Managed EV charging companies are helping to drive the growth of OpenADR adoption in the past three years. We are seeing this momentum continue in 2024, with a wave of companies joining the Alliance who are offering a different focus and innovative new business models to the growing EV marketplace.
One such member is OpenRoad Technologies Inc. who joined us on our recent webinar, New Frontiers in EV Charging. Here we find out a bit more about the company as we talk to Evan Kirchhoff, CEO and co-founder and a 20-year veteran of software and hardware technology companies, including Adobe, Razor, and Google.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your company
I'm co-founder of OpenRoad Technologies, an American company based in Cupertino, California and Detroit, Michigan. We're an early-stage startup, in prototype stage. What we're building is the world's first portable, true Level 3 fast-charging platform. With this product, we are trying to hit several of the major pain points around EV adoption and electrification.
Most obviously, there are drivers’ concerns around range anxiety -- but also around access to fast charging where they want it, when it's not too busy, or in areas that are essentially fast-charging deserts. There's a lack of equitable access on the grid side as well, while the addition of EVs places a lot of new strain on the grid, and this issue will be difficult to solve quickly.
Finally, there's a big gap in the market to bring fast charging down to a smaller footprint at lower price points -- there's nothing really in that space right now. This is the vision of what we're building.
What do you see as the main challenges in EV charging?
I think there are two groups of challenges, and we're trying to solve things at the intersection of these two problems. On one hand, there’s a power bandwidth issue, where the circuit capacity of a site, or of the external power distribution to the site, often isn’t high enough to deliver fast charging without expensive upgrades. At the same time, the transition to EVs and renewable energy generation is creating new power demands that are misaligned with new supplies. You can see this in California, where we can now generate an impressive amount of solar energy, but most of it arrives in the same few hours, and not when people typically want to charge their cars.
But we saw analogous issues with data bandwidth on the early internet. Back in 2000, my cofounder and I were working at an online video startup, when consumers began to want media streaming that was far beyond the capacity of their networks. It obviously wasn’t possible to build a faster internet immediately, so what evolved was a distributed system of caching and buffering. Netflix still does a version of this today, with their video data collocated on special servers at over a thousand partner ISPs. Similarly, we believe that today’s power bandwidth issues can be addressed by caching and buffering electricity, especially for high-value applications like EV charging.
Tell us a bit more about how it works
The idea is to be able to install fast chargers anywhere: gas stations, convenience stores, or apartment buildings that have relatively low-end circuitry and not a lot of excess power. They can then use the caching functionality to build up high speed charging efficiently, with minimal or zero trenching for new cables. We especially want to minimize install costs, because one of the major pain points in getting a nationwide charging network into remote locations like this will be the install cost.
What markets and sectors are you targeting?
We’re seeing plenty of opportunities. First, we see demand from EV fleet operators, which is easy to address since our experience in previous LEV companies is largely in this sector. There's also a market for commercial chargers in all these long-tail, difficult locations. But we've recently discovered yet another market, where utilities are wanting to co-locate smart battery networks on customer sites, behind the meter, and use them for either local grid augmentation or grid resiliency. This is happening around us right now in Cupertino and Sunnyvale, where PG&E is rolling this out.
What’s next for OpenRoad Technologies?
As I said, we are a startup, so first we need to prove our concept. The next stage is to iterate on our prototype and take that design to market. We feel our core technology is validated, and now we need to do the work around productizing it and getting it to the point of mass production.
Finally, why is being part of the OpenADR Alliance important to you?
We joined the OpenADR Alliance quite early in our product development cycle, because we wanted to make sure from the beginning that our product would be aimed directly at industry standards for distributed energy storage. We also felt that it was important to be a part of the ecosystem of hardware and software companies that are building out the smart grid, and grappling with issues like scaling up all these new DC power sources, or dealing with the tradeoffs between demand response and consumer preferences. America’s energy transition will be extremely complicated, and any single company can only solve a small part of it, but we are excited to be part of the conversation as it moves forward!
To watch the OpenADR webinar on New Frontiers in EV Charging, visit our webinar page: https://www.openadr.org/webinar-series