EV Charging Infrastructure Developers’ Lessons Learned (ACT Expo 2024 Recap)
At this year’s Advanced Clean Transportation Expo – the largest to date – Voltera CEO Matt Horton joined a panel of infrastructure developers to share insights into the EV charging depot development experience. Topics of discussion ranged from unique solutions to power challenges, the role of organizations like PACT (of which Voltera is a founding member), reliability, and the importance of regulatory reform.
Introducing Voltera, Matt highlighted some unique aspects of our Charging Infrastructure as a Service model, specifically how we tackle land acquisition, utility power, energy delivery, and site services. Other developers on the panel, in contrast, “Go much higher on the stack to in some cases even operating vehicles.” Matt explained, “We focus on the infrastructure on top of which customers build their businesses.”
Matt shared the story of Voltera’s development of the Einride Smartcharger Station in Los Angeles – the largest operational charging site for electric heavy-duty freight in North America. With 65 high-power charging stations and up to 11 MW of capacity, the site is capable of hosting up to 200 Class 8 trucks per day. Challenges the Voltera team had to overcome included the need to evaluate multiple sites, heavy upfront capital requirements, complex AHJ permitting process, and lengthy utility connection processes.
“Speed was critical and we were pleased to bring the site online as quickly as we did, particularly in that market,” Matt explained. From beginning to end, Voltera permitted, built, energized, and operationalized the site in under 18 months. “And it’s not just charging. It’s full facility operations – security and access control, site amenities for drivers, etc. Our turnkey solutions provide the fleet with peace of mind as our experts are focused on continued site optimization and operations.”
The Smartcharger Station, outside the Port of Long Beach, is an example of a customer-driven development. Most often, a customer approaches us with a need in a particular market and we undertake a site identification and development project to serve that need. “Voltera has 21 sites acquired and under development, and most of those are fully contracted,” Matt explained.
Voltera also does thesis-driven development in strategic locations where our data models show us there will be a need for charging infrastructure at scale. Those are “sites with available capacity” in the map below.
The other infrastructure developers on the panel – WattEV, Greenlane Infrastructure, and Zeem Solutions – described significantly different models.
“Owner operators make up a big portion of the freight transport industry,” explained WattEV co-founder and CEO Salim Youssefzadeh. “We wanted to become an infrastructure provider but realized that owner operators can’t afford the heavy capital investment required. So we developed a truck-as-a-service offering.” The company currently has 50 trucks in its fleet (Volvo, Daimler, Nikola, and BYD), and will have 180 by the end of year.
Greenlane Infrastructure – a $657 million joint venture between Daimler, Blackrock, and NextEra Energy – is acquiring land for new builds as well as “bolt-on” locations such as at truck stops. “Ours is a corridor-driven strategy,” explained CEO Patrick Macdonald-King. “We’re lighting up one corridor at a time, beginning with the corridor between the Port of Long Beach and Las Vegas.”
As for Zeem Solutions, co-founder and CEO Paul Gioupis said the company develops infrastructure at origin and end points such as ports and customer facilities. That includes multi-tenant depots (shared charging infrastructure at dedicated sites near key logistics hubs) and in-yard infrastructure (located at a single customer’s site).
Unique solutions to tough power challenges
Throughout the conference, a key theme was the challenge of procuring enough power for fleet charging at scale. Panelists described a variety of approaches to overcoming that challenge. “The Voltera team has deep expertise in the charging world, plus we spun out of a large data center developer that builds high reliability data centers with large power needs,” Matt explained. “The approaches used in data center development inform our strategies for developing high-capacity charging stations.”
WattEV’s Youssefzadeh described the company’s depot in Bakersfield, where they were able to procure enough land to build a 25 MW solar-powered microgrid, circumventing utility interconnection challenges. (The site does have a 6 MW grid connection.) In another unique approach, Zeem Solutions develops on the sites of decommissioned power plants where utility capacity still exists. “We just announced an installation at the Port of Long Beach where we have a 15 MW interconnection and can scale by 20-40 MW per transformer,” Gioupis explained. “At another decommissioned site we got a 33 MW interconnection.”
Chickens and eggs and the role of organizations like PACT
The newly formed PACT (Powering America’s Commercial Transportation) had a significant presence at ACT Expo, and Dawn Fenton, PACT board chair, moderated the infrastructure developers’ panel. Comprised of 24 companies from across commercial trucking and energy sectors, PACT is “a coalition focused on education and advocacy for accelerating the deployment of nationwide infrastructure for medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission vehicles.” In addition to Voltera, other founding members include Amazon, Cummins Inc., Daimler Truck North America, J.B. Hunt, Navistar, Inc., Penske Truck Leasing, Pilot Flying J, and Volvo Group North America, among others.
One of the key challenges PACT founding members and others in the industry have faced is the gap between electric vehicle rollouts and charging infrastructure availability. (The age-old chicken-or-egg problem.) For an update, Fenton asked the panelists, “Where do we stand today between the development of charging infrastructure and availability of EVs?”
Matt Horton said, “Having worked at vehicle OEMs and in charging, I can say timing almost never lines up perfectly. For quite a while as an industry we were waiting for viable ZEVs at scale; I don’t think that’s the challenge anymore. Reasonable volumes are starting to show up. But in a lot of places in the country infrastructure is still a challenge.” Matt explained how Voltera is “investing ahead of demand to make sure infrastructure is in place when it’s needed” and that “one reason PACT is great is that it facilitates tight relationships between OEMs and developers.”
Ensuring reliability
Infrastructure challenges like real estate and power dominated the discussion at ACT Expo, but charger reliability was also a hot topic. Greenlane’s Macdonald-King shared the perspective that the industry’s charger reliability “black eye” occurred with passenger vehicles, but that the technology for commercial applications is superior.
Matt Horton agreed, but said the industry as a whole still has more to do to improve charger reliability overall. “I’ve lived through two DC fast charger development programs,” he said (at Rivian and Proterra). “So I know how difficult it is to build great charging hardware.” But, he added, “Most hardware available today still isn’t reliable enough.”
Matt explained he’s optimistic charging hardware will improve, but that’s not the only way to ensure high uptime. “Lots of things can be done to achieve uptime. You have to build a system that’s reliable even if the hardware is not. That’s another approach we took from the data center industry – architecting the charging site (e.g. with redundant power feeds, overcapacity on chargers) so that if a power feed or charger goes down, vehicles can still charge. Also top-notch service that responds to issues quickly and effectively.”
The importance of regulatory reform
When asked for ideas to solve power- and real estate-related infrastructure challenges, panelists talked about regulatory reform to allow utilities to invest proactively ahead of demand, and to streamline AHJ permitting processes. “We all have a long list of suggestions for our utility partners, but it’s important to recognize they have a very difficult job,” Matt Horton explained. “In many cases the utilities’ hands are tied because of how they’re regulated. It would really help if they could make proactive investments. It’s no great mystery where trucks go and we know where centers of power demand will be.”
“In addition to utility timelines, permitting is another key challenge we face in developing sites,” Matt said. “We’re talking about building 10 MW facilities for heavy-duty trucks, and in most jurisdictions there’s nothing in the zoning code for that. California has been a leader in enacting policies to help encourage local jurisdictions to move faster. We’d love to see more of that.” (For details on those policies, see page 7 of our Playbook 1: Real Estate Identification & Acquisition at Scale.)
Bottom line
Despite a discussion focused on the challenges associated with developing EV charging infrastructure at scale, the panel ended with optimism. “All the things you’ve heard us talking about today are real challenges,” Matt Horton said. “But we have great partners and customers committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, so we know we’re going to overcome the challenges. It’s hard, but it’s straightforward. We have the technologies; we just need to make sure we’re aligned and progressing.”