6 ms·

Everything I've Learnt About the Public EV Charging Businesss

32 points by decryption 4y ago

decryption 4y ago
I co-founded two EV startups in Australia in 2019 and 2020 that failed at their mission of installing more EV chargers in this emerging market (less than 1% of new car sales are EVs compared to 5% in the US and 10%+ in Europe) and didn't install a single charger. I did however, learn a fair bit about EV charging - the software that runs them, choosing locations, the electrical needs, how to install chargers, etc. - that someone else with a bit more business sense and access to capital might find useful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- insomniacity 4y ago
  Thanks for the interesting info. As you didn’t want to go into the failure there, would you be willing to explain more here? You mentioned some missed out on the government grants - was that the main cause?
  - decryption 4y ago
    With EV Up it was a rotten co-founder that didn’t follow through on their contract. It poisoned the well, destroyed the trust between us and the remaining co-founders (me and one other person) left. That business still exists and is operating to this day - under new management. For Park N Plug, missing out on the grant from ARENA was a big kick in the balls as we had investment depending on receiving the grant. When the grant didn’t happen we had no capital. To make things worse, we were relying on the R&D tax incentive to come through on our software platform, but the tax department said it wasn’t eligible despite earlier guidance it was. That left us out of pocket on developer costs and deflated from the setback. We probably should keep at the software stuff and pivot the business, but my co-founder and I have other businesses we are busy with so the energy hasn’t been there. This blog post and the reaction to it has been quite positive, so who knows, maybe I’ll try a third time to get something EV charger relate going.
lathiat 4y ago
I always appreciate a bit of behind the scenes info you might otherwise see, as I'm sure many on HN would. Also with pricing, pricing transparency is a real PITA.
- decryption 4y ago
  Amen to that - I love being able to plan things without having to listen to a sales pitch first, or explain myself to someone.
hedora 4y ago
This space is so frustrating! All the charging companies want to be facebook for some reason. Hopefully, someone will put them out of business with a decentralized system. They would sell standalone chargers that accept credit cards, and publish their busy/not-busy/broken status to some standard database. Ideally, the database would be run by the government or nonprofit service. It would provide GPS coordinate based bounding box queries of each charger's status. I think the whole US database would fit on a raspberry pi that's stuck behind a CDN (with a second raspberry pi elsewhere for disaster recovery). Obviously, it would be run on something slightly beefier, but I can't imagine the server costs exceeding a few thousand a month.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Chargers which are not taking credit cards and you need to clown around with 29 different applications while 20 years old automatic gas station takes credit cards really grinds my gears. It is like watching negative progress.
  - rewrewrewqf 4y ago
    >It is like watching negative progress. Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?
- decryption 4y ago
  Totally agree. I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery? In NZ they have a government list of every fast charge station. https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/ https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/ Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).
  - teeray 4y ago
    > I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery? My guess is a harebrained idea at monetizing your charging data.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Love the summary of well-worn but nonsensical anti-EV talking points at the start. Since Australia hasn't set any legal targets for EVs, companies like Volkswagen have no incentive to sell their limited production of EVs in Australia. Considering the solar and mineral resources they have, this is a tragic waste. Presumably they'll catch up soon though as it becomes unavoidably obvious how dumb they are being. edit: only thing I missed was discussion about getting cheap electricity prices by acting as demand response and/or virtual power plants, possibly with colocated storage. I'm assuming that's part of the big players business plans but it doesn't get talked about a lot in public. Just hints from Tesla.
- decryption 4y ago
  The tide is turning quite rapidly in Australia. New government held an “EV Summit” a few weeks ago outlining their hopes and will release a policy discussion paper late September. We will get to 5% of new car sales as EVs faster than any other OECD country has - just a shame we will be last to do so, haha. I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month? Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    A lot of the gee-whizz stuff about EVs and grid focuses on the car powering the grid. But most of the benefit comes from opportunistic charging to help renewable rollout. You can look up the details of what a home charger needs to do to get UK government funding support. I'd imagine Australia will follow suit. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-smart-charge-points#how-to-comply https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-sma...
    - 4y ago
vsmhn 4y ago
I still wonder why we don't see wide spread standardized battery packs placed in standardized housings, that could be swapped faster at existing gas stations with minimal infrastructure. Ideally, swapping would take relatively the same as filling a tank of gas and would be done by an automatic system. I've seen some videos of NIO doing this, but I'm pretty sure there's no standardized solution for the European market. I think this model could work if car owners don't own those replaceable battery packs, but they just pay for the energy inside them instead. I guess it would be easier to install 1 automatic ramp in a gas station that services a client in < 5 minutes than to build charging stations that service clients in hours. LE: not referring to the whole battery capacity, these packs could offer ~100km range depending on the vehicle.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Most people don't need to fast charge most of the time, so it never really made sense compared with gradual improvement in battery size/cost and fast-charging, and greater availability of slow charging at places where cars park anyway. Gogoro scooters used this model, and it might still have niche uses, but generally not as good as our current solution.

32 points by decryption 4y ago

I co-founded two EV startups in Australia in 2019 and 2020 that failed at their mission of installing more EV chargers in this emerging market (less than 1% of new car sales are EVs compared to 5% in the US and 10%+ in Europe) and didn't install a single charger. I did however, learn a fair bit about EV charging - the software that runs them, choosing locations, the electrical needs, how to install chargers, etc. - that someone else with a bit more business sense and access to capital might find useful.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
insomniacity 4y ago
Thanks for the interesting info. As you didn’t want to go into the failure there, would you be willing to explain more here? You mentioned some missed out on the government grants - was that the main cause?
- decryption 4y ago
  With EV Up it was a rotten co-founder that didn’t follow through on their contract. It poisoned the well, destroyed the trust between us and the remaining co-founders (me and one other person) left. That business still exists and is operating to this day - under new management. For Park N Plug, missing out on the grant from ARENA was a big kick in the balls as we had investment depending on receiving the grant. When the grant didn’t happen we had no capital. To make things worse, we were relying on the R&D tax incentive to come through on our software platform, but the tax department said it wasn’t eligible despite earlier guidance it was. That left us out of pocket on developer costs and deflated from the setback. We probably should keep at the software stuff and pivot the business, but my co-founder and I have other businesses we are busy with so the energy hasn’t been there. This blog post and the reaction to it has been quite positive, so who knows, maybe I’ll try a third time to get something EV charger relate going.

lathiat 4y ago

I always appreciate a bit of behind the scenes info you might otherwise see, as I'm sure many on HN would. Also with pricing, pricing transparency is a real PITA.

decryption 4y ago
Amen to that - I love being able to plan things without having to listen to a sales pitch first, or explain myself to someone.

hedora 4y ago

This space is so frustrating! All the charging companies want to be facebook for some reason. Hopefully, someone will put them out of business with a decentralized system. They would sell standalone chargers that accept credit cards, and publish their busy/not-busy/broken status to some standard database. Ideally, the database would be run by the government or nonprofit service. It would provide GPS coordinate based bounding box queries of each charger's status. I think the whole US database would fit on a raspberry pi that's stuck behind a CDN (with a second raspberry pi elsewhere for disaster recovery). Obviously, it would be run on something slightly beefier, but I can't imagine the server costs exceeding a few thousand a month.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Chargers which are not taking credit cards and you need to clown around with 29 different applications while 20 years old automatic gas station takes credit cards really grinds my gears. It is like watching negative progress.
- rewrewrewqf 4y ago
  >It is like watching negative progress. Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?
decryption 4y ago
Totally agree. I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery? In NZ they have a government list of every fast charge station. https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/ https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/ Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).
- teeray 4y ago
  > I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery? My guess is a harebrained idea at monetizing your charging data.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Love the summary of well-worn but nonsensical anti-EV talking points at the start. Since Australia hasn't set any legal targets for EVs, companies like Volkswagen have no incentive to sell their limited production of EVs in Australia. Considering the solar and mineral resources they have, this is a tragic waste. Presumably they'll catch up soon though as it becomes unavoidably obvious how dumb they are being. edit: only thing I missed was discussion about getting cheap electricity prices by acting as demand response and/or virtual power plants, possibly with colocated storage. I'm assuming that's part of the big players business plans but it doesn't get talked about a lot in public. Just hints from Tesla.

decryption 4y ago
The tide is turning quite rapidly in Australia. New government held an “EV Summit” a few weeks ago outlining their hopes and will release a policy discussion paper late September. We will get to 5% of new car sales as EVs faster than any other OECD country has - just a shame we will be last to do so, haha. I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month? Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  A lot of the gee-whizz stuff about EVs and grid focuses on the car powering the grid. But most of the benefit comes from opportunistic charging to help renewable rollout. You can look up the details of what a home charger needs to do to get UK government funding support. I'd imagine Australia will follow suit. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-smart-charge-points#how-to-comply https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-sma...
  - 4y ago

vsmhn 4y ago

I still wonder why we don't see wide spread standardized battery packs placed in standardized housings, that could be swapped faster at existing gas stations with minimal infrastructure. Ideally, swapping would take relatively the same as filling a tank of gas and would be done by an automatic system. I've seen some videos of NIO doing this, but I'm pretty sure there's no standardized solution for the European market. I think this model could work if car owners don't own those replaceable battery packs, but they just pay for the energy inside them instead. I guess it would be easier to install 1 automatic ramp in a gas station that services a client in < 5 minutes than to build charging stations that service clients in hours. LE: not referring to the whole battery capacity, these packs could offer ~100km range depending on the vehicle.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Most people don't need to fast charge most of the time, so it never really made sense compared with gradual improvement in battery size/cost and fast-charging, and greater availability of slow charging at places where cars park anyway. Gogoro scooters used this model, and it might still have niche uses, but generally not as good as our current solution.