ChargePoint’s CEO optimistic about EV adoption despite ‘not helpful’ federal policy

Rick Wilmer, CEO of EV charging company ChargePoint, sees the environment in which the US EV charging sector is operating right now as “a big basket of headwinds and tailwinds.”

On the one hand, the federal government is rescinding support for electrification on all fronts—most recently with the Trump administration’s move to roll back fuel economy standards. On the other, Wilmer is convinced that battery-powered vehicles will win the day on their own merits.

Tech Brew recently caught up with Wilmer about federal policy, as well as ChargePoint’s recent debut of an upgraded software platform and its rollout of vehicle-to-home charging solutions in partnership with multinational power management company Eaton.

“As part of our three-year strategy, we’ve really been focused on innovation, both on the software side and the hardware side,” Wilmer said. “Furthermore, we also believe that technically innovating in collaboration with the grid, which our chargers plug into, and the vehicles which plug into our chargers, can create even more differentiation and value and better experiences for drivers, and lower costs for charging station operators.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you think about bringing V2H costs down and ChargePoint’s role in making it appealing for a mainstream consumer?

If you look at the implementations that are out there today, you get a charger that’s bidirectionally capable. You get, oftentimes, a supplemental battery, a stationary battery in the garage. Then you’ve got what we call a grid disconnect device, or an islanding device, which allows your house to be disconnected from the grid when you want to power it from the garage, the vehicle, or the fixed battery. Those are the main parts of the system. And oftentimes you need a service upgrade or a panel upgrade to install this in your home…So what we’ve done is we’ve eliminated the need for the controller box, because we’ve now put that capability in the charger. So all the decisions about which loads do I keep on when I’m in a power outage, all that intelligence, is not a separate piece of hardware. It’s now part of the charger, which communicates with the Eaton smart breaker technology that’s in the breaker panel.

And the Eaton breaker technology is really cool, because it not only can be retrofitted into an Eaton panel, it can be retrofitted into non-Eaton panels. So you now are able to serve many, many homes with this technology without having to upgrade the panel, by just installing a smart breaker. And you can scale that as you go. You can install more smart breakers to manage other loads in your home if you’d like to do that. You don’t have to make that whole investment from the beginning. You also don’t need a separate battery in your garage. So the net-net is we should dramatically reduce the cost of getting V2H capable in a home, especially in a home with less than 200-amp service, compared to what’s out there today.

What’s your outlook on the next level beyond that, which is the ability to send power back to the grid?

What we’ve built is V2G. It’s not just V2-home. Let’s say now I’ve got solar at home, and I’m powering my car through my solar panels, and now the power’s out and I want to give the energy back to my home. Great, we’ve got that covered. But in your scenario, now you need to work with the utilities and figure out, how do you provide an economic benefit to the homeowner if they provide energy back to the grid?...Electricity is a commodity. It’s worth money. So if I’ve got solar at home, and I’m using that to charge my vehicle, and my vehicle is essentially a reservoir of energy that I can move around because it’s on wheels, could I now take that energy to some other place and sell it there?...You could charge your car from solar at home for effectively free, and then go out to dinner and give some energy to the restaurant while you’re eating and use that to pay for your dinner.

There’s a lot of really interesting futuristic ideas that we’re working on and thinking about in areas like this. But I think there’s a lot of work left to be done before you as a driver with clean energy at home could actually monetize that and create an economic benefit for you, the driver of the EV. But it’s definitely coming.

How would you characterize the financial health of the public charging sector as a whole?

In the US, I call it a big basket of headwinds and tailwinds. On the headwinds side, you’ve got federal policy. Whether it’s the elimination of the EV tax credits, or next year the elimination of the EV charging tax credits, or just recently this week, rollbacks of CAFE standards. All of those are not helpful. And then you see the auto OEMs react to that by starting to delay or change their plans on the number of EVs or the timing of EVs they want to roll out. All not helpful.

On the tailwinds side, you’ve got a growing population of people with EVs that are extremely happy. The data is overwhelming. Once people go EV, they’re never going back, and I’m a perfect example of it. The product is just superior to a gas vehicle in terms of maintenance costs, driving experience, quietness, acceleration power—it’s just better. So we really do believe that just based on the superiority of the product offering, the vehicle for passenger car drivers, it’s going to ultimately win…Adoption is going to continue. Also fueled by, despite some of the pullbacks from the OEMs, just more cars, better selections, lower price points. We continue to see the cost of EVs come down and get closer to those of gas vehicles. In China, where EVs are now 50% of the market, the EV cost has now crossed over the equivalent cost of the gas version of that same car.

What do you think the reversal of CAFE standards will mean for ChargePoint’s business and the adoption curve in the US?

It’s not helpful. It’s going to cause the auto OEMs to slow down their plans for EVs, so that doesn’t help. But at the same time, I think the superiority of the products, the auto OEMs that do continue to put great EVs into the market, I think they’re gonna figure out how to make money, figure out how to gain market share, and the adoption’s gonna continue…I just think it’s going to hurt America’s ability to compete on the global stage with automotive. Because the world is going electric, and without our government’s support of our automotive industry, I’m concerned we’re gonna lose the race to China and fall behind the auto OEMs in Europe.

With less federal support for charging projects and electrification in the near term, how do you see local communities and individual states…pushing forward on their own?

I expect as the federal government rolls back their carrots and sticks, the states that care will step up and try and help us along.

The other thing that, regardless of whatever the government does at the federal level or the state and local level, this is just good for business…If [businesses] don’t offer charging, they’re now missing out on a larger and larger segment of the population that may go to one of their competitors close by that does offer charging…There’s a business imperative to put charging in commercial settings if you want the people you care about to come to your place, whether that’s to work there, shop there, sleep there, eat there, whatever the case may be…On the fleet side, I think there, it’s really just economics. Can I deliver the people or goods every day for less money, less total cost, with an electric fleet than I can with a gas fleet? As the vehicle costs come down and we introduce innovations like…our new DC fast charger, we’re going to get to a point where it’s just less expensive to operate an electric fleet than a gas fleet. I can absolutely see that coming in the near future.

What innovations are you most excited about to make public charging more reliable and faster?

On the technology side, we’ve got a very sophisticated Network Operations Center, where we’re not only looking at the data that our chargers send us on a routine basis to monitor their health, we’re also using our mobile app to allow drivers to tell us about stations that may have issues that we aren’t able to detect with remote monitoring…Two years ago, someone who owned and operated that station at a hotel, for example, or on a highway corridor, they would have to figure out the charger has a problem and then call us to come fix it. Now, because of what we’ve done in this Network Operation Center, almost 80% of our support cases, we’re now calling the station or saying, “Hey, we detected an issue, we’re gonna come repair that for you.” So we’ve made a lot of progress in that area.

The other thing we’ve done, which isn’t so much technology-related, but we’ve introduced a number of new services to help customers keep their stations up and running. We’ve got a service now where you can have people come out every month, every quarter, and just inspect all of your stations for you. It’s relatively inexpensive. They’ll come out and clean them and make sure if there’s any bird poop or trash, they’ll clean it up. And they can do some basic mechanical repairs. If there’s a scratched up screen, they can fix that. And if they find a station that’s not functional that they can’t repair, then they open a support ticket and we’ll go fix that station.