It’s tough to keep a battery-electric rideshare vehicle on the road and making 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 hauling juice to power-thirsty rideshare EVs.
To accelerate its transition from internal combustion engine cars to battery-powered vehicles, rideshare platform Alto has partnered with charge-as- a- service company L-Charge.
The Dallas, Texas-based company provides off-grid power through units transported on trailers requiring only a 30-foot 8.5 foot parking space. The units are energized mainly by natural gas—real and synthetic, according to L-Charge CEO Dmitri Lashin.
Each single 180kW charger is equipped with two charging guns. The system can be configured to enable both guns to provide 90kW simultaneously, or for one gun to dispense ultra-fast 180kW charging.
The goal, said Lashin, is to bring power where it’s needed quickly and inexpensively when a customer cannot afford to build a permanent recharging infrastructure right away, or wait for one to be built by a municipality—a growing issue.
“It’s not only the U.S. or Europe, it’s everywhere,” said Lashin, in an interview. “The grid is not ready to maintain the electric vehicles.”
For Alto, the urgency to keep 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 overall.
Unlike some other rideshare companies, Alto drivers are direct employees and the company owns the cars, adding to the need to have charging power at close hand.
“That means that we’re paying the driver no matter 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 the cars,” explained Alto co-founder and CEO Will Coleman, in an interview. “So we need our own dedicated charging so that the cars can charge when they don’t have a driver in them. But building out that infrastructure in our facilities 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 costs or other fees. The business customer pays only for power, currently 35 cents per kilowatt-hour in the U.S., according to Greg Fields, L-Charge vice president, 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, says Coleman, even if the actual cost of using L-Charge’s service does not represent a savings over buying power from the grid.
“It’s really a trade-off of price and speed,” said Coleman. “In L.A., for example, one of our sites has taken us 18 months and we still don’t have a pole power at that site. We were able to install and get L-Charge trailers up and running using a virtual pipeline of gas, meaning delivered via truck, and then powering the generators, which are powering the chargers in maybe five weeks.”
The portability of the L-Charge units is another attraction for Alto as it expands its EV fleet into other areas, providing power while a more permanent infrastructure is planned and built, Coleman asserted.
Indeed, as impatient businesses and consumers await governments and private businesses to construct a national EV charging network, the need for quicker solutions is being met by several enterprising companies.
Beam Global and Voltpost are creating recharging stations by retrofitting streetlights with charging ports in several cities.
Startup DC Grid offers modular, direct current power generators using energy sources such as solar, renewable natural gas and biogas.
L-Charge is currently operating eight of its units but plans to increase that to 200 by the end of this year as it expands to the east coast in North Carolina and New York, according to Lashin.
For Alto, L-Charge’s units are, for the most part, a stopgap solution, said Coleman, but as the company expands to areas where it will be impossible to find a permanent power source “in some places it might be the sole long term solution.”
