As a young SpaceX engineer, Quincy Lee led a rollout of hundreds of terrestrial antennas for Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet service. The project covered three continents, took just 24 months—and turned out to be great preparation for Lee’s next chapter.
Lee, now the founder and CEO of Electric Era, wants to make EV charging faster, ubiquitous, and more affordable for drivers and for retailers looking to lure customers and still turn a profit on electricity. As part of that, the company today announced its second-generation RetailEdge chargers. The sleek DC chargers can deliver up to 400 kilowatts, on par with the most-powerful public chargers in America. But for the Seattle-based company, the real innovation is stationary power storage, something you won’t find at any charger from top players such as Tesla, Electrify America, or Ionna.
The RetailEdge stations can amass 370 kilowatt-hours of storage for a station with eight customer stalls. Taking a page from Starlink satellites, the chargers include software to let chargers self-identify and fix faults remotely. Backed by a box full of prismatic LFP batteries, sourced from China, the company’s chargers can deliver roughly four times as much power as what’s actually being supplied by the grid itself. Lee calls that a potential game-changer for an aging, overmatched electrical grid that was not built for a world in which millions of drivers would demand access to industrial-level juice.
“A simple way to think about it is, a typical charging station consumes 1,000 homes’ worth of power on a city block. We can take that down to about 300 homes,” Lee says, while still delivering charging speeds that rival the industry’s best.
EV drivers have seen the hulking green transformer boxes that supply stations, including ones with roughly 1,000 kilovolt-amperes, the unit that describes a system’s total electrical power. In contrast, Electric Era stations use smaller, circular transformers—think the ones hung from telephone poles in residential neighborhoods—that can cost as little as US $16,000. (those beefier units can cost up to $100,000.) That makes for faster permitting and grid upgrades, a potential end-run around construction snafus that can delay DC projects, with some taking more than two years to complete
“The transformers are cheaper, easier to source, and take up less space,” Lee says. “We can swap larger pieces of power conversion equipment for smaller ones, and still serve up to 140 charging sessions a day for our midsized stations.”
With nearly 120 of its first-generation, 200-kilowatt DC chargers currently in the ground for customers including Costco and Shell, Electric Era says it can decrease installation times and costs by roughly a factor of four. Projects are going from contract to completion in six to nine months on average, and some in as little as two to three months.
For its midsize stations with four charging stalls, the company needs only 370 kilovolt-amperes of installed capacity, about one-third that of some typical DC stations. (The kVa figure describes total apparent power, the product of a circuit’s maximum voltage and current.) The rest is supplied by 220 kilowatt-hours of stationary battery storage, barely more than the 205 kilowatt-hours found in a Cadillac Escalade IQ or GMC Hummer EV.
As drivers plug in, the system automatically balances power between grid and battery supplies. EVs get all the juice they can handle, with stations able to operate 24/7 without any significant curtailment of power.
“Most EVs are only accepting peak power for a few minutes, so we can then use intelligent load management to service another car, and power all the cars at the right time,” Lee says.
Electricity becomes dramatically cheaper as well. Utility customers pay for both electricity they actually use, and the infrastructure wiring that guarantees a ready supply at peak demand. The latter results in “demand charges” that are a notorious obstacle to a profitable, sustainable EV charging business. The higher the ultimate capacity, the higher the charges, even when no car is actually filling up.
“That makes the economics much easier to pencil,” Lee says. “Our customers’ electricity charges are about 50 percent lower, because of demand-charge savings.”
AI-Driven Cost Savings for EV Stations
The company says its system, backed by an AI platform and an intuitive, voice-based screen assistant that can operate in multiple languages, can reduce retail operator costs by up to 70 percent. And that can translate to more-reasonable prices for drivers, Lee says. A 2024 Harvard Business School study of EV charging that analyzed 1 million consumer reviews of charging experiences around the United States showed that “Wild West” pricing, and a lack of pricing transparency, are major sources of frustration for drivers.
Or don’t ask Harvard: At many Electrify America stations, such as one near me in Providence, R.I., drivers pay up to 64 cents per kilowatt-hour. The cost of convenience is daunting: According to an EV calculator, at those prices, a driver would spend roughly $3,000 a year for enough juice to cover 15,000 miles in a Hyundai Ioniq5 SUV. At current prices for regular unleaded, a driver would spend only $1,600 to drive the same distance in a model that gets 30 miles per gallon (about 13 kilometers per liter).
At Electric Era stations, where retailers set their own prices, customers pay about 45 cents per kilowatt-hour on average, about one-third less than many EA stations.
As EVs proliferate, more retailers are seeing the long-predicted upside of luring customers with electricity. A captive charging audience will hopefully spend money at the business, whether it’s a gas station, convenience store, restaurant, or shopping mall.
“For years, that didn’t work, because there were too few EVs on the road,” Lee says. “But the calculus is shifting, and retailers are putting real estate aside (for chargers).”
The company claims a 99.8-percent uptime, and a 93-percent reliability rate, meaning seven percent of people who plug in fail to get a charge for any reason, from payment glitches to user error. The same Harvard study posted a troubling 78-percent reliability score for public charging, meaning about one in five charging attempts ended in failure.
As Lee says, “One of the things we learned at SpaceX is that you can’t send a repair truck to space, and we’ve adopted the same methodology.”
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