Portable EV charging stations created by technology company L-Charge.
It’s hard to keep a battery electric vehicle on the road and make money if there’s no power available to keep the cars charged. But that problem is being solved for one company through a partnership with a tech startup that is literally delivering juice to power-hungry EVs.
To accelerate its transition from internal combustion engine cars to battery-powered vehicles, ride-sharing platform Alto has partnered with charging-as-a-service company L-Charge.
The Dallas, Texas-based company offers off-grid power through trailer-hauled units that only require a 30-foot by 8.5-foot parking space. The units are mainly powered by natural gas – real and synthetic, according to L-Charge CEO Dmitri Lashin.
L-Charge Portable EV Charging Station.
Each single 180 kW charger is equipped with two charging guns. The system can be configured to enable both weapons to deliver 90kW simultaneously, or for one weapon to deliver a 180kW ultra-fast charge.
The goal, Lashin said, is to get power where it’s needed quickly and cheaply, when a customer can’t afford to build permanent recharging infrastructure right away, or wait for a municipality to build one — an issue growing.
“It’s not just the USA or Europe, it’s everywhere,” Lashin said in an interview. “The grid is not ready to support electric vehicles.”
For Alto, the urgency to keep its fleet shared with EVs is acute, just as the company is transitioning to battery-powered vehicles — currently 350 EVs at its locations in Dallas and Houston, Texas, and Los Angeles. Alto operates in six cities overall.
Unlike some other companies, Alto’s drivers are direct employees and the company owns the cars, adding to the need to have charging power up close.
“That means we’re paying the driver regardless of what they’re doing whether they’re going and generating income or doing other work, and so it’s very, very inefficient for us to pay drivers to load cars,” he explained. Alto. co-founder and CEO Will Coleman, in an interview. “So we need our dedicated charging so that cars can charge when they don’t have a driver in them. But building this infrastructure in our facilities is something that can take, often times, you know, years, if not you know, certainly quarters, if not years.”
Under L-Charge’s CaaS model, there are no upfront costs or other fees. The business customer pays only for electricity, currently 35 cents per kilowatt-hour in the US, according to Greg Fields, L-Charge’s vice president of sales.
“It’s really a way to streamline the electrification of their fleet vehicles,” Fields said.
That simplicity and ready availability is really the win for Alto, Coleman says, even if the actual cost of using L-Charge’s service doesn’t represent a savings over buying power from the grid.
“It’s really a trade-off of price and speed,” Coleman said. “In LA, for example, one of our sites has taken us 18 months and we still don’t have a backbone in that location. We were able to install and run the L-Charge trailers using a virtual gas pipeline, which means it’s delivered through the truck, and then power the generators, which power the chargers, in maybe five weeks.
The portability of the L-Charge units is another draw for Alto as it expands its EV fleet to other areas, providing power while more permanent infrastructure is planned and built, Coleman claimed.
Indeed, as impatient businesses and consumers wait for governments and private businesses to build a national EV charging network, the need for faster solutions is being met by several entrepreneurial companies.
Novi, Michigan-based ION Dynamics has developed an autonomous robot that can be guided into an EV in a parking spot, or another location, by a mobile app.
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L-Charge currently operates eight of its units, but plans to increase that to 200 by the end of this year as it expands on the East Coast in North Carolina and New York, according to Lashin.
For Alto, the L-Charge units are, for the most part, a stopgap solution, Coleman said, but as the company expands into areas where it will be impossible to find a permanent power source “in some places it may be the only long-term solution.”
