doesn’t take up a new space on the sidewalk. It’s occupying something that’s already there. typology? It’s a retrofit. the power availability, and we’ll talk about that in terms of what, another differentiator that we have at It’s Electric, that’s something. That still needs to be addressed. Most lampposts don’t have enough power to make a decent EV charger.

So there’s a complication around how you do that. This is a European [00:07:00] model. And you can see, so volt post has the two attached cords to it. This is a much smaller and compact model. This is basically the size of a bread box. It gets bolted on to, also an existing lamppost. Also, trying to take advantage of that piece of real estate that’s already been occupied for urban infrastructure, but it’s much smaller and much more compact because of the detachable cable. So this has the same socket based round socket with the hinged door on it that our chargers have. It just takes up less space.

Curbside Charging

Journey with Purpose: Okay, can we talk about curbside and how even if you put these chargers curbside, you’re taking space away from the sidewalk. And can you talk about sort of the context of curbside charging in the states?

Nathan King: When you think about curbside, it, there are different variations of those two themes. You’ve got your pedestal chargers or your post chargers like what we have, and you have attached cord chargers. New York City does have a curbside [00:08:00] charging pilot that is being done through Con Ed. They’ve installed 50 dual port chargers throughout the five boroughs. Those are a similar typology to what Volpost has. They have an attached cord. They’re mounted mostly on their own dedicated pedestals, although in Los Angeles they are mounted to the streetlights.

New York City has their own EV fast charging sort of network that they’re trying to build.

Nathan King: right now in the U. S. 85 to 90 percent of EV charging happens at home. So drivers are not going to EV charging gas stations and plugging in generally speaking. It does happen when you drive between cities. Sometimes people get free charging when they buy the car. And so they use those chargers, but mostly what you’re doing is you’re plugging your car in at home.

That’s great. Works out really well. I never have to go to a gas station again, using scare quotes. I never have to go to an EV charging station again. I’m just plugging my car in. Every morning I wake up, I’ve got a full battery. That kind of convenience. Is what [00:09:00] makes owning an electric vehicle attractive for suburban drivers. But people who live in cities don’t have access to that. the idea for It’s Electric is looking out my window and saying why isn’t there just a charger on my street the way that my friends who live in the suburbs have a charger for in their driveway

About Me

Journey with Purpose: So how does your life and your background and your expertise impacted it’s electric and your goal on helping decarbonize mobility.

Nathan King: I think it’s important, as we have this conversation, that you’re talking to somebody who used to participate in critical mass rides as very much an advocate for changing the way that we design our streetscapes so that it’s not car focused. And for me, that hasn’t changed.

I think that there’s things on the urban design level that we still need to improve, as well as the policy level. New York City, famously, most of our parking spaces are free. So we don’t charge [00:10:00] drivers anything. There’s no residential parking permit. It’s just free space that we give to drivers. So I am also suspicious of whether or not we should continue to encourage people to park their private vehicles on public city streets. But I came to the conclusion that always has to be tradeoffs in this dialogue. one thing I was never certain of was, To what extent do we want to reduce the number of parking spaces on city streets? Is it 100%? Is it 80%? I don’t really know what I would say. New York City has a goal of around 20 percent reduction of parking spaces over the next two decades.

So the political reality, as well as just like my own thoughts on this, we’re still going to have cars parked on city streets. there’s not any realistic scenario where you’re imagining like no cars parked on city streets.

After, being somebody that cared very much about, what we [00:11:00] call alternative forms of transportation ended up getting a car and made my life a whole lot easier. And I think that a lot of people experience that at different points in their life lot of people that drive cars, Can’t walk to the subway, right? Like they just can’t, and those people exist in a lot of numbers.

Product Market Fit

Journey with Purpose: I’m really interested in where you think curbside EV charging should have a home. Now my feeling is that in dense neighborhoods, a curbside and sidewalk itself should be for people. And that car base infrastructure shouldn’t be allowed. That way we give space back over to people and we don’t induce demand. that being said for your product, where do you think it should be installed as both the right place for EV charging and the right place for your product?

Nathan King: Where we are particularly interested in deploying our chargers is actually further away from commercial centers, actually. So this is something that we can talk about in terms of our position on the right way and wrong way to do right [00:12:00] away charging.

First of all, especially in these early days of deployment every charger that you put in should have the greatest amount of impact on GHG emissions and pollution. not going to find those drivers in your commercial and, neighborhoods adjacent to the downtowns.

So think less Brooklyn Heights and more Jackson Heights. That’s where you look at census track data for vehicle miles traveled for your commute. Um, And that’s where you actually want to be as an EV charging provider because you’ll get more utilization of the charger. So if people are putting more miles on their car, they’re going to need the charger more, but then they’re also, you’re also taking that many more emissions and pollution off of our city roadways. focusing on the neighborhoods that have the greatest need.

The other thing about the right way, wrong way is looking at those neighborhoods, let’s say on the edges of the outer boroughs. First is that’s where what we call right now are charging deserts are.

So if you look at maps of [00:13:00] where public charging, I’m doing scare quotes, public charging is available. It’s all clustered in basically downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg. If you look at those chargers more carefully, you see a lot of them are actually in parking garages. So they’re not truly public.

You have to pay to park there. And then there just happens to be an EV charger. I think that works for a lot of those neighborhoods, because I don’t think people tend to commute when they own a car and they live in the downtown, or they live in a neighborhood like Brooklyn Heights. They have that car for their convenience and maybe get away on the weekend, but they’re not taking it to work every day.

Why would they? They have a great subway system that’s right next to them. But when you go further out, that’s where you start to see not only the availability of any kind of EV charging, whether it’s in a garage or not, it just doesn’t exist at all, and that’s also then where you say to make this model work for people who are in low middle income neighborhoods, You can’t expect them to be paying for a private garage parking space [00:14:00] and the charger as well.

It just becomes economically unfeasible.

It’s Electric

Nathan King: So when I bought my first car, it was a ICE vehicle. And actually the story of It’s Electric is wrapped up in that sort of like journey of trying to figure out what to buy. And realizing and actually it hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years.

The closest publicly available EV charger was about a mile away in a garage, and I’m in Crown Heights. I would have had to walk to Prospect Heights, park my car, walk home, pay for the parking, pay for the charging. When I’m ready to get the car, I’ve got to walk a mile to get the car. It just was like, no, I can’t do that.

I’m getting a car to make my life easier,

Charging equity

Journey with Purpose: So what about equity? Now, my view is that we want to create the conditions where you don’t need a car to get around. You can use public transportation, you can use bikes, either acoustic or electric, or you can take public transportation. What’s your view on mobility, charging, EVs, and equity.

Nathan King: We want to address as a company about the right way of doing it. There is a very important [00:15:00] question about access and equity. So what neighborhoods and what demographics makes.

Are going to have access to E. V. Chargers. Is it is our E. V. Is just going to become a luxury product that is concentrated in our suburban areas because they don’t have to worry about charging that much because they have their garage charging and then off limits to people who live in cities and don’t have driveways.

I don’t think that is the right answer. actually think it should be done the other way around. I think we should be putting more investment into people having charging access in urban areas because of the disproportionate benefits around Pollution EVs, even though they’re expensive to buy, they still, even now, are less expensive to own mile per mile.

So there’s an economic benefit that can go back to these communities as well. So really I think that part of the question, this equity question, ties into how do we treat our curbside. And if this is really the best way to get people to switch from a gas car to an electric car. This is one way that we can begin to really aggressively [00:16:00] address that equity question.

Not solve all the problems

Journey with Purpose: So it’s probably really easy to take any one product or solution and expect it to solve everything. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

Nathan King: I don’t think we are trying to solve all of the problems. We believe is actually EV charging should be a privately funded transition. Now, I realize right now there’s billions of dollars literally being put into the EV charging industry. But that, I believe, will stop after the next five or so years. The industry just needs some incentive to get started, overcome the incentives that still go into subsidizing fossil fuels. So this is a way to try to correct the imbalance. And I think that we should set things up. Cities should look for business models that don’t require continued financial support.

We need this sort of one time shot in the arm to get things going, but that we shouldn’t structure our business models to be reliant on public [00:17:00] subsidy. And I think actually the infrastructure law is doing a good job at that. It’s just to cover some of these upfront costs while the industry gets its legs for us as well.

Like we’re taking advantage of grants and subsidies where we can, but we can still make the unit economics work once we’re at a certain scale. Because it works just like any other business. People need to fuel their vehicles. They’ll pay for that. We can use that money to cover our operations and reinvest into new infrastructure.

And so I think that’s how it should work. I’m saying all of this like it’s obvious, but it’s not. Cities are not, cities are trying to figure out how to do EV charging and they’re thinking about models of maybe we need to pay a company to operate and maintain an EV charger that drivers can use for free.

Atlanta’s looking at something like this. So they’re putting EV chargers in the ground and they’re gonna let drivers in the neighborhood use them for free. I think that’s great from an equity perspective. I’m not sure how sustainable it is. So there is a debate going on about do we [00:18:00] want the cities to actually be the network operators of our chargers?

The way that we have, operate our subways? I don’t know, some cities are thinking about doing that. Some utilities are thinking about doing that. I don’t think they want to. I don’t think anybody wants to. So we look at more recent examples like bike share, city bike is a privately funded solution that is solving an infrastructure problem.

It’s being done in partnership with the city. It’s using parking spots on city streets and to great benefit. I use city bike all the time, like we think of ourselves in that same way. there’s tons of examples of these overlaps between private and public where private industry is using a public asset for the public good. But in such a way where the financial model means that the city isn’t paying for it. there’s still a lot of debate about what the right way to do it actually

Right of Way Impact

Journey with Purpose: So while I’m not wholly convinced that we should be putting in curbside charging in dense neighborhoods. Can you speak a little bit about how your [00:19:00] design impacts the public right away. Accessibility and the like,

Nathan King: You got to look at our charger. First of all it’s compact. It’s small. So Right off the bat, we’re trying to take up as little amount of space in the right of way as we can.

There are accessibility issues around this. Every time you put a charger in, you’re taking up space that could block people from getting past it. So there’s a very rigorous methodology when you look at a specific site that we apply to make sure we’re not creating an accessibility issue. We want to maintain a certain width for people to have an accessible path.

We want to make the charger itself accessible, right? We want everybody to be able to use it. The form factor of the charger that you’re using is important. And if you contrast it to what we’ve designed to what other kinds of charging that you see in the right of way things that kind of look like gas pumps.

We think that’s not the right way. We think you should strive to take up as little space as possible. This is our first pass at it. We’re going to keep getting that footprint smaller and [00:20:00] smaller. We’ve seen companies in the EU and the UK where there’s probably about 40, 000 curbside chargers already deployed that are much more compact and much more elegant.

They’ve just had the advantage of doing a couple decades of engineering on this problem. So we’ll get there as well. think we’re in a good place to start out. But there needs to be this sort of continuous improvement. We thought also very much about this problem that you’re posing around future proofing.

So we have a very modular unit. This thing, you can put it down in the ground in about a, about two days. That’s our installation process. So it’s minimally disruptive. And it’s very easy to remove it. You just open up the access panel. You have to know what you’re doing, but you can disconnect it and move it in a few hours.

So if these things do become obsolete, it’s not going to be a big deal to remove them. I don’t know if they’re going to become obsolete in 10 years or 50, but if we assume that private vehicles persist on city roadways, and if we if we acknowledge that they’ll need to get electricity from somewhere.

We have [00:21:00] the ability to change the hardware to allow it to be some other kind of connection source. Some people are advocating for induction charging. So wireless charging that would actually be out in the roadway that has pros and cons. But for us, that’s just a switch in the hardware configuration.

It’s more about building the relationships, finding the right locations. And doing some of that subgrade infrastructure work that allows us to have that future proof ability. But I think cities should be thinking about that when they put out their RFPs. What will these chargers be doing in 10 years? Is there a way to upgrade them?

I frustrate myself because I’m always saying it’s a, it’s an all of the above or it’s an, it depends like I’m constantly framing, of my problems is that I don’t have a strong conviction that there is one thing for any given problem some of that is born out of my experience working in architecture, Is putting multifamily housing in cities. Is it a policy thing? Yeah. Is it an architecture thing? Yeah, it’s a design thing. Is it? Is it a financially? Yeah, because [00:22:00] developers need to know that they can make money on the buildings they’re building. It’s all of these things.

The transition to clean energy. Same thing.

Journey with Purpose: It seems like this is actually. either a pure policy problem or a collective action problem. Do you have some thoughts on this?

Nathan King: Sometimes in these conversations about investing in infrastructure and whether or not we want to set aside things in the public space for Private vehicles. It reminds me a little bit of the debate between the people who are advocating for nuclear versus solar, Like solar is cheap. It’s available now.

We can deploy it quickly has problems, right? People don’t want it. It takes up space. There’s an issue about whether or not you can reuse the panels like it’s not a perfect solution. It just happens to be super cheap and super deployable nuclear has its own problems, too. There’s never going to be a one thing.

So It is a policy thing. I think that cities are struggling with it.

They’re trying to figure out what the right formulas and there’s no examples of it right now. Nobody’s doing it. there’s 40, 000 chargers in the [00:23:00] UK. We probably have around 800 curbside chargers in the entire country. And we’re about three times the size. So like we don’t, we haven’t figured it out yet.

What I think we’re doing differently is we’re just trying to think about these problems. In this sort of holistic, it’s not just one thing kind of way we’re trying to solve the technical problems to the best that we can today. We’re trying to inform the policy debate based on what we’ve learned.

Journey with Purpose: can you speak a little bit of how your product is a little bit different and how it fits into the larger EV charging in New York city?

Nathan King: The other thing that’s different about us is how we power the chargers. New York City, as I mentioned has a hundred dual port chargers throughout the five boroughs.

Those chargers are all connected directly to Con Ed’s power feeds in the roadway. That process requires an interconnection agreement, or an interconnection process, let’s say, between the charger itself and the power. And from an infrastructure perspective, it also requires deeper digging, it requires a transformer, a connection box a meter.

[00:24:00] All of that stuff has to be located in the right of way somewhere. In New York City, they sunk it underneath the ground. In other cities, it just gets popped up on the sidewalk. So it takes up more space. the way that we’re doing it in the U. S. What we’re proposing to do and what our charge is the way that we’ve installed them today is instead we pull power from the adjacent buildings.

And so we’re finding electrical capacity at the correct voltage that’s already metered and we’re pulling that out to the curbside for a charger that anybody in the community can use. So no interconnection agreement. The utilities care about what we’re doing, but we don’t need to go through an interconnection process.

not going to tell Con Ed I’m putting an electrical dryer in my house, right? You need to get a building permit, but not. Deal with Con Ed. And Con Ed’s not the enemy in this discussion. We love Con Ed. They just have a lot to do as do all utilities, especially in municipal areas.

And because we can model different unit economics for like, how much is this charger going to make? We think it’s going to be there for 10 years. We can realize a certain payback period and a certain profit off of [00:25:00] that charger. We can actually do it at no cost to the host property, and we could do it at no cost to the city.

So we’re going to make money by selling power to drivers. We don’t need anybody to pay for our capex or for our equipment cost. And then on top of that, what we’re doing is we are sharing a portion of the revenue with the host property. So now we’re actually forming partnerships with people in the community.

So I’m going through this business model with you because I think it addresses a lot of these different sort of threads that are pinned on the wall. We’re building community support at to some level because we’re not just going in a top down approach and telling people we’re gonna put a charger here Whether you want it there or not We’re finding actually host properties that are willing to actually host one of our chargers and by the way They can be homes businesses schools churches, but That partnership will help us politically. It also makes the permitting processes easier because we’re taking out a permit on that property owner’s behalf or an improvement on their right of way rather than, doing [00:26:00] some sort of what you might call eminent domain process. Not really, but that’s what the way that it was done before.

So that also helps them that larger policy discussion because now cities have A way of looking at this. The private sector is solving this infrastructure problem for

Tesla Supercharger

Journey with Purpose: So what type of competitive space does it’s electric and other publicly funded charging systems exist? And how does it connect to say like the Tesla supercharger We should probably talk about the Tesla supercharging versus what we’re proposing, because I think this is something that we’re also trying to communicate when we think about what the right way to do it is.

Nathan King: Curbside skeptics would say people should just go to EV charging stations and that’s where they fuel their car the way that vehicles do today. But there’s a problem with this. The, and the problem is electrical capacity. Gasoline is a great fuel because it’s easy to transport and you just fill up these tanks and people can fuel their vehicles in about five minutes and then they’re on their way.

obviously so many other problems that happened because of that [00:27:00] basic distribution of power, but that’s how it works today. And so people are thinking why don’t you just do that with superchargers? the problem is that we don’t have enough electrical capacity today for our current demands, Forget about EVs, forget about the electrification of everything. We’re already at our limit. We’re already overstraining our grid. A 15 stall fast charging station is using the same amount of power as a mid rise commercial building, it’s not just a straightforward thing to occupy a very expensive square of real estate and try to make money off of selling people, pennies of, Power, there’s also the cost, right? What we are doing is a lower voltage, slower charging. And so what we’re doing is allowing people to do long term parking, especially overnight charging when the grid is not at its peak demand. again, that’s how most people charge in the suburbs, plugging in, charging overnight, slower, longer duration.

So we’re just up against the reality that the city’s can’t provide the power for the DC fast charging station. [00:28:00] Simply not there. It costs 10 to 20 times more to put a single charge port in. That’s a DC fast charger compared to our level 2 slower charger. So we’re putting more chargers in, they charge slower, but we can put, up to 10 to 20 times as many chargers. And then the other thing is E. V. Batteries are only getting bigger. Charging speeds are going up, but again, it’s this power capacity issue, and it’s still going to take you about 20 minutes, even with the fastest possible charger. And that’s not what we have today, and I don’t think we’re gonna have it anytime soon.

Separately to there’s this why do we want to replicate this model of dedicating our street corners? And, like in within cities, do we really want to take up a whole bunch of real estate with E. V. Charging? So I think there’s also like a question about whether it makes sense to replicate the gas station model, even if you could.

That’s It’s not to say that we don’t need those fast chargers. We do. It’s got to actually be both. And when you look at NREL and Department of Energy, they suggest a 20 [00:29:00] 80 split. So 20 percent of charging happens at the DC Fast charging 80 percent is that slower overnight charging, .

FUTURE

Journey with Purpose: as you were making the case for smaller and longer duration charging at say more locations, what type of future might this bring, if this product comes to life.

Nathan King: We can fundamentally change the way we think about fueling, not just passenger vehicles, but all kinds of vehicles once we remove gasoline from the equation.

Because the source of power for those vehicles is electricity, which in cities is literally everywhere. So there’s opportunities to charge vehicles no matter where you are in your city. What I’m also excited about is that sort of flexibility that then comes with electricity. So gasoline goes in one direction. It goes from the tank to the car. Electricity can very easily go back and forth between the car and the power supply. And so we think about resiliency and the possibility for the vehicle batteries, which are huge. There are enormous batteries in these cars. The [00:30:00] power potential that they have to push power back into the grid is actually going to be a resiliency solution to this looming demand that we’re focused on.

So vehicle to grid, vehicle to home technology, that’s something that’s very easy to do in the suburbs. It’s trickier to do in the cities. We need to put the infrastructure in place to make sure that again, we’re addressing this equity question and actually we would get much more benefit from this sort of flexibility.

Also excited about solar installations, supplementing the grid and attaching to the vehicles. And I’m also really excited about the distributed charging network to actually charge micromobility. We don’t have that as part of our charger now, but it’s something that we’re looking at. Like it’s really easy to put 120 volts connector onto it and charge last mile vehicles scooters. The city’s trying really hard to figure out how to shift that charging behavior away from the insides of buildings. And I think again, it’s not just gonna be one thing that solves it. I think we have to try lots of different things.

On the policy side, if I’m issuing an RFP and I’m a city. [00:31:00] I would ask the EV charging company, if they’re going to use that public space, if they have plans around micromobility. Is there a way to encourage other kinds of mode shift as part of that and not just be this amenity, let’s say, for people who have a car.

Goodbye

Nathan King: My name is Nathan King. I’m co founder of It’s Electric. we’re a Brooklyn based EV charging startup here in New Lab. And what we’re doing is bringing EV charging to cities for people who park their cars on the street.

Outro

Journey with Purpose: My thanks to Nathan King for his time speaking with me about his business it’s electric.

I continue to be at the very least cautious. Or at the most absolutest, uh, car infrastructure on sidewalks and in the public realm.

My biggest worries on all this is when we in place infrastructure. The concrete, the pipes, the time, the investment. That is all needed to safely move electrons into cars. Then it entrenches car [00:32:00] dominance in the streets, and it’s hard to change that there’s a sunk cost fallacy. There’s intertia. There’s policy winners that are all impediments to change and returning to a moment in time. Where people come first. And then vehicles on our street. I don’t think people understand that in the sixties, a quirk of regulation. Allowed people to park over night in the city streets. Which has entrenched free parking of, you know, 3 million parking spots in New York that go to this very day and it’s hard to roll back those sort of changes.

It’s really easy to get into a scarcity mindset around mobility and streetscape policy. There’s only so much street between buildings. Hopefully, we’re not building more street. We tried that we know building more street induces car demand. And we know that there’s a lot of really bad externalities [00:33:00] from cars.

There are amazing tools, but. The increase in asthma, the increase of death and injuries caused by cars. The increased cost of owning a car. there’s just so many externalities that in many places in the us and our cities, we should not be prioritizing personal vehicles. We should be figuring out a way to return streets to people.

That being said, I’m, I’m glad that people like Nathan are working on this issue. You know, we we need to decarbonize our society. We need to electrify everything, but like everything Nathan said, it’s, there’s a bunch of different policy trade-offs. Now every time I see this Tesla parked backwards and draping a charging cord over the sidewalk, I think this is a policy failure is a failure that this person needs to drive in a very dense location. It’s a policy failure that They’re taking up space. That is for the [00:34:00] public is a policy failure that this is an obstruction in the public right away that I have personally seen people trip and fall on. And I just think it’s something that we can do better.

I want to thank Nathan and it’s electric for spending time with us.

This has been another episode of journey with purpose. This is episode 25. Wow. 25 episodes. That’s awesome. So please do share like heart, et cetera, versus episode these sort of non-monetary things help keep the program running. Costs you nothing but a few seconds of your time, but it really does fuel our creative drive.

a reminder that all opinions you hear from me today, isn’t necessarily the opinions of our employer. We don’t speak for them, but you knew that

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