How one California startup hopes to make EV infrastructure more reliable
How one California startup hopes to make EV infrastructure more reliable
The Biden Administration has set a goal of getting 500,000 electric vehicle chargers online before 2030. That’s three times as many as there are now. But installing chargers is just one step in creating a reliable charging network that can electrify America’s roads.
“This is the beginning of a new era,” said Evette Ellis, cofounder and chief people officer of a California-based startup called ChargerHelp. “For this to work, the operations and maintenance have to be taken care of.”
Though the number of EV charging ports is increasing, reliability remains a major issue. Researchers at University of California, Berkeley found more than a quarter of the public charging stations they tested didn’t work or had cables too short to reach the EV inlet. Other studies by J.D. Power have found similar results.
That’s one of the problems that ChargerHelp is trying to address. “Our customer is whoever is in charge of the charging machine,” Ellis said.
She and her co-founder, Kameale C. Terry, started ChargerHelp four years ago at Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. Terry, who had previously worked for a company that makes software for charging stations, was frustrated by a lack of technicians trained to fix the type of software issues that typically takes EV chargers offline.
“She would get the angry calls from all the drivers,” said Ellis. Terry convinced Ellis, who has a background in workforce development, to join her in starting a company.
Today, ChargerHelp offers “reliability as a service,” where companies pay $40 to $100 a month (depending on the service plan) for access to trained technicians who can come out and fix chargers when they go down.
The company has 24 technicians on staff and says they’ve trained about 1,000 of them through their workforce development programs.
Click the audio player above to hear Ellis’ conversation with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal.
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