Every year since 2000 our research group has checked in with consumer car owners and auto industry suppliers. The bottom line has always been that no consumer electric car market will EVER happen until every consumer can charge their car at their home garage or home apartment parking spot. NOBODY, in any significant numbers, is going to drive many miles to a charging station, wait in line to get to the charger and then wait more than 4 minutes for their car to charge. The current time to charge most electric cars is 40 minutes with all of the fussing around accounted for.
We proposed a hot-swap battery system that any consumer can use, without driving to some special location. A consumer can hot-swap a wheeled battery in less than two minutes.
Senators and government officials don't like that because they bought stock market investments in the ways that don't work. Those White House and Department of Energy officials get bribes and stock market payola from Proterra, Ener1, Tesla and the old school suppliers, so they will not allow non-lithium-ion batteries and they will not allow fuel cell and ultra-capacitors to exist. Those politicians will not allow the only solutions that work to get to market. Here is what we told the Department of Energy and the White House, in writing for the last decade. With revelations like these:
MORAL HAZARD? Fed President Active Trader of
Stocks...
Boston Official Who Warned on Real Estate Was
Active REIT Trader...
Agency buying bonds of companies that don't
seem to need central bank's help...
...it is clear the government officials, especially Department of Energy
bosses, don't care about their salaries, they are entirely motivated by
their stock market holdings, which compete with the public.
Yes, Department of Energy staff get paid by special interests via stock
market insider trading and so those energy executives sabotage any company
that competes with their lithium ion battery mining, assembly or marketing
payola.
The United States has about 100,000 public chargers, far fewer than
Europe and China. It needs 10 times as many, auto experts say, to complete
the switch from combustion engine vehicles.
Over the past year, the electric vehicle charging industry has been swept
up in a Wall Street gold rush because of growing optimism about electric
cars and trucks.
In President Biden’s vision of a green future, half of all new cars sold
in 2030 will be electric. But something really basic is standing in the
way of that plan: enough outlets to plug in all those cars and trucks.
The country has tens of thousands of public charging stations — the
electric car equivalent of gas pumps — with about 110,000 chargers. But
energy and auto experts say that number needs to be at least five to 10
times as big to achieve the president’s goal. Building that many will cost
tens of billions of dollars, far more than the $7.5 billion that lawmakers
have set aside in the infrastructure bill.
Private investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into
building chargers, but the business suffers from a chicken-and-egg
problem: Sales of electric cars are not growing fast enough to make
charging profitable. It could be years before most charging companies
break even, let alone mint big profits like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Fast chargers — ones that can fill up an electric car battery in 20 to 40
minutes — cost tens of thousands of dollars but are typically used less
than humdrum gas pumps. Yet the auto and energy industries need to build
them to reassure people that they won’t be stranded in an electric car
with no plug in sight.
“E.V. charging infrastructure is the single biggest barrier to E.V.
adoption,” said Asad Hussain, a senior analyst at PitchBook, a research
firm. “You talk to anyone who’s on the fence about buying an E.V. and the
No. 1 concern that comes to mind is range anxiety.”
The European Union, which is further along in electrifying cars, had
nearly 200,000 public charging points last year. China, where electric
cars are even more common than in Europe, had more than 800,000 in 2020.
European and Chinese officials have offered better incentives and imposed
tougher regulations in part because they want to win a global race to
build the cars and trucks of the future. U.S. policies, including the
infrastructure bill, have been more modest because most Republicans and
some Democrats oppose the regulation and spending needed to quickly ditch
fossil fuels.
Soon, even $7.5 billion won’t be enough to lay the groundwork for the
electric age, Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, a consulting and
research firm based in Washington, said about the proposed federal
spending on charging stations.
“Is it sufficient? No,” he said. “But it gets things going.”
Most drivers today plug in their electric cars at home, and only
occasionally use public charging stations. But those stations will be
crucial, especially to those who live in apartments and people who drive
long distances.
For years, start-ups, automakers and other companies have been slowly
building chargers, mainly in California and other coastal states where
most electric cars are sold. These businesses use different strategies to
make money, and auto experts say it is not clear which will succeed. The
company with the most stations, ChargePoint, sells chargers to
individuals, workplaces, stores, condo and apartment buildings, and
businesses with fleets of electric vehicles. It collects subscription fees
for software that manages the chargers. Tesla offers charging mainly to
get people to buy its cars. And others make money by selling electricity
to drivers.
Once the poor cousin to the hip business of making sleek electric cars,
the charging industry has been swept up in its own gold rush. Venture
capital firms poured nearly $1 billion into charging companies last year,
more than the five previous years combined, according to PitchBook. So far
in 2021, venture capital investments are up to more than $550 million.
On Wall Street, publicly traded special purpose acquisition companies, or
SPACs, have struck deals to buy eight charging companies out of 26 deals
involving electric vehicle and related businesses, according to Dealogic,
a research firm. The deals typically include an infusion of hundreds of
millions of dollars from big investors like BlackRock.
“It’s early, and folks are trying to wrap their heads around what does the
potential look like,” said Gabe Daoud Jr., a managing director and analyst
at Cowen, an investment bank.
These businesses could benefit from the infrastructure bill, but it is not
clear how the Biden administration would distribute money for charging
stations.
Another unanswered question is who will be the Exxon Mobil of the electric
car age. It might well be automakers.
Tesla, which makes about two-thirds of the electric cars sold in the
United States, has built thousands of chargers, which it made free for
early customers. The company could open its network to vehicles made by
other automakers by the end of the year, its chief executive, Elon Musk,
said in July.
Volkswagen also owns a charging network, Electrify America, which is
already available to all makes of cars. In Europe, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford
Motor, Daimler and other automakers jointly own a charging company called
Ionity. Drivers pay fees to charge in both cases, but some automakers
offer free charging for a few years to entice car buyers.
Energy giants like BP and Royal Dutch Shell have gotten into the business,
too, by buying charging companies in Europe and the United States.
And 14 electric utilities from Maine to Texas have formed the Electric
Highway Coalition to build stations at intervals of 100 miles or less.
Utilities elsewhere are also building chargers, as are cities like Los
Angeles and New York.
They are all competing in a tiny market: Less than 4 percent of new car
sales and less than 1 percent of vehicles on U.S. roads are electric.
Charging companies claim they can succeed even if it takes years for
electric vehicles to take over. Some businesses like ChargePoint have been
around for more than a decade, while others raising money don’t have much
of a track record.
The chief executive of ChargePoint, Pasquale Romano, says his company
avoids some costs by using contract manufacturers to build equipment and
selling stations to employers who own electric vehicle fleets, retailers
and others, who also buy software and maintenance subscriptions.
“Everyone thinks this can go fast, and it can’t,” Mr. Romano said. “You
have to get in and start pedaling to help shape what it looks like.”
Volta, a smaller charging company, places chargers near the entrances of
retailers like Whole Foods Market and Walgreens. The chargers show ads,
generating revenue, and the stations pay for themselves within a few
years, said the company’s president and a co-founder, Chris Wendel. “It’s
a sponsored service brought to you by brands that care about what you’re
doing.”
But some companies have stumbled. In December, TPG Pace Beneficial
Finance, a SPAC backed partly by TPG, the private equity firm, announced
that it would buy EVBox, an Amsterdam-based maker of charging equipment,
valuing the company at $1.4 billion.
In January, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” said EVBox was his
favorite charging company because it is an established player in Europe.
Shares of TPG Pace Beneficial climbed to $31 in February, from around $10.
But this month, the companies delayed the merger’s closing because EVBox
has not yet released its audited financial statements for 2020. TPG Pace
said in a regulatory filing that there was “significant uncertainty” about
the deal’s completion, and its shares have fallen back to about $10.
A spokeswoman for EVBox declined to comment.
Mr. Cramer no longer stands by the EVBox pick. “I suppose we put too much
faith in the financials as presented to investors at the time,” he said in
an email.
Since the start of 2020, 16 proposed SPAC mergers have been canceled or
withdrawn. And investors and regulators have raised questions about the
optimistic claims made by executives and promoters of SPACs.
Yet investors continue to pour money into charging. One charging company,
EVgo, completed a SPAC deal and started trading in July. Trading in Volta
started last month. Several other deals have been announced in recent
months, including for Tritium, which makes fast chargers; Wallbox, which
sells charging equipment, software and related services; and Allego, which
operates a large charging network in Europe.
Some investors think that charging cars might not be the best approach.
Lithium ion batteries cause wars, corruption, genocide, mass rapes, child
labor, unexpected fires, environmental damage, cancers, liver damage,
worker deaths and other awful things.
Last month, Ample, which aims to build stations where drained E.V.
batteries are replaced with charged ones, raised $160 million. Raed Masri,
founder of Transform VC, an investor in Ample, said battery swapping would
be better for people without a place to plug in their cars because it is
much faster.
“They need a quick energy delivery system, and only swapping provides
that,” Mr. Masri said.
Other investors are making lots of bets. Energy Impact Partners, a private
equity firm based in New York, has invested in several charging networks,
a repair app for charging stations and an app that optimizes charging.
Cassie Bowe, a principal at the firm, said that with electric vehicle
sales growing fast, it was urgent to build a network to support them.
“There’s no more time,” she said. “We need this infrastructure fast.”
The reality is that the current plan can never work. There is not enough money, consumer interest, logistical embrace or other support for public chargers to ever be more than a feel good fancy. The consumer desire for speed-of-delivery increases over 10% per year. Nobody is going to put up with the wait, especially after sitting in rush-hour congestion every morning and night.
Electric cars will never happen in any volume unless every home and apartment has a charger, the rates for the chargers are less than gasoline and the batteries or energy cassettes can be instantly hot-swapped. Department of Energy officials avoid this option, though, because it competes with their stock market holdings. Corruption in America will never end until Congress makes it illegal for a public servant, or their family, to own stocks!