Gas Prices, the Iran War, and the Business of EV Charging

0:00Tsvetta Kaleynska Alex, Eurist, has built a career on US-China business relationship and has spent the last few years helping Xcharge expand its footprint across North America. Are we talking about electric vehicle charging stations? So you mentioned hotels, you mentioned shops and other places.

0:16 The power conversion methods could be similar to what you would find for easy polls.

0:21Tsvetta Kaleynska In the last few years, there have been multiple wars that have just broken out all over the world. How have the last few years like evolved with all of that? And is there an actual shortage? And one country you could name that's building the future correctly. Alex, welcome to the Money Signal Podcast.

0:52 Thank you. It's great to be here.

0:53Tsvetta Kaleynska It's amazing to have you here as probably actually one of the youngest founders uh that I have ever spoken with. Let's start off with the war uh with Iran. Because I just uh looked at, you know, while getting ready for this interview and while preparing a bit more on your background and obviously your company, one of the things that really uh stuck to me was actually the relationship and the correlation between basically global wars and obviously the success of your business.

1:25Tsvetta Kaleynska How has the wars, not only with Iran, but the last few wars affected your business? And how did you guys really figure out the niche that you're uh you're in?

1:35 Yeah, it's certainly an interesting parallel to draw between uh at least business success and uh global catastrophe and and wars that are going on. Um it's the positives out of this are obviously that oil prices are increasing. Um, and that creates systems by which we need to find alternate forms of power and alternate forms of transportation or ways that we're going to utilize energy in order to make the next wave of great innovations, great products, and keep people moving from you know location to location.

2:06 And when that becomes economically unstable because of the rise of prices, we need to look to alternate forms. And you know, we've seen an increase of the interest in, frankly, EV charging, or rather, even more broadly, just electric vehicles as a whole, um, out of the spur of the conflict in Iran. Um, you know, if we think back towards other conflicts and how that causes uncertainty, I think there's this general rationale that uncertainty causes opportunity.

2:35 Um, and folks certainly look for that when, you know, perhaps the road isn't so clear or the road is maybe not electrified. In some cases, that might be. Um, and people want to double down into the opportunity. I wish we had started investing earlier into, particularly on the US side, into uh electric vehicle infrastructure and just like really EVS-y, as we put it, um, electric vehicle service equipment, you know, a few years back, because maybe the impact wouldn't have felt so grand in a certain way, but sometimes we need a snap moment to understand where there's new momentum to gain and how we can start to create the conduit for change that we want to see.

3:15Tsvetta Kaleynska When did you guys decide to start Xcharge?

3:17 So I and my business partner Atish uh on the North American side. So we started X Charge North America around 2022, um, was the formal incorporation date. The company was founded in 2016, um, prior and you know, was quickly gaining traction in Europe. Um, myself and Atish in 2020 had co-founded an operator of charging stations called Kern Electric.

3:40 And at that point, we had reached out to a number of different manufacturers in the space, really, because we were trying to operate charging stations in you know hotels, quick serve restaurants, areas that made a lot of sense to us of where you would want to charge naturally.

3:55 Right.

3:55 Um, reached out, started working with X Charge very closely on developing technology specifically for 208, three-phase charging, which in North America, there's different voltage standards for uh three-phase infrastructure that you can find, just high voltage applications. Um, you can find 208 or 480 generally.

4:15 Most of the charging solutions are designed around 480 because it's closer to what the global standard is. Um, the cost of associated wiring and infrastructure work necessary for 480 are less when doing it on a large scale, but 208 is more commonly available based off of what's been on our grid to begin with.

4:33 So, this is the initial thesis of like why we got started in the space. We built up a very strong working relationship with Xcharge, and it made a lot of sense for us to start the local entity of Xcharge in North America. Um, we started that in about 2022 and then had built up the capability stateside, really broke market and started to acquire more customers.

4:54 And then the company at the group level went public in September 2024, um, which was via you know, uh on NASDAQ via ADR with a Cayman Island holding company. And you know, from there it's been kind of like a launch moment of being able to address the public of what our solutions can bring to the market, how we can help address that.

5:14 And then just thinking more broadly of you know, electric vehicle infrastructure, how do we help influence the change of this over the long term?

5:22Tsvetta Kaleynska I you mentioned so many things that for a second I think you lost me there because they were just so complicated. But let's take a step back and let's actually go to the basics first, which is when we talk about charging and electric EV, um, are we talking about electric vehicle charging stations? So you mentioned hotels, you mentioned shops and other places, um, or does it entail of other other sources?

5:50Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah. Are you guys just EV?

5:52 Yeah, so we are just right now EVs, electric vehicles. Um the power conversion methods could be similar to what you would find for EV toll or other electrified transportation methods.

6:04Tsvetta Kaleynska Um we can like what?

6:06 So um, like you'd see like quadcopters, and you've been seeing perhaps uh some of the test uh like projects that have been going on between Wall Street and then going out to like a LaGuardia and JFK with Joby Aviation, I believe it is.

6:18Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah, I just saw that actually recently launched.

6:20 So those are all electrified. Um, and that same type of charging standard theoretically would be a CCS one standard, I believe is what they're currently using. And that input is the same as what you would find in an electric vehicle, ideally, right? And unless there's specialized charging standards. It's not uh, you know, it hasn't been proliferated enough for it to really be something commonplace that we're starting to develop those stations out, but we've had some initial interest on developing out airports and like kind of thinking about that from an autonomous, like autonomous electrified EV toll side of things.

6:54 Um, other locations that we'll find chargers in are obviously like interstate or convenience stores where gas stations might start to put in, you know, charger EV chargers in those locations. And that's just general passenger vehicle, um, like electric vehicles in that way. We have some emergency response vehicles that are electrified now.

7:14 Um, and you know, have been seeing starting to see some more momentum and maybe more localized, like airport emergency response vehicles versus something that needs a longer uh duty cycle. Um, and it's really like matching the use and use case of the type of electric vehicle to the infrastructure and use case that you see there.

7:31 We manufacture what would be called direct current fast chargers, so DC fast chargers. Anything that's above our threshold is generally like 30 kilowatts and up. Um, actual charge times that that starts to equate to, if you want to think about it that way, is like an hour or less is kind of like what you would generally find for DC fast charging.

7:51 Level two or AC charging, alternating current or yeah, alternating current charging is um, you know, like your four to six hour charge or four to eight hour charge. Um you might see it at a an apartment building, you might see it at a hotel where you're staying overnight and it's just a charge overnight.

8:08 You can have it at home and like this is the predominant method for home charging. Um, what we find is you know, where our business is focused on is direct current or public fast charging, or the fleet use case where they need high turnover in their vehicles. So we're just trying to push electrons in quickly, yeah, get them on the way fast.

8:25 Yeah.

8:25Tsvetta Kaleynska And where do you guys produce the charging stations?

8:28 Yeah, so we have a few uh locations we'll produce them, but predominantly right now in China. And then we also just announced a location in Valencia, Spain that we're in the process of opening up and starting to explore further and um had a big launch event with uh Valencian local local government there, and really quite an awkward, you know, quite an awesome situation.

8:49 Yeah.

8:49Tsvetta Kaleynska So thinking about the Money Signal podcast and the Main Street Wall Street relationship, which is obviously how our in general, how is the economy moving based on Main Street conversations and main basically like the day-to-day life. In the last few years, there have been multiple wars that have just broken out all over the world, not just the Middle East.

9:12Tsvetta Kaleynska Um and one of the things I keep reading, maybe you can educate me better, because I'm not obviously too educated in that, and chemistry was not my my top uh subject or strongest subject, but uh, we keep on reading in the news consistently about what goes into say an iPhone, right? Uh whether it's uh battery and like what produces the battery and like everything that goes into the battery, and how basically that's being affected by the war, specifically in this case like Ukraine and basically the different countries that house specific uh ki chemicals and specific produce.

9:50Tsvetta Kaleynska How has how have the last few years like evolved with all of that? And is there an actual shortage of some of the material that technically has to go into the production of the EV stations?

10:03 So for the EV stations, like from a shortage perspective, it comes into play when we talk about our battery integrated stations because we manufacture batteries that do make up a component of the actual charging stations. From the critical mineral supply, from you know, at least like the power conversion going in with the power modules in a charging station.

10:22 There are some critical minerals that go into that, but generally it's like uh silicon, if I'm not mistaken. Um, where we'll see more of the rare earths or rare earth materials that come into play is from the at least the EV supply chain, is when looking at battery supply chains generally. So particularly the vehicles themselves and you know, lithium cobalt that's going into those for the batteries that are being manufactured.

10:42 And similarly, if we look at our uh, you know, energy storage systems within gridlink, which is the unit we manufacture, um, it has a 215 kilowatt hour lithium-ion battery in it. So therefore we still are we run up against that. It's a rippling effect across supply chains as a whole, right? Anytime you're having to move goods between one location and another, whether it be through the refinery for the refining process, yeah, you have incurred cost because of the cost of fuel and you know the cost of running the business to actually ship everything over and just starts to stack on top of each other when you have global conflict that then supply chains get constrained.

11:16 Um, from the actual mining and supply component, the the talk has been around a cons you know, a constrained supply chain in this for quite some time.

11:27Tsvetta Kaleynska Um, even is there an actual shortage, would you say?

11:32 I don't have enough knowledge on the subject, at least in the supply chain side. I wish I could give a like a firm answer on that. Um, but from what we're seeing, it's nothing too critical in what we're manufacturing, at least. Um, long-term supply of cars and just you know, batteries for cars as a whole still seems consistent and in line with the demand that they're seeing.

11:55 But, you know, with more constraint supply on perhaps data center development, chips that need to be developed, and you know, utilizing some of the same raw materials or inputs that need to be refined differently, that starts to be where there's maybe a constraint problem. Um, but it's uh it's definitely an interesting phenomenon.

12:13 There's a really great book I always recommend for folks who are just trying to understand more about supply chains. It's called Volt Rush. I think it came out in 2016 or 2018. So it's getting a little more dated just on the current state of affairs, but it talks a lot about just the advent of like battery supply chains, um, a lot of the investment that Tesla did early in creating their own supply chains.

12:36 Um, a lot of the work that like BYD and um just Chinese battery manufacturers started to do with cattle, started doing early on with actually mining of critical minerals, and then the refining process and then difference between like artisan mines and um like general mines and how the nomenclature developed out of that.

12:54 And it's a really interesting look and how to understand battery supply chains a little further.

12:58Tsvetta Kaleynska This is a whole new uh territory for me because I don't really know much about batteries outside the you know my phone and understanding uh more of like how basically to get the most out of my battery life. But I'm curious to understand. So, how many EV charging stations do you guys produce between uh the European production now, the Valencia that you've added?

13:17 So annually, um I actually don't have the numbers in front of me, and I'm your team will have to probably add it a little bit. Um, and maybe we can revert back with the actual figures if you want to add it in after the fact. I would say, like rough estimate. Um, we're probably annually. I don't know.

13:34 Actually, that's probably a very hard figure for me to give.

13:37Tsvetta Kaleynska That's okay.

13:38 We can probably revert back on that one.

13:39Tsvetta Kaleynska That's okay. That sounds good. That's cool. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. This is totally fine. And then tell me more about so the type of the types of EV charging stations that you guys have. You mentioned there's one that's like has battery and then one that doesn't. So this is obviously I love, I need to understand.

13:57Tsvetta Kaleynska If I'm I'm a hotel and I need to purchase several EV charging stations. First and foremost, how much does an EV charging station cost to begin with?

14:07 It's the favorite answer. It depends. Um, unfortunately, a lot of things in this industry, the answer you're gonna get from a lot of people in my seat or other integrators or operators in the station is it depends. Um, we've had you know the initial use case of why we got started and really looking at the hotel market from the onset or why Atisha and I had really thought of that as the market.

14:28 The first install we did cost around $10,000 to $15,000 because we were tapping into power that was already available on site. We were effectively just running a line of conduit from the electrical room and drilling a hole in the wall to then push out to the charger and then paying for the cost of the charger.

14:46 Um, a DC fast charger, depending on the manufacturer and the output and you know, all the bells and whistles that you're looking for, could range anywhere from say 30,000 all the way up into 200 plus thousand, just depending on the type of charger that it is. Yeah. Um and you know, your charger that you're gonna use depends on the use case that you're tapping into.

15:08 The instance that I just described at the hotel where we first installed this was off of, as I described earlier, like 208 three-phase, which is more commonly available in this type of commercial location. If you needed to upgrade the power to 480 three-phase, you might be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure work necessary.

15:27 And that's going to be something you have to talk to the utility company about and whether they have make ready incentives that will help make up the cost of that installation.

15:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

15:34 And this is like a long answer of each time you look into these projects, you start to have to look at all the, well, what if we have this going on, or what if we have this going on? And then, you know, from a customer's perspective, figuring out what the right equipment is for the right situation, you end up relying a lot on turnkey providers, um, which is something that we offer up for folks is trying to help, you know, turnkey understanding how you're gonna coordinate with the EPC to do all of the labor and the assessment work necessary.

16:01 How are you gonna write in for incentives or rebates off of installing the equipment? How do you even chart the potential ROI off of this asset? There's a lot of great resources available for folks that are hungry and want to go and learn this on their own. And they can listen to a lot of collateral like this and you know, other things I've talked on and you know, my colleagues have in the industry, but it's a lot of information gathering for folks for sure.

16:22 Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's like your it comes down to the real estate that you have, right? Like anything. If you have great real estate, you put a charger in, it will do very well over the long run. Um, we've had some customers who have returned on made a return on investment within a year, year and a half, and they were in low EV adoption states, but really because they were the primary, you know, method of charging in that area.

16:46 Yeah.

16:47 And it's hard to tell somebody that like you're absolutely going to, you know, make a lot of money out of here. But we have seen customers, you know, return on investment or get a return on investment for their charges that they're installing, even in the short term when EV adoption is seen as limited.

17:01 So, you know, it happens.

17:03Tsvetta Kaleynska I I thought you would say, I mean, it starts at a hundred grand and goes up to like half a million or something as crazy as that.

17:10 It depends. I mean, like the whole project itself could get up into I've seen some stations that might be, you know, two, five million dollar builds, but you're looking at you know, dozens of ports on site, maybe solar canopy, like some sort of canopy work over top, huge infrastructure work, probably 2,000 to like 5,000 KVA transformer that you're pulling in and like just a lot of ancillary equipment.

17:33 Yeah.

17:33 That when you start to do the analysis on that, you need to have a site really have high utilization for that to make up the gap. Where this model is starting to like take an interest now is with the advent or the increase of autonomous vehicles coming into the mix.

17:50 Yeah.

17:50 There's a lot of talk about depots and you know how you can pretty much have the backstop or the utilization guarantee on a depot.

17:58 What's a depot?

17:59 So a fleet depot. Um, it would be just a larger, uh, just a larger location of chargers. So instead of having like, you know, four chargers, maybe dual port, eight ports there, you might have 40 chargers in a location. And if you have those 40 chargers, the difficulty from the developer's point of view in the past was how am I going to ensure that I will make back my money off of all this capital expenditure that I put down?

18:24 You're spending millions of dollars worth of money, you spend spending millions of dollars on equipment to develop this out. So how can you ensure you're going to get that back? If you can go to a Waymo or a Zooks and say, hey, if 20% of your fleet is to charge here, we'll give you a good rate. And then you can judge a baseline rate off of that and ultimately help to make up the backstop.

18:45 But there's only so many of those opportunities available, and people want to now capture that as the way to get financing or some sort of underwriting structure around it. So it's just all shaking out differently.

18:56Tsvetta Kaleynska Well, this is actually super interesting to me. I'm an entrepreneur and I'm very passionate about learning new ways of doing business, meaning, like, how do other people, what are the models of working and how they make money and how they make things successful ultimately. So I keep on thinking about the example, if I'm a hotel chain and one of my hotels wants to have an EV charging station, and we have the kind of the electric part.

19:20Tsvetta Kaleynska So I assume let's just simplify it, that you just plug it in the electric system and then it's feeding basically all the charge back into the EV, into the electric vehicle, and then you have your battery operated. And then I'm thinking from like maintenance end, I mean, for the with the electric one where I plug in the wall and it's keeping basically the charging station on.

19:46Tsvetta Kaleynska I mean, I would assume that like the electric bills are probably like very high, and you have to make sure that you don't mess up the whole electric system of the hotel so like nothing actually goes down. But then from the battery end, how do you guys once you provide these electric charging stations, do you s support them in any way?

20:06Tsvetta Kaleynska Like, do they, if they break, like what does the hotel do? Did it just call you and you come and figure out what basically went wrong?

20:13 Yeah, pretty much. Um, so we have a three-year included warranty that's service and labor with all of our hardware out of the box. We can extend that up to 10 years of total coverage. So if something does go wrong, you know, we'll be out there to help fix it on site, given it's covered under warranty.

20:27 We will also help with maintaining them if it's not covered under warranty, but we obviously have to charge for that. Um the units themselves, uh, from a preventative maintenance standpoint are actually very straightforward to take care of. It's effectively like an AC unit. Um, you're changing your filter or you're cleaning your filter.

20:44Tsvetta Kaleynska Fancy AC unit.

20:45 It's a very fancy AC. And there's a lot of don't touch me parts in that AC unit, um, which I there's just like a portion of the charger that just don't touch, uh, generally, unless you have the right PPE. It's the key part. Um, nonetheless, it's just it's a very simple cleaning method. There's fans on the front and the back.

21:04 You're just gonna clean those out and make sure that they're you have the proper airflow. Um, some areas, like we found Las Vegas, is a little dusty, so we kind of got to clean out the fans a little more often. But that's kind of natural for what you find from an environmental condition standpoint. And then, yeah, if you're a hotel owner, um, you run into an issue with the charger, you can call us up, you write our uh help at xcharge.us, put in a ticket, and then our after sales team will help to cue that up.

21:31 And we have different response times associated with different levels of severity on the units, and we provide that same level of service all the way up to our enterprise customers who are buying hundreds of them, down to hotel customers who either are buying through distributor or maybe direct if they're doing a few hotels at a time, and kind of how we think about that.

21:48 Um, the breakdown of units and kind of how that you know gets solved in the industry is certainly something that folks have talked a lot about and reliability of chargers and ensuring that they work. The first time that you get there. There are a lot of moving parts for uh chargers. When we work with somebody like a hotel, if it's a single site owner and they've never done this before, generally they're gonna buy equipment from us that comes included with the software out of the box.

22:16 And then if they start to expand their network, there's another add-on of looking for software providers that they might need to take on. Um and at which point, you know, we might need to help them with that process. And it's got other incurred items of the management of charging stations.

22:30Tsvetta Kaleynska It seems like a very complex process for sure. What about like if I'm how uh how well, first and foremost, like how long on average does it take for a car to charge fully?

22:42 My favorite answer, it depends. Um, no, it's the the best way to think about it is generally we'll look at state of charge coming in and state of charge leaving. Um, the optimal range that a car should be charging at is 20% battery to 80% battery, very similar to like if you're charging your phone, you'll notice that when it gets above 80, it'll either change the charging habit or it'll be slower.

23:03 It's the same idea. And I always like to draw the comparison of like if you're if you have a gallon milk jug that you're filling up in the faucet, you have to turn the faucet down as it gets towards the top, or otherwise all the water is going to spill out from the the top of the gallon milk jug. It's similar to a battery, right?

23:19 If you're pushing electrons or you're pushing power into a battery like fully, you will have an overflow, and that's what we would call thermal runaway, and that's a fire in your battery, and that's no good. So you have to think of the overall charge curve. When you look at 20 to 80 percent, that's your optimal range of charging where you can do your max output from a charger, and that's where it matters from what the charger's capability is.

23:42 Often people might go to, say, in Electrify America 350 kilowatt charging station and expect they're gonna get 350 kilowatts, and they don't understand that maybe their car doesn't even take that high of a charge rate. Uh, maybe the conditions aren't actually like correct to take that high of a charge rate, but they're upset because they're not getting the 350 kilowatts.

24:04 Also, not understanding that that charge rate might only be for two to four minutes of the charge cycle as a whole, and it might come down to like 170, 150. I see. Overall charge time of a charger, long way around answering it, is generally anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the rate of charger in the car that you're driving.

24:23 The difference of battery type, whether it's a 400 volt battery versus an 800 volt battery, makes a difference. And um, you know, the effective ampacity, like the the amps or power level that a charger can push into a vehicle also matters, and that comes down to the cable type.

24:42Tsvetta Kaleynska Wow, very, very different variables to kind of come into play.

24:45 Yeah.

24:45Tsvetta Kaleynska Do you have a favorite type of electric vehicle or a brand that you are a fan of?

24:50 So I uh I live in the city, obviously. So my favorite electric vehicle is the New York City subway, is uh really the easy end. No. Um when I drive EVs, I really like the Kia EV6, actually. I think from the standpoint of just like being able to get done what you need done for a vehicle, it's very solid.

25:10 The room is convenient, you know. I'm a taller person, so like you know, there's enough leg room. Um, the conveniences of the vehicle are nice, has like lane assists. The issues are that it you can't pre-condition the battery. So this whole concept that I just explained of what you need to do right to get the max charge rate, you can't pre-condition intentionally, you know, unless you put it into the on-screen navigation, which if you're gonna do that, it defeats the purpose of Apple CarPlay and like that's very interesting.

25:36Tsvetta Kaleynska One of the so you is your background engineering, actually?

25:39 It is not, no. My background is Mandarin and Economics.

25:43Tsvetta Kaleynska Mandarin and economics. Yeah. I feel like I need to hear more. So your last name is Uh, Eurist. Yeah, Eurist. And you mentioned that's Eastern European. Uh, you speak Mandarin?

25:54 Yep, yeah, I'm fluent in Mandarin.

25:56Tsvetta Kaleynska How how did that happen?

25:58 Um, so freshman year of high school, they offered Mandarin for credit. Uh, I'd been taking French from kindergarten up until then, and I really liked languages, and I thought I would try the challenge, and I terribly my first year, um, stuck with it. Then the school ended up, my my Chinese professor, their Chinese teacher at the time, Gal Ausha, had ended up getting a uh grant from the US Department of State through something called NSLIY, National Security Language Initiative for Youth, uh, where I was able to go to China with her in the class and like spent time learning the language and just speaking it.

26:32 Wow.

26:33 Really enjoyed it, came back. I did the same program on an independent basis before I went to college. Then I majored in Mandarin economics in college. I did a lot of language programs, uh, lived in China a little bit, and then I worked and lived there after graduation.

26:47Tsvetta Kaleynska That's awesome.

26:48 Yeah, did a lot of different things. Used to translate for hedge funds, so we're doing due diligence in China. That was another big piece of the background. Yeah.

26:55Tsvetta Kaleynska Do you currently practice Chinese with some of the partners that you collaborate with?

26:59 Yeah, so I still speak frequently. There's a lot of people in the energy industry, um, obviously, from you know, manufacturer perspective, like there's a lot of colleagues in the industry that I like to chop it up with at different industry events. Um, and then just personally, like stay on top of my Mandarin in New York, especially.

27:16 It's not too hard. I go to flushing a lot, I go to like Sunset Park a lot. Um, I'm gonna be translating in the upcoming elections for like as a poll worker and just kind of doing some of that to do that. So it's it's kind of cool.

27:28Tsvetta Kaleynska That is very cool. And you actually mentioned the government, and I heard the word rebate earlier. Um, can you enlighten me in what that means? And like, how is the US government really into rebates and providing rebates to businesses as well, who are um providing obviously alternative sources and charging stations, et cetera?

27:48 Yeah, for sure. So there have been a number of incentive programs or different incentive programs run for EV charging equipment across the space for quite some time now. The most famous one is Nevi, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program. Um, this is the $5 billion incentive program geared towards increasing the number of charging stations across highways and um alternative fuel corridors in the US.

28:13 And it's been a slow rollout. There have been now many stations developed and even more, you know, continually in development. Um, but the stipulations of that program, you know, were confusing on a state-by-state rollout basis. There's been kind of mixed signals for whether or not funding gets pulled, whether it's still there.

28:31 There's still programs in place and being rolled out. So that's been very helpful. Um there are also uh utility make ready incentive programs. So this is something that each utility program is generally going to have to incentivize people to build stations. And they'll take up the cost of the infrastructure that they need to go and develop and help to, you know, go and do that.

28:55 It's just the the trade-off is it might take a while. You know, you could have that, even though you're getting it paid for, it might take a year or like a year and a half before you actually get the work done. And somebody might be able to jump you in the queue based off of if they're a larger customer, bigger rate payer, just however it gets played out, because there's not really a huge incentive for them to that to haul other coin.

29:15 And then there are different state-by-state incentives that might come into play. So most recently, Illinois EPA hadn't had a grant, the IEPA grant, where if it was within certain um, you know, uh Justice 40 areas or like economically underdeveloped areas in the Chicagoland area or in Illinois as a whole, there were some different incentives that you could capture.

29:38 And so looking at those on a state-by-state, you know, county by county, region by region basis is something that, you know, helps when you're trying to put in stations. And there's a lot of tools out there that when you're looking at building a charging station, can tell you kind of what you can capture and then how to go about doing that process.

29:55 Um, we have seen, you know, the IRA tax credits also played a huge piece in incentivizing more vehicle purchases and driving the adoption of EVs. Um, the other thing we saw was ITC 30s, so energy storage tax credits as well. Um, our product Gridlink, which has the battery integrated charger or the 215 kilowatt hour energy storage device on it, um, was able to capture about a 30% uh you know tax credit on that unit based off of the ITC 30s.

30:27 Um there are different ways to offset the cost of equipment that make it a much more economically viable consideration from the total cost of capital standpoint. Yeah.

30:37Tsvetta Kaleynska Very interesting. I hope that there are founders out there who are getting inspired in uh taking advantage of some of those um opportunities, if I may call them that. So one of the things that I was very fascinated by when I was learning more about you and about Xcharge was actually that you joined the company.

30:55Tsvetta Kaleynska So the company, as you mentioned, started in 2016, and then you actually joined, I believe you mentioned 2022, and you practically built it the US operations up from zero to now, which is 28 plus states, uh, is what I found online. What was the hardest part of that entrepreneurial journey and building the company up to that size?

31:17 Yeah, I think especially in the US. Um, you know, businesses in the US and the way it works in the US is if it hasn't been done here, it doesn't really exist. Um, the background that a company has in another country, um, perhaps elsewhere across the world, doesn't really matter because the US has very special circumstances and the players here also know the local market in a very certain way.

31:42 So it makes it much harder from using proof and testimony of global deployments and how to apply that into the US. Um, that was definitely a very big challenge early for us as you know, being already a well-established manufacturing entity, already having the engineering backing and engineering prowess and market experience of effectively, you know, different market cycles across APAC and across Europe, and understanding how that's gone and being able to apply that knowledge into the US and what we've learned.

32:13 Um, a lot of it was early pilot projects and trying to hit the ground running as far as what we could prove from the technology. We knew that it would work. We knew that if we got it installed, that it would just make sense for folks. We'd needed to find those opportunities early. Um, worked with very early on the Virginia Clean Cities Coalition were very supportive of us in trying to help us find ways to get our technology out and adapted, which was a very strong way to make a market entry early.

32:41 Like these are um not they're non-government organizations, but nonprofits that are geared towards helping increasing the acceleration of new technologies in this way. You know, they're working on the alternative fuel quarters. So it's almost like a home run hit for being able to prove a new technology.

32:56 We took charging stations that were deployed by Green Spot charging, um, which had been sold to Shell at like 20, was it 2018, 2019, something like that?

33:08Tsvetta Kaleynska How much did they sell it for?

33:10 Oh man, I am not sure. A few million at least. And then, yeah, I mean, the the operation of those stations kind of like fell off. Um, a lot of the chargers that were deployed in Virginia went defunct, they didn't have any long-term support. The units were not being supported anymore from like the hardware manufacturer.

33:29 And the interesting thing is they were still 208 three-phase chargers, like this whole concept that we had been building into. So it was a natural extension for us to be able to work with Virginia Clean Cities Coalition to get entry early on. Yeah. So it's like it's it's finding the right ways you can prove your technology with a partner that carries some weight that then you can use to get the next step and just prove commercial viability.

33:52 And the biggest thing is just jumping off of case studies and how you can show the actual effect and use your data to your advantage of you know, showing customers this is how it's going to build. Um, and like that is the process case in point. We're still fighting, you know, it's still a constant battle in the industry to prove that our technology works, um, and and frankly, it's reliable, that our customers enjoy using it, you know, and all these things that you just need to keep underscoring.

34:19 And, you know, it's just that that process at the end of the day.

34:23Tsvetta Kaleynska And as a young entrepreneur yourself, what was the hardest part for you personally building the building the business up?

34:30 Um, it's a really good question. I I feel like, you know, the hardest part, it's not necessarily like the hours that you put in. Like you enjoy doing that, you enjoy the hours and like the quote unquote sacrifices you're making to push the business forward and and do that. Um I think the hardest part is just trying to not get distracted necessarily by the like the next shiny thing.

34:55 Um, and what you know, folks who maybe will buy your product or telling that you that you need to go and do, yeah, you know, or like how you need to change the product in order to appeal to this potential market when it works totally fine for that potential market currently, and it's just people wanting like the next bell and whistles.

35:12 Like, how do you position your product and change that over time and take in market considerations, but also stay steadfast in what you've done the design work around and understand the fit for. And then, you know, keep re-educating and teaching people. And like, that's the challenge, honestly, is filling the education gap.

35:30 And I think anybody in this industry as a whole would say that too. Um, there is constant, like we go through today, right? Like the idea of what battery type is in your vehicle and how does that play to the overall charge rate that you're going to get? That's a driver education piece. Is that a charging company that needs to educate them?

35:47 Maybe a piece of it. But also, should it not be like Ford and GM that are educating their car purchasers what their expectations of charging should be? Probably, but it's like those conversations across the industry as a whole that have to happen. And then you have to just pull the different incentive lines that, you know, why does Ford care about doing that?

36:05 Because they're going to sell more chargers and then, you know, just like try to talk to people that way.

36:09Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah, and educate, as you mentioned. So who's your competitor? Who do you guys compete with currently?

36:14 So we compete with a number of different manufacturers of EV charging stations.

36:18Tsvetta Kaleynska Can you name a few?

36:19 Yeah, for sure. So ABB, they're a large, obviously, electronics manufacturer. They manufacture very great um high power charging solutions. Um, another one in the space is Chem Power, Tritium, uh, Samsung, LG, Alpatronic. It's a very congested space. Nedick also has a product. Um, there's some other upstart companies that have been in there.

36:42 There's some that have now like peeled off of the market. And it's definitely a space that people come and go out of. There's a lot of push to for like particularly the large electronics manufacturers to get into the space early. Um, now we're seeing the second wave of those that have kind of ridden out the initial piece, yeah, are starting to see more success and continuing to get more solutions in the market.

37:06 Um, but you know, it's it's like a it's a constant battle between those that are there and overall the technology that's available and the standards that's designed around. It just comes down to how you can service your customers and make sure that their chargers are still operating.

37:19Tsvetta Kaleynska And is do you think that the industry right now is consolidating or expanding?

37:24 I think from the operator standpoint, something I talk a lot about with folks. I really think we are like trudging towards consolidation on an operator perspective. From the manufacturer perspective, there's a continual cycle, I would say, of manufacturers that are coming in and out of the space and who is investing a lot of resources, who can win one contract that kind of brings them back to life, so to speak, and like they're ready to spend again.

37:49 Yeah.

37:49 Um, that push-pull relationship, I feel like, is always gonna be there from the hardware manufacturer side. And then the operators, it's a constant push-pull of who's generating real profitability on their sites and like who's trying to cut off some of the sites to go sell off to another operator who can turn around some of those underperforming sites.

38:09 And it's just again, it comes back down to real estate. So, like if you have great real estate, you likely will win out and you can look to scale your operation over time there too.

38:18Tsvetta Kaleynska And where right now in the US, if you had to name locations, because you mentioned Waymo, so obviously California seems I heard I thought in my mind I heard California, but all although you didn't mention it, what's a good real estate for charging stations right now, states-wise or cities?

38:33 I think you need to look at like proximal location to highways and prox and like proximal location within a community. So, what does the station do within the community and what type of market does it serve there? Um, I have been a huge proponent of people installing chargers at strip malls. I've yet to really like crack that very strongly.

38:53Tsvetta Kaleynska Educate harder.

38:54 I'm trying, I'm trying. It's just you know, they make a lot of sense. You can go to a great Indian restaurant, you maybe have your barber or you know, haircut salon at a strip mall. Maybe there's a wine shop there that you like to frequent. And like if you have a charger that's going to be able to charge somebody in 20 to 40 minutes in that type of location, it really makes a lot of sense.

39:16 And that's more community type charging. Then if you look at highway or interstate charging, really anything near some sort of convenience, whether it be like a quick serve restaurant, Burger King, McDonald's, like a cafe, uh dispensary, like you name it, kind of can fit in the mold there. California from the EV adoption standpoint is very good.

39:38 Um, there are a lot of folks driving there. Florida, actually, surprisingly, is another market that's been seeing a very big increase of EV drivers.

39:47 Yeah.

39:48 Um, New York, aspirationally, for a lot of folks, is a market that makes a lot of sense, particularly as you start to go upstate. Um, the city is incredibly congested, and that is still being figured out from the charging infrastructure perspective. Um, when we talk about bringing in autonomous vehicles into the mix, that's why it makes sense in a place like New York.

40:08 If you can be the charging hub provider and have the location that AVs can go to, um, it just makes a lot of sense to like have that geospatially located.

40:18Tsvetta Kaleynska Um ISO, you guys are have uh HQ in the US in Kyle, Texas, is that right?

40:24 We do, yes, just south of Austin. Like Kyle.

40:26Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah.

40:26 Yeah, in between San Marcos and Austin.

40:29Tsvetta Kaleynska And how did you guys pick Texas? Why did you pick Texas?

40:32 Yeah, so Atish and I, when we were initially looking for the location to put our HQ, had been talking to a lot of a lot of different EDC, like in uh economic development committees in different states. Um, Texas really stood out as one from at least what they're able to able to offer us from incentives.

40:50 We liked the idea of proximally being located to Tesla to a degree, particularly at that point.

40:55Tsvetta Kaleynska Toyota, too.

40:56 And Toyota, yep.

40:57Tsvetta Kaleynska In Texas.

40:58 Yep, and especially being in Austin and like that area. There's a lot of great like tech students, a lot of great engineering students when you think about from um McComb, school business also, not engineering, but when you think about like business school students and the recruiting pipeline that way, yeah, rice also, Texas at large, and like that side of things.

41:16Tsvetta Kaleynska And you mentioned Tesla proximity. Do you guys have any relationships?

41:20 We have no direct relationships with them.

41:22Tsvetta Kaleynska So you're saying you have not met Elon Musk?

41:24 I have not met Elon Musk. Yeah. It would be an interesting conversation for sure. I think he'd vibe with our 208 strategy.

41:31Tsvetta Kaleynska What would you if you if you had to pitch Elon Musk? What would you pitch him?

41:34 Uh, I would, I mean, I think what Tesla's doing from a diversified energy storage play is interesting. Like just the idea of being able to install more energy storage across the grid and what that affords for the future is the right play. I think like from a pitch perspective, it would be more capital and frankly putting more capital into diversified energy infrastructure.

41:55 So if we can get more batteries on the grid and whoever can hold those batteries, they ultimately can become the Rockefeller of tomorrow. But they're the ones who are gonna have to be the ones that can put the capital down today to make that happen for tomorrow.

42:07Tsvetta Kaleynska Wow. And from acquisition standpoint, are you guys uh would you be open to acquisition? Are you is there anything that you can share in terms of like where you stand as a company?

42:17 I think uh nothing I can share from you know, at least whether or not we are or not in talks or anything. We're open to talking to folks across the industry. I think our big piece is just engaging, you know, publicly and trying to help contribute to the ecosystem at large on a global scale. Um, we're now in 30 plus countries.

42:36 You are yes. Oh, I missed that part. Yeah, we you know, from at least the EU side, we have great presence across you know Europe. We're now in a number of South American countries um working on some strides into Africa as well, potentially.

42:50Tsvetta Kaleynska So how many charging stations do you have currently out there in the world, in those 30 countries?

42:56 Yeah, in the world, our current stat to date is 6,000 plus DC fast charging units, so of like fast chargers.

43:03 Yeah.

43:04 Um, we initially had a level two product, which we sunset back in 2019. So we're not focused on all AC chargers anymore. Um, our previous stat line on that was around what 30,000 plus AC chargers.

43:17Tsvetta Kaleynska And sorry, AC charger means what again? Can you remind me?

43:20 Alternating current charger. So it's like your slow charger, yeah, anywhere four to eight hours generally.

43:25Tsvetta Kaleynska Gotcha. Yeah. Wow, that's I mean, six thousand plus maintenance. My goodness, I can't even imagine. So before we wrap up, I'd actually love to do a rapid fire questions. Absolutely. So my team has proposed to me, or they have made to me, do a rapid fire. Um, so they're going to obviously edit this and we're gonna chop it into some uh content.

43:48Tsvetta Kaleynska So we're aiming for 60 seconds or less. Obviously, they'll chop it in between. But are you ready for rapid fire questions with Sveta?

43:57 Let's do it.

43:58Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah, the future of gas stations, strip malls, most important infrastructure investment, energy storage. Hardest thing about building a hardware company, capital, most overrated startup advice.

44:11 Grind set.

44:12Tsvetta Kaleynska Ooh. Fundraising in one word.

44:14 Grind.

44:16Tsvetta Kaleynska The Eevee race. What is it about?

44:18 Mobility.

44:19Tsvetta Kaleynska And one country you could name that's building the future correctly.

44:23 Ooh, ooh.

44:24Tsvetta Kaleynska Careful. We live in America.

44:26 I know. Oh no.

44:28Tsvetta Kaleynska Um man. TikTok tick tuck tick tock.

44:32 Uh the moon. No.

44:37Tsvetta Kaleynska I love it. Mars. Yeah, Mars.

44:40 Mars. Maybe. I don't know. Is it Elon's Mars though?

44:42Tsvetta Kaleynska Well, will it be a country? That's a whole other thing. It's not a country, right?

44:48 Yeah. So it'd be the world. Yeah. I love it.

44:52Tsvetta Kaleynska Alex, you have literally educated me in so much. And actually, before we go, there's one more question that I want I love, because I love data. And this is again, this is Main Street and Wall Street, how they interact. We care about uh financial investments, we care about the economy and how consumers should think about the future and how they should be obviously thinking about their success, monetary success.

45:15Tsvetta Kaleynska What if there's one data set that you guys depend on every day? And it could be a data set could be the news, the newspaper. What is that one data set that every day you feel like you have to have your finger on the pulse? You just depend on it. Cannot live without that data set.

45:31 That's a very uh good question. I I would say the like we we get a lot of data from Perrin, um, who does a lot on like the just like EV adoption trends and particularly like just EV general EV statistics. Yeah. That's really the data set that we pay attention to a lot is general growth of EVs, um, you know, purchases last quarter that we're looking at, and just the general trends from that perspective.

46:00 Um but then also for me lately, and it goes back to what we started off with gas prices, definitely a good North Star data set of late in terms of how you can yeah, judge cost of electricity, cost of charging off of that in comparison to gas prices.

46:19Tsvetta Kaleynska Yeah, great question and great answer. Um, because I again I love data sets and it's all based on the data. Thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for being with us. This is the Money Signal podcast from Main Street to Wall Street. Stay tuned for more.