Electric Era's AI Powered EV Fast Charging Stations

While EV adoption rates in the US have more than doubled in the past few years, the unreliability of charging stations has turned those who have thought of utilizing the sustainable mode of transportation away.

The quantity of EV charging stations has undoubtedly risen, with more private companies like Ionity, Electrify America, and ChargePoint spreading their many stations across many states. However, the quality of EV charging infrastructure hasn’t improved and may have even worsened.

More and more EV owners have stumbled upon long queues, failed payments, and boredom from having to charge their EVs in less-than-ideal locations, far from places for them to relax or entertain themselves during the wait, which may take minutes to hours. Broken charging equipment is also still commonly found, especially in stations that still completely rely on power grids prone to strains and outages.

Electric Era, an EV charging company founded by former SpaceX engineers, including CEO Quincy Lee, aims to solve the issue of EV infrastructure unreliability with its AI-driven PowerNode EV fast-charging platform.

Available but Broken

The option of having EV chargers at home is always open to most, though the convenience of public EV charging stations will always be required, whether for those who accidentally didn’t plug their chargers properly and only just realized mid-grocery shopping or those traveling long distances.

Availability of EV charging stations hasn’t been a problem, especially with government bodies like the Biden administration calling for a national network of 500,000 EV chargers along highways and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law providing $7.5B for EV charging expansion, pushing more companies to build more charging infrastructure at a faster pace.

What needs to be established is a highly functional EV charging infrastructure, equalizing the quantity and quality of EV chargers. In most states, especially ones without bigger, central cities, charging stations are still not regularly maintained, often leading to breakdowns. According to a study by the University of California, Berkeley in 2022, even in San Francisco, one-quarter of public EV fast chargers didn’t work due to unresponsive screens, payment and charge initiation failures, as well as broken connectors.

One way to overcome this is by relying on battery buffers to overcome grid strains and prevent power shortages, or on charging station maintenance companies like ChargerHelp!, which has managed to fix over 10K charging stations as of last June, and possibly many more now.

Electric Era offers more efficient solutions to these drawbacks by fixing the problem from its core, relating to power usage and maintenance management.

AI-Driven Chargers

Electric Era focuses on deploying stations in locations like convenience stores and quick service retail locations, to not only provide the benefits of EV owners’ fun pastimes but also extra revenue for store owners.

The company’s AI-controlled charging station, called PowerNode, can be easily installed in mere weeks, with construction, permitting, utility, and maintenance support all taken care of. The station is equipped with PowerNode OS, an operating system that allows for real-time monitoring of utility bills and data analytics to predict loads, so each station is optimized to the highest performance while still being economical.

All this data can be monitored and managed remotely with the PowerNode Command Console from a computer or a phone. The platform can track cost and revenue, monitor daily charging sessions and peak customer onsite time, as well as integrate with one’s point-of-sale system.

Stable Power Usage and Maintenance

While the stations still need to rely on power grids, a battery buffer used to store electricity is installed in every station, allowing the chargers to draw power from the battery buffer instead of directly from the grid. This way, every charge is more consistent and stable, preventing any risk of charging interruptions.

The PowerNode’s load-balancing algorithm also allows the station’s batteries to replenish during off-peak hours for lower pricing and have some energy left in store when grid electricity gets too expensive or is unavailable. This ensures bigger chances of charging always being available for EV owners visiting a certain location.

According to Electric Era, this ability lets the PowerNode chargers provide a 100-mile charge to a typical EV in under ten minutes, possibly accommodating up to 100 vehicle charges daily. The station is equipped with an easy-to-use interface and supports all payment types, whether it be Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Visa and Mastercard, and requires no applications whatsoever. After payment, EV owners can simply plug the charger in and wait for completion.

Electric Era’s stations autonomously monitor any issues with high-rate telemetry and give out alert notifications to the company’s Network Operations Center (NOC) in case of emergencies. NOC operators can troubleshoot priority alerts remotely and send out maintenance professionals available 24/7.

Electric Era has raised a total of $19M since it was founded in 2019, with investments coming from Chevron Technology Ventures, HSBC Asset Management, Asymmetry Ventures, SQM Lithium Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, and Proeza Ventures.

With its funding, the company has plans to have over 10 of its PowerNode stations across seven states by the end of 2023 and 10K installations in the US by 2030.

Meme & AI-Generated Picture

Job Posting

• Electric Era - Software Engineer - Seattle, WA (In Office)

• Electric Era - Engineer, Site Implementation - Seattle, WA (In Office)

• Capital One - Sr. Director, Head of Data Capital One Software - Washington DC+ (Remote/Hybrid)

• Samsara - Senior Marketing Data Engineer - San Francisco, CA+ (Remote/Hybrid)

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