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’s literally putting juice into power-hungry EVs.
To accelerate its transition from cars with internal combustion engines to vehicles with batteries, rideshare platform Contralto has partnered with the charge-as-a-service company L-Charge.
The Dallas, Texas-based company provides off-grid power through units carried on trailers that only require a 30-foot by 8.5-foot parking space. The units are powered primarily by natural gas—real and synthetic, according to L-Charge CEO Dmitry Lasin.
Portable L-Charge EV charging station.
Each 180 kW charger is equipped with two charging guns. The system can be set to allow both guns to deliver 90kW simultaneously, or for one gun to deliver 180kW super fast charging.
The goal, Lashin said, is to bring power where it’s needed quickly and inexpensively when a customer can’t afford to build a permanent recharging infrastructure right away or wait for a municipality to build one — a growing issue.
“It’s not just the US or Europe, it’s everywhere,” Lashin said in an interview. “The grid is not ready to support electric vehicles.”
For Alto, the urgency to maintain its EV rideshare fleet 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 in total.
Unlike some other ride-sharing companies, Alto’s drivers are direct employees and the company owns the cars, increasing the need to have charging power nearby.
“That means we’re paying the driver regardless of what they’re doing whether they’re going and generating revenue or doing other work, and so it’s very, very inefficient for us to pay drivers to charge cars,” Alto explained. co-founder and CEO Will Coleman, in an interview. “So we need our own proprietary charging so cars can charge when they’re driverless. But building that infrastructure in our facility is something that could take, often, cases, you know, years, if not you know, certainly quarters, if not years.”
Under L-Charge’s CaaS model, there are no upfront fees or other charges. 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 simplify the electrification of their fleet vehicles,” said Fields.
That simplification and ready availability is really the payoff for Alto, Coleman says, even if the actual cost of using the L-Charge service doesn’t represent energy savings from buying power from the grid.
“It’s really a trade-off of price and speed,” Coleman said. “In Los Angeles, for example, one of our locations took us 18 months and we still don’t have pole power at that location. We were able to get the L-Charge trailers up and running using a virtual gas pipeline, which means delivery by truck, and then feeding 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 into other regions, providing power while a more permanent infrastructure is designed and built, Coleman argued.
Indeed, as impatient businesses and consumers wait for governments and private enterprises to build a national EV charging network, the need for faster solutions is being met by many entrepreneurial companies.
Based in Novi, Michigan ION Dynamics has developed an autonomous robot that can direct itself to an EV in a parking lot or other location via a mobile app.
Performance of combined Beam Global BeamSpot street lights and EV charging stations.
Beam Global and Voltpost are creating recharging stations, retrofitting street lights with charging ports in many cities.
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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 the Alto, L-Charge’s 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 unique long-term solution.”
