EV charging lots will never replace gas stations: Blink CTO Harjinder Bhade on the infrastructure we actually need

An electric vehicle plugged into a Blink Series 7 Level 2 EV Charging Station (courtesy: Blink)

September 26, 2019 was no ordinary day at work for Depeswar Doley, the owner of a gas station and repair shop serving Takoma Park, Maryland since 1958.

That’s when RS Automotives became the first petroleum station in the United States to completely transition from pumping unleaded to exclusively charging electric vehicles.

Disheartened by oil companies and inspired by his 17-year-old daughter, Doley told the Electric Vehicle Institute about his plan to escape the death grip of fossil fuels. The Maryland Energy Administration stepped in and provided a $786,000 grant to help fund the conversion, which included four 200kW charging systems. Takoma Park’s total number of EV charging options suddenly tripled.

“It’s not something that I expect to become rich overnight or something like that, but it’s a good cause [and] good for the environment,” Doley told CNBC. When interviewed, he admitted he hadn’t seen a lot of EVs driving around in his area, but that didn’t deter him.

In the fall of 2019, Maryland had less than 21,000 registered EVs on the road. By the end of 2023, there were nearly 93,000. The state anticipates 300,000 by 2025 and 600,000 by 2030.

RS Automotives is still open (and crushing it on Google Reviews), but few gas station owners have followed in Doley’s footsteps and gone through with a total electric overhaul. Instead, more commonly, gas stations and rest stops are adding electric chargers as an option alongside fossil fuel-based refueling offerings. In fact, more than half of charging stations erected with IRA funds have shown up at travel centers and gas stations, per E&E News and EVAdoption.

Can swapping out fuel tanks for fast chargers be a savvy business decision? Doley seemed to suspect it wasn’t when he pulled the trigger. And some of the industry’s leaders aren’t convinced of a future featuring generational fossil fuel proliferators being go-to EV charging stops, either.

“I think people thinking about [turning gas stations into EV centers] are not able to draw the basic math, in my opinion,” chuckles Harjinder Bhade, the chief technology officer at Blink Charging. He believes a very different model will fulfill America’s EV charging needs- one based on understanding the habits of a typical electric vehicle driver.

EV chargers that make sense and make cents

“At the end of the day, everybody wants to make sure whenever they’re going anywhere, they have enough juice in the tank,” asserts Blink’s CTO, mindful of range anxiety.

He starts doing some of that aforementioned math, invoking a different sort of anxiety.

Let’s say an EV charger draws 250 kW (that’s likely a very generous underestimation). Put ten of them on a lot, and you need at least 2.5 MW on that site- enough to power a couple thousand homes.

“It is very, very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to get that. But fundamentally you don’t need it,” Bhade contends. “If you look at the average driver, they drive approximately 35 miles a day… When they get to work or another destination, the car is parked there most of the time.”

“So just like you do with your cell phone when you need it, you plug it in and you go about your normal business,” he continues. “It’s going to be the same thing with EVs. When you go to work, you’re gonna plug it in and you’re gonna top it off. So when you come home, you’re going to need maybe five or six kilowatt hours of power, right?”

“The fact that people are thinking that all the gas stations will be converted to DC fast chargers is not realistic, but more importantly, it’s not needed.”

-Harjinder Bhade, chief technology officer at Blink Charging

Knowing how much juice you’ll need each night is an important variable in Blink’s consumer habits equation. So is finding precisely the right place to situate those difficult, expensive, time-consuming EV charging stations. Bhade thinks they can be strategically located.

“Fundamentally, bigger is not always better,” he suggests. “What do we need at the end of the day? And then, is it cost-effective to deliver that?”

“Where you need the fast charger is when you’re going from city to city. For example, the Bay Area to Los Angeles,” Blink’s CTO reasons. “I will need a charge somewhere in the middle, but naturally, you’re going to be making one stop anyway… You’re gonna go to the bathroom or get something to eat, and you plug it in, top it off, and put in your next destination, right?”

“In my opinion- in Blink’s opinion- you have level two charges in the majority of places. At your workplace, at your home, at your shopping centers, and so on. And when you’re going between cities where you’re only stopping for maybe 10-20 minutes? That’s where you put the DC fast chargers.”

Bhade says that sort of model has been working in Europe for years. He recounts a lovely-sounding recent trip to his Amsterdam and Belgium offices. Stroopwafels were regrettably not discussed.

“And that model- people don’t even think about it. It just works, and I think that’s the same model we’ll have here as well,” he concludes.

Last month, Blink announced a new 30,000-square-foot factory in Maryland that will allow the company to more than triple its EV charger production capacity from about 15,000 units per year to 50,000.

But making stuff is only half the battle. Blink’s team tracks EV sales in granular detail and analyzes drivers’ usage patterns to determine how charging infrastructure can be best utilized. AI and machine learning tools are helping make sense of more than a decade of driver data.

“We can understand the driving patterns,” Bhade says. “So we know how much energy they need, when they need it, and where they need it.”

He says it’s important to think of the EV charging space holistically- not just one element of it, not just in the United States, but totally and globally. He laments that lots of infrastructure was built before we had a handle on modern usage patterns, leading to construction in less-than-ideal locations.

“How do we make this infrastructure accessible to everybody with a great user experience at the right cost points?” Bhade asks rhetorically. “Not only for the drivers but for the owners or host of the charging station?”

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Battery energy storage: the problem and the solution

Harjinder Bhade helped co-found ChargePoint in 2007, and has since done his share of tinkering in the EV sector. He took an immediate interest in energy storage and distributed energy resources (DERs)- particularly utilizing storage as a virtual power plant and using it for grid resiliency.

In his early days in the industry, technology simply wasn’t far enough along to support Bhade’s ideas. But over the last four to five years, DER tech has come a long way. Blink’s CTO credits EV adoption with driving down the cost of battery storage, opening up a world of possibilities.

“Before that, there was not enough volume on the batteries to make the price curve go down as drastically as it did,” Bhade explains.

Now programs that monetize battery energy storage are becoming prevalent; combined with software innovations, they’re making some of Bhade’s virtual power plant-type dreams come to life. But he knows none of those advancements will matter to consumers if reliability is a concern. Thankfully, battery energy storage can be a solution to some of its own problems.

“As the technology matures, the EVs themselves become part of the solution. The EVs themselves are power plants, especially if you aggregate enough of them,” Blink’s CTO says. “What we need is really flexible resources that can shift the availability of the power to when you actually need it rather than when it’s naturally generated.”

“Energy generation is not our problem,” he adds. “We have enough energy. It’s having the energy available at the right place at the right time, that’s the issue- the problem that needs to be solved. How do we deliver that energy without doing massive infrastructure upgrades on the transmission and distribution side? That’s where we come back to DERs that are local to the consumption.”

Reliability or liability?

If putting charging infrastructure in the right places is Blink Charging’s Priority A, then making sure that infrastructure is reliable is Priority A1.

“Reliability is absolutely at the top of the list,” insists Bhade.

That includes keeping the grid stable as more DERs come online, but it also means reliability in the sense of having working stuff. Ideally, chargers are online and operational 24/7/365- requiring regular service, maintenance, and updating.

Blink Charging’s CTO has heard plenty of frustration from EV drivers about chargers not functioning as they’re supposed to.

“I think maybe it’s a little bit overblown, but there is some truth to it,” admits Bhade. “So I think as an industry we need to come together to address the reliability problem so that’s not one of the hurdles that drivers are running into.”

Machine learning can help with that- like how AI assists Blink with the driver habits side of the equation.

“We can track [a driver] into the right charging spot, and also more importantly, we can use the data to predict when a charger needs maintenance or will have some service issues,” explains Bhade. “And when problems arise, we run the problems through data models to understand much quicker fault isolation at scale.”

Rather than dispatching human engineers to assess issues, AI can conduct the initial triage stage and report back. If the machines can’t fix the issue, at least the problem can be narrowed down. That’s a solid quality-of-life improvement not just for the maintenance folks- but drivers, too.

To Bhade, it’s a tool in a toolkit that’s getting smarter by the day. A future full of distributed energy is just around the corner- whether there’s an EV charger on that corner gas station or not.

“It’s really a lot of technology and business ideas coming together all at once,” he admits. “These types of products that we’re working on are going to have generational changes.”

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