When EV charging startup Electric Era moved this summer to a spacious location south of downtown Seattle, the team was glad for the extra room to accommodate the growing business and its mandate to work onsite.
But there’s an essential, additional perk, said CEO and co-founder Quincy Lee. A functioning workspace buzzing with employees can showcase a startup’s legitimacy — and lead to sales.
Electric Era shared news today that it has launched its first electric vehicle charging station at a Costco site. The deal was sealed after the EV charging team for the Washington-based retail giant toured Electric Era.
“We’re in the facility, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you guys are legit, you’re real. There’s clean, laid out, nice production spaces, supply chain, inventory logistics spaces. Everybody’s here. They’re dialed in, they’re professional,'” Quincy said. “It’s a leveler.”
Electric Era is building DC fast-charging systems that include giant batteries to help deliver and store power. By the end of the month, it will have installed stations at nine locations including the Costco in Ridgefield, Wash., as well as mini-marts in Oregon, a shawarma shop outside of Boston, and businesses in California, Tennessee and Missouri.
The 33-employee startup is scaling up and hopes to deploy an additional 50 stations by the end of next year.
Around the country, companies large and small are installing EV stations for drivers to juice up and help relieve range anxiety. In recent years, city, state and federal legislation and funding have helped goose deployment. There are roughly 9,000 public, fast-charging stations in the U.S., Bloomberg reported in July. If the current pace continues, EV sites will outnumber petrol pumps within eight years.
The big deal on batteries
Electric Era’s selling points include its quick sales turnaround, said Lee. The team installed its fast-charging devices at the Costco site within seven weeks from being ordered. Lee also touts the affordability of their chargers, which are slightly more expensive than Tesla, but at least 25% cheaper than other competitors, he said. And while it has a limited deployment so far, Electric Era stations are performing well, with chargers operating 98% of the time.
One problem facing public fast chargers are their unreliability. That’s due to multiple issues, including criminals stealing the charging cables in order to sell the copper they contain. Lee said their stations are typically installed near businesses where there’s more activity and less opportunity for theft.
Electric Era’s stations also offer an added, significant feature: a battery about the size of an extra-large refrigerator.
The battery is important because of the giant gulps of power needed for fast-charging stations. Each Electric Era charging device, which has ports for two vehicles, can deliver as much energy as is consumed by 200 homes. A typical station will have four chargers and serve about 150 cars per day.
So it’s a big deal electricity-wise when one of these systems gets plugged into the grid. By including a battery in the set up, it can recharge from the grid when demand is lower and provide extra power when it’s needed to charge cars.
“The fundamental value that the company has is solving the grid constraint,” Lee said. “And that’s the problem that’s just going to get worse and worse and worse as more and more people drive EVs, and we have bigger and bigger charging stations.”
Room to grow
Electric Era launched in 2019 and has raised $20.5 million from investors.
Its 18,000-square-foot facility features an open central room that includes a collection of desks, electrical benches, a space for customizing chargers with Electra Era’s software and payment interface, and other work areas. There’s also a fireproof garage for testing the batteries under different conditions to verify their performance before installations.
The site has plenty of room to expand into as orders are coming in.
“[I’m] trying to wrap my head around the scale that this company is going to get at in such a fast time,” said Gabriel Santos, Electric Era’s supervisor of production and testing. “It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also a lot of work behind getting us there, trying to understand how many people we need, how much infrastructure we need.”
Costco declined through Electric Era to comment on the recent installation and their partnership, but the startup’s team is hopeful there could be additional deployments.
The company has gas pumps at some of its 890 warehouse-style stores worldwide, and offers EV slow and fast charging at more than 50 sites in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Korea and the United Kingdom, according to its 2023 climate action plan. It also sells EVs through an approved dealer network.
Costco said in its report that it plans to install fast chargers at 20 locations, but does not say over what time period. It opened its first fast-charging station last year in Denver as a pilot site.
Lee is eager to keep expanding the Electric Era’s network nationally through deals with Costco and others.
“We all came together to build the future of car refill, to get the next generation of drivers into the seat of an EV,” he said. “And the big gap there was just reliability and accessibility of charging stations.”
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