Episode 41 Transcript: Diving into Urban EV Charging with It's Electric

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

If you subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter, you'll know that I recently launched my EV buying guide, breaking down buying considerations and recommending electric cars. Yes, I will eventually be talking about e-bikes, I promise. But this week on the show, we're tackling one of the hurdles that’s slowing down the electrification of cars in cities: charging when you can't just plug in at home.

No driveway, no garage, and no handy charging station close by—that's the reality for millions, and it's a roadblock to the adoption of EVs.

Enter… innovation.

Tiya Gordon:
Hi, my name is Tiya Gordon, and I'm the co-founder of It's Electric. It's Electric is electric vehicle charging built specifically for cities. So we've come up with a pathway to overcome the barriers that cities have previously faced in deploying ubiquitous public charging.

Molly Wood:
Let's define the problem and talk about some of those barriers, and why they present a problem for the adoption of EVs.

Tiya Gordon:
Yeah, so you put your finger right on it. The leading barrier for the adoption of electric vehicles in the United States right now is access to charging. I kind of put it in three big buckets.

In the United States, 85% of EV drivers will charge at home. They have a garage and can put a Level 2 charger right in it. The second bucket is fast charging, which is well cared for on highways and rest stops.

Then there's this third final frontier of cities—urban charging. By our count, almost 70 million drivers in the US don't have a garage or driveway and park on the street. They’re private drivers, taxi drivers, fleet drivers, and rideshare drivers, and we need to find ways for them to charge. That's what It's Electric is laser-focused on.

Molly Wood:
When we think about that second bucket of fast charging, talk to me about why that doesn’t work for cities.

Tiya Gordon:
Yeah, so fast charging is needed, just like Level 2 (which we're calling "standard charging" instead of "slow charging"). Why can't we just put fast chargers everywhere in the city?

A four-stall fast charger uses as much energy in a month as a 300-unit apartment building. If you're a developer putting up a 300-unit building, you need years to coordinate with the utility for power. It's not reasonable to think we can pop up fast charging across the city. There's also the logistics of bringing the power to that location. Fast chargers require a lot of power and a lot of space, with the chargers themselves being the size of two or three refrigerators. They also have transformers the size of two or three cars, so they need large parcels of real estate.

Cities don't have an abundance of land or excess power. US cities need to be powered differently. So, let's go to curbside Level 2 charging, which is small, has a light footprint, and can be put in without needing large parcels of land.

Cities are currently connecting curbside chargers to the main utility lines, which is high voltage and cost- and time-prohibitive. That's the papa bear in my Goldilocks metaphor. Connecting to lamp posts is the baby bear since lamp posts in the US (except for Los Angeles) have only 110 or 120 volts, which is too low. But buildings already have 240 volts, which is just right for EV charging. 

That's your Level 2 EV charge.

So It's Electric installs public curbside chargers powered by the building next to them.

Molly Wood:
Tell me about the size of the curbside charger. Should we think of it as a parking meter?

Tiya Gordon:
No, it's much smaller. Think about it like a fire hydrant. We have several fire hydrants on every block, and we need access to power on every block too.

It's Electric installs small, bollard-style curbside chargers right on the block where you're already parking your car every night. We power it by the building next to it, so we don't have to tap into the main utility. This allows us to install in just two days anywhere there's a building and a curb, at one-tenth of the cost.

Molly Wood:
What's a bollard?

Tiya Gordon:
It's like a parking bollard—8 inches by 8 inches and about 36 to 40 inches tall.

Molly Wood:
Got it. So it's like a little post in the ground.

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. We use the spare capacity in buildings to power our chargers, allowing us to avoid any coordination with the utility. Utility coordination is a time-consuming process, so we work directly with building owners instead.

Molly Wood:
How do you forge relationships with building owners?

Tiya Gordon:
We install a submeter on their panel, so their bill never goes up. And we revenue-share, giving 20% of our charger revenue to the buildings that power our chargers.

A single building with one charger that's used 50 to 60% of the week earns around $3,000 a year in passive income, offsetting their entire year's electric bill.

Molly Wood:
Wow. Their existing electric bill doesn't go up?

Tiya Gordon:
Correct. We separately pay for the energy used by our charger, so their bill doesn't inflate. They just receive passive income every month.

Molly Wood:
And the end user pays?

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. The end user pays competitive rates for Level 2 charging, less than they'd pay for fast charging. They’re charging exactly where they’re already parking their cars every night.

You go home, park, plug in, go inside, and wake up with a full battery. Keep in mind that with DC fast charging, you can't get to a full charge due to the curve at the top around 80 to 85% where the charge slows.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
This is a battery management technique where, up to 80%, voltage flows into the battery like a wide-open hose. But in those later stages, the voltage slows to a trickle to prevent damage and overheating.

Think of it like filling a fountain drink. At first, you just let it run, but as you get close to the end, you carefully control the flow to prevent overflow. Boom, physics.

Tiya Gordon:
That's why the Joint Office, NREL, and the White House are pointing to a world where Level 2 charging, standard charging, is the pathway to more hygienic charging behaviors.

You can get a 100% battery, which can mean 20 to 50 more miles, depending on your battery size. Plugging in overnight and charging instead of using fast charging—which degrades the battery over time—is the more viable solution.

Molly Wood:
Right.

Tiya Gordon:
To paraphrase a Molly Wood quote from your competition with Kim Stanley Robinson, abundance leads us to these climate disasters. This idea that we need it fast and now (like charging your car in 30 minutes) contrasts with the adequacy of Level 2, which will give you a full charge. You don't wake up in the middle of the night to check if your phone is charged yet, and you won’t do that with your car either. You'll have a full battery with Level 2.

Molly Wood:
Charging vehicles at off-peak times must also be a benefit.

Tiya Gordon:
100%. We're helping utilities offload overnight inventory when demand is at its lowest. Most people aren't running their dryers overnight, and this allows utilities to start building positive habits for charging overnight when demand is lowest.

We share our data with utilities and cities and even create dashboards for them so they can have full transparency into the usage data from our Level 2 overnight chargers. This allows them to create predictions for charging as it scales across urban areas.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll dive into more specifics about how these chargers work, what they look like, and what it might take to get them installed everywhere. Stay tuned.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Tiya Gordon, co-founder of It's Electric—a beacon of hope for EV drivers without a plug in sight.

Molly Wood:
Tell me about the chargers themselves.

Tiya Gordon:
Thank you. My background isn't in transportation or energy; it's in design. I'm very much an outsider to this world, which comes with advantages.

When we designed the It's Electric charger, our first model is called the Brooklyn 718. It's a beautiful piece of street furniture. We collaborated with Billings Jackson Design, a major industrial design company in New York City. They know how to design structures that blend into the urban fabric.

We wanted our chargers to blend into neighborhoods and not stand out. There's no advertising, no screens, and no cables lying around. We're the only company that offers a detachable cable. This is important for three big reasons.

Molly Wood:
Right.

Tiya Gordon:
First, the cable is the first component that breaks on public chargers. You get to a charger and find the cable is broken. We learned that from Camille Terry of ChargerHelp, and we looked to Europe, where detachable cables are common.

When you charge with It's Electric, you get a small, lightweight cable that you keep in your car. You can pull up to a charger, plug in, and charge.

Molly Wood:
Got it. So the customer controls the cable, and there's no cable hanging off unless they've plugged in on purpose.

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. And we're the only US company offering a detachable cable solution.

Molly Wood:
What's the charger made out of? It must be weather-resistant and kick-proof.

Tiya Gordon:
They're stainless and aluminum, made in the US to meet Buy America and Build America qualifications. There's nothing on them except a socket and an RFID reader.

Again, this goes back to conversations with Camille Terry and my background in public-facing hardware. I've worked on projects like the 9/11 Memorial Museum, which has over 200 layers of technology. I've learned how to put hardware in the public way that can endure all sorts of environmental and human interactions.

When I wanted to translate that knowledge to climate, it felt like climate hardware wasn't well tended to, and I wanted to help move the industry along.

Molly Wood:
Tell us more about your background and how you came to this solution.

Tiya Gordon:
There are three official origin stories for It's Electric, and they're all true. I live in Brooklyn, and I was there when the pandemic hit in 2020. My daughter was around five, and before masks and vaccines, public transportation became unsafe.

I had never had a car in the city, but as an environmentalist, I thought I should get an EV. But there was no place to charge it. The only option was paying $800 a month for a spot in a garage a mile and a half away, hoping that the one EV charger would be available.

Molly Wood:
Wow. That’s infuriating.

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. It raised the issue of equity early on. Are EVs only designed for the wealthy who can afford this luxury? We need to make it easy for people to go electric by putting chargers everywhere.

Molly Wood:
It's also about availability, not just for overnight charging but also for fleet drivers or delivery people who need a quick top-up.

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. We're not looking to bring more cars into cities but finding a path for existing cars to convert to electric.

New York City recently passed the Green Rides Initiative, mandating that all rideshare vehicles be electric by 2030. There are 80,000 rideshare drivers in the city, most of whom live in the outer boroughs and park on the street. How do we ensure they can charge?

Molly Wood:
Where and how many It's Electric chargers are deployed?

Tiya Gordon:
We're still practically a baby at about two years old. We're raising our seed round now, and we've gone from our first pilot in New York City in April 2023 with six chargers to a pipeline of over 700 curbside chargers in six cities across the US for 2024.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
It's Electric got a $1.5 million grant from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation that helped them deploy chargers in Los Angeles, Jersey City, Alexandria, and Detroit. More importantly, it funded the creation of a curbside charging toolkit to help simplify the process of working with cities, utilities, and permit offices.

Tiya Gordon:
The previous ways of connecting to the utility were so complicated that cities didn't want to figure it out. But with It's Electric working with the Joint Office to create this toolkit, we're going to show how to do this in different types of cities.

By showcasing case studies and how we worked with each city, this toolkit can be used by other cities wanting to adopt curbside charging in the future.

Molly Wood:
Public right-of-way permitting seems like a big deal. You have to get permission to run that line under the sidewalk.

Tiya Gordon:
Absolutely. That's been a big deterrent for other companies not wanting to work in cities. They'd rather put chargers in a Walmart parking lot than negotiate the politics of the curb.

But destination charging in a Walmart parking lot wasn't adopted. People don't want to spend eight hours there. So we work with cities to understand their process, usually called revocable permits or revocable consent.

In a city like New York, they have a fantastic pilot with a Canadian company called Flo, but their chargers are much larger and connect to the utility. Despite that, they’ve shown patterns of increasing utilization, indicating that people are adopting EVs because they now have a place to charge.

Molly Wood:
Could the toolkit standardize permitting requirements nationwide?

Tiya Gordon:
That's absolutely a future potential. Every city is different, but we can start to build a standard. Let's move out of this Wild West of charging.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has already created a national standard for cables. Within that standard, there's a provision for a detachable cable. So we're moving toward the NACS standard (the Tesla standard).

We also need a standard for regulatory and permitting requirements, just like for cables.

Molly Wood:
Last nuts and bolts question: how many vehicles can plug into an individual charger?

Tiya Gordon:
Right now, our first model is a single port for one car per charger. We'll develop multi-port chargers later. The cable locks on both ends during charging to prevent tampering.

Molly Wood:
Is the cable proprietary?

Tiya Gordon:
No, we buy these cables just like in the EU and UK, and we give them to drivers. It's a stopgap until vehicle manufacturers start putting Level 2 cables in cars like they do in Europe.

But you still need to use the It's Electric app or RFID card to charge, so not just anyone can use the chargers.

Molly Wood:
Right. So there’s a bit of control.

Tiya Gordon:
Exactly. And we designed the charger to be modular like Legos. If there's an upgrade in the future, like tap-to-pay, we can pop our new model on without disturbing the subgrade component.

We don't want to be the company with chargers that are down. If a charger breaks, we can replace it in 48 hours because we work with ChargerHelp.

Molly Wood:
Do you get paid via charging fees from consumers?

Tiya Gordon:
Yes. Our revenue is from the money we earn from drivers who park and charge. We pay back the utility, and there's a small markup for profit.

We give our chargers away for free to cities and buildings because we're a climate tech company and our goal is to advance EV adoption.

Molly Wood:
Tiya Gordon from It's Electric, thank you so much for the time. This is amazing.

Tiya Gordon:
Thank you, Molly.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions at in@everybodyinthepool.com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybodyinthepool.com.

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See you next week.