Charge Foundation

Can we run a cable from the nearest building to a parking lot?

Charge Foundation aims to accelerate electric vehicle adoption by tackling the most significant problem: range anxiety.

Trips and Range Anxiety

Let’s take a look at the data. 28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles.

Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!

Additionally, we can break down the demographics into single and partnered. Partnered households have two cars shared by the family. One of the cars can be electric, a daily driver, and another a plug-in hybrid for long trips. Half of the US population can have an EV; they have a backup!

Fifty-six percent of the people are partnered in the same household.

Another option is to rent a car for longer trips. There are two million rental cars!

But people have range anxiety, and we must acknowledge and address it. There is a simple solution: Can we run a cable from the nearest building to parking?

Charging Stations

Let’s talk about Charging Stations, the current solution for range anxiety. We go to a gas station because there is no gasoline supply to homes. We have electricity everywhere. There is no reason to build identical infrastructure to gas stations. Charging stations have a role in accelerating EVs, maybe as battery swapping stations or DC Fast Charging (ten minutes or less), but nobody is enthusiastic about spending twenty to thirty minutes waiting while a car is being charged.

We can’t build enough charging stations to support peak long-distance trips when most people travel for holidays. We need to understand queuing theory:

Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. What will the expected waiting time be? What happens if you add another teller?

We assume customer arrivals and customer service times are random (details later). With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. But if you add a second teller, the average waiting time is not just cut in half; it goes down to about 3 minutes. The waiting time is reduced by a factor of 93x.

Why was the wait so long with one teller? There’s not much slack in the system. Customers are arriving every 10.3 minutes on average and are taking 10 minutes to serve on average. If customer arrivals were exactly evenly spaced and each took exactly 10 minutes to serve, there would be no problem. Each customer would be served before the next arrived. No waiting.

The service and arrival times have to be very close to their average values to avoid a line, but that’s not likely. On average there will be a long line, 28 people. But with a second teller, it’s not likely that even two people will arrive before one of the tellers is free.

From a high-level understanding of peak traffic patterns ( a third of the US population is on the move for holidays a few times a year), we know having enough Charging Stations for peak travel is uneconomic.

Standards and Codes

Our world is built on layers and layers of standards of codes. Look around; nearly everything in our environment is based on a standard or code. Let’s talk about one standard, The Box. The Box is a shipping container. It is a recent innovation, invented in 1956. But it has enabled the modern world we live in. It changed how we have considered transporting goods for over two thousand years and created a standard abstraction everyone can count on.

Think about how many ways the Box informs, influences, and enables the modern world: Ship-building, trains, trucks, the width of a road, minimum height of a bridge, maximum width of any vehicle, cranes, port design, humongous robots for loading and unloading containers, port operations, shipping and receiving docks. It enabled companies to build cranes, robots, processes, and numerous inventions because everyone could count on the standard unit for shipping.

Before the Box, shipping was for luxury goods. Most manufacturing, food production, and mining were local because shipping was costly. Standardizing a size allowed us to make all the innovations and make shipping incredibly cheap via sea. This allowed us to manufacture goods, grow food, mine anywhere in the world, and ship them anywhere.

Consider the width and height of anything manufactured. It must be transported on a train or truck to the final destination. The maximum size of any part is informed by the width of the road and height of the bridges, which is informed by container standards. This is currently a problem for wind turbines; their size has reached a limit, the limit of transportation is based on container size, and we can’t install bigger, more efficient turbines on land. The future of wind production is offshore.

H-E-B sells a two dozen pack of pencils for $3.10. This is 13 cents/pencil. Pencil, one of the simplest objects, needs dozens of materials from many continents, which goes through many stages of mining or logging, processing ores, shipping them from one point to another as increasingly diverse materials are produced from simple inputs, finally going into factories specialized in making the individual components and assembly of a pencil. It requires the coordination of millions of people and thousands of companies. No one person knows how to make a pencil. The shipping container enables making a pencil and the millions of manufactured goods we take for granted.

How can Charge Foundation accelerate EV adoption?

Charge Foundation will use existing codes and standards or develop new codes to enable a rapid transition to EVs.

Port Standards

240V charging ports must be grid-connected and smart: the grid can charge an EV when there is excess supply and the price is negative or zero. Ports are bi-directional, and power can be supplied back to the grid. We should be able to use an EV to provide power to home in emergencies.

Residential Building Code

We will work with cities to make a minor change to the building code: Two 240V ports in the garage and two 240V ports in front of the garage for a two-car garage.

This is a trivial change to the existing building code. The current code requires 240V ports for the dryer, either in the garage or the laundry room adjacent to the garage. We ask for two ports in front of the garage so friends, family, and visitors can charge.

We start working with cities; this is the first code change we request. Any new single-family home, condo, or townhome built with a garage or with parking in front of the house (no garage) will be ready for EVs.

Apartment Building Code

The for apartments code can be updated to add a 240V port for garages, lay conduit before paving the parking lot, and require some percentage of parking to be EV-ready.

Commercial Building Code

We ask for a simple code change for all other buildings, office space, warehouses, retail, and everything else: lay conduit before the parking lot is paved. Require 10% of the spots to be EV-ready.

Working with Builders

We can accelerate this by working directly with builders. We reach out to the builders and say, look, we are already working with cities to make this change. You can adopt this standard now and have better marketing over other builders.

Battery port in Car trunk

We need this new standard. A battery port in the trunk will allow us to plug in batteries for range extension. Retailers can offer fully charged batteries, the same as they provide bottles of water. We’ll work with Car manufacturers, battery manufacturers, and Governments to develop this new standard.

On the supply side, the biggest bottleneck in EV manufacturing is the supply of batteries. Tesla understood this and built massive Gigafactories first.

Because of range anxiety, people want to buy cars with a 300+ mile range. If batteries were available to plug in the trunk at retailers, most people would be happy with a 100-mile range. This accelerates EV production, and now, we can produce three cars where we would have built one before. EVs will be significantly cheaper, making them more affordable than the cheapest gas cars.

A car trunk battery port can enable many innovations, just like the Box.

Companies

We’ll work with companies, requesting them to offer free charging at work. It saves employees some money as well as the right thing to do, not forcing their employees to spew toxins on the way to work.

Retailers and Restaurant Chains

Free charging attracts high-quality foot traffic. Anyone coming to charge will be there for at least 20 minutes. Retailers and restaurant chains don’t have the best-paying jobs. This is great for employee retention.

HOAs

HOAs operate community-owned facilities with tennis courts, a pool, and maybe a park. HOAs can offer free or paid charging. This creates the best-distributed network, in all the suburbs, in every neighborhood. Most long-distance trips are not interstate travel but between close cities—for example, Bay Area to LA, Houston to Dallas. You can travel without range anxiety if you can charge at a destination, friend, or family’s neighborhood. This frees up all the DC fast charging stations, making them available only for those traveling super long distances.

Utilities and Cities

Utilities own transmission and distribution until the entry point to the home. They can provide 240V ports at any point in their infrastructure. Providing free charging is profitable for utilities. Power price goes negative 200 million times per year. They can absorb all that excess supply and be paid for it.

Utilities and Cities own the light poles. Cities also own paid and free street parking. They can provide charging at many points which are already cabled and electric. We need to add a port.

Parks, Libraries, and Schools

Cities own parks, libraries, and schools. We can have free charging at all locations owned by municipalities. This is an excellent perk for teachers.

University Campuses

Ten percent of the population is enrolled or working at a University or college. Most of them live on campus or are very close. The number of miles driven by them is 5000 per year. This is a lot lower than the average 13,500 miles. Campuses can offer 240V charging, and transitioning this demographic is a lot easier.

We can charge where we Live, Work, and Shop. We work locally with cities and other organizations and make this happen.

The US has two billion parking spots, and more parking spots are being added every year from new constructions. With all the initiatives above, we can have twenty million (1%) EV spots and range extension batteries at every retailer in a few years. These initiatives would permanently solve range anxiety and enable us to take the next step: convince everyone to stop buying new gas cars after 2025.

In 2025, Electric Foundation will start a new initiative: My Next Car is Electric. We go to everyone and say: gas cars are a terrible idea. Let’s stop buying new gas cars. There is no range anxiety, we’ve added millions of spots, and two to four million more will be added yearly just from the building code changes and a lot more from all the other initiatives. The switch to EVs is inevitable. What are we waiting for?