The Democratic caucus of the Kingston Common Council hosted a presentation at its September meeting by Nathan King, an entrepreneur based in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, co-founder and CEO of the company Itselectric.
King was permitted to proselytize for 20 minutes, communicating the vision of his company providing the equivalent of gas-station pumps for electric cars at quarter-mile intervals along the sidewalks of city streets.
Shaped like rectangular posts, the pumps deliver electricity instead of gasoline by tapping into the excess juice provided by the electrical panels of all kinds of structures.
“In fact,” said King, “we really kind of like the larger commercial properties that are oriented around the corner property lots because they could host multiple chargers.”
The company was invited to make a sales pitch by councilmember Steven Schabot “I give a disclaimer first,” explained Schabot. “This is nothing but an informational session. We’re not going to be voting or anything else tonight. This was brought to my attention to by one of my constituents, and I thought it would be some good information that we could look at.”
King’s company is pursuing a grant from the Mid Hudson Momentum Fund, a $150-million state-funded program providing grants to housing and infrastructure projects. To be eligible for it, Itselectric would need to deploy 250 charges across the region.
“We don’t think there’s one single city in the mid-Hudson area that would be able to support enough money for the minimum grant for this,” said King, an architect by trade. “We’re really looking to put together a coalition of cities and deploy these 250 chargers over the next five years or so.”
Should the city go along with the designs of the company, King addressed the boon for participating property owners. “You may ask, well, why would a property owner let us do this?” said King. “Well, we actually will share revenue from the charger. Twenty percent of our top-line revenue [gross income] from our charger goes back to the property owner. It’s a way to lease that spare capacity that they have on their electrical panel.”
Fueling electric vehicles
The inspiration to provide electricity to cars in a decentralized manner came about in response to a personal problem that he had experienced, the way King recalled it.
“I had lived in Brooklyn, hadn’t had a car in 23 years,” said King, describing himself as very ecologically conscious. “I wanted to get an electric vehicle, but when I started researching I found that the closest public charger was about a mile away. And so to deal with the logistics of driving the car to the charger plugging it in, walking back home, and then walking back to where the charger was, it made getting an electric vehicle out of the question …. We can’t ask or expect people to drive their vehicles and plug in and drive back home on a regular basis. It’s just not sustainable if we want this to work.”
As highlighted by King, charging an electric vehicle differs from the gas-station model everyone is familiar with. It takes a substantially longer time to charge a battery than to fill a gas tank. The stress created by owning an electric vehicle in a world built for gasoline consumption is still novel. King in his presentation identified two kinds of anxiety experienced by the owner of an electric vehicle: Range anxiety, the fear of running out of battery power before arriving at one’s destination. And access anxiety, the same kind that affects anyone pursuing a commodity whose capture is unsure.
According to King, the installation of EV charging stations wouldn’t cost the municipality or the property owner anything to install. King acknowledged that Itselectric had to meet a requirement for matching funds in order to receive the grant. He said the firm was exploring working with Central Hudson, Con Ed and the New York Green bank, but offered no specifics.
King wanted Kingston as an anchor city. He said Nyack and Haverstraw had already written letters of commitment.
Commitments are non-binding. The municipalities are in effect only expressing interest in participation.
Council president Andrea Shaut threw cold water on a similar letter from the council by the early October soft deadline King had communicated. “We would not be able to get a letter of commitment by October 2,” said Shaut, “So your best bet would be reaching out directly to the mayor.”
Take it to the mayor
The revelation that the idea had already been presented to the Climate Action Committee, now chaired by Julie Noble, brought a swift response from majority leader Rennie Scott-Childress. “That’s not the mayor,” he said.
One of the recommendations of the Climate Action Plan, adopted in October 2020, was the placement of electric-vehicle infrastructure at several locations citywide, including municipal government facilities. The purpose of community choice aggregation, as it was called, was to allow participating local governments to procure energy supply service and distributed energy resources.
Though only two or three percent of vehicles in New York City are currently electric, the era of rapid growth in electric-vehicle ownership is coming. Hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles will be added on the roadways every year. The United States had “maybe a total of 1000 EV chargers on the curbside.” King said. In contrast, tens of thousands of curbside chargers are currently deployed in Germany, in France, and in the U.K.
“Like I’ve said before, power sort of exists everywhere,” says King. “It’s in the buildings that we live. Our curbside chargers are publicly available to everyone in the community …. We pull that power out to the curbside and we skip the whole process of having to deal with the utility.”
According to King, New York City calculates that in 30 years there will be one charger for every ten parked cars. King estimated there’d be 100,000 chargers throughout the city. He said the number of chargers was probably closer to double his estimate. In this future, curbside charging stations will spring up along the sidewalks of municipal landscapes with a frequency reminiscent of the payphones of yesteryear.
Scott-Childress wished King well and looked forward to working with him in the near future.
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