246: Solving a Major EV Issue – Josh Charles, Coul St. Interview

This week on Still to be Determined, we’re going to talk about keeping it cool. Hey everybody, I’m Sean Ferrell. Welcome to Still to be Determined. This of course is the followup podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And with me, as always is the aforementioned Matt Ferrell.

Matt, how are you today? I’m doing really well. How about you? I’m doing okay. It’s a bit fall, like a bit chilly here in New York city, which is making me think about heating services that would be better than the one I currently have. Luckily for me, my brother talks about heating services all the time.

And normally we would take a look at Matt’s most recent video and we would have a look at our most recent video in the comments that it spawned. But this week we have something different for you. Once again, we are happy to share a long form interview. These have proved to be very popular and spur a lot of conversation.

And this week, we’re going to be sharing Matt’s conversation with Josh Charles. Josh has a new company. It is Coul St.,, which is developing an on street EV charging station. And it’s a new and clever system that could make a huge difference for suburban and urban locations where EV owners don’t have access to a garage.

And as Not an EV owner, but as somebody who lives in a city, yeah, nobody’s got a garage. Josh and Matt know each other because they are both YouTubers and Josh is putting his engineering background to work to try and solve this gap in the EV market. So we are very happy to share this long form conversation between Matt and Josh.

And we’ll look forward to your comments once we’ve shared this video with you.

Hi Josh, so thanks so much for joining me. I got to start this off by telling the viewers and listeners, you and I actually have had a few connections over time. Back when I started YouTube, you were already there doing videos and I had a little giveaway where I had an extra Tesla EV connector that was like, Signed, I think it was signed by Elon and I gave it away and you ended up getting it.

So I sent it to you, which I find really funny because you’ve gone down the path of EV charging now, like you’re doing your own EV charging. So I find that really kind of cool. How about you just kind of like, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing.

Sure. Yeah. And, uh, I’ll fill you in on that backstory on that, but you.

You’re one of the few people I credit with me actually diving into this a little bit. So, uh, Yeah, my name is Josh Charles, I created a company called Coul St.,, uh, our mantra is we’re solving EV charging for street parkers and other people who can’t charge at home today. Started, boy, I don’t know when you sent me the charger, but sometime back in that era, back in the late teens, uh, we moved into our home here where I park on the street, realized this is going to be an issue when I get an EV, I didn’t have one at the time, but started planning ahead and then eventually jumped in.

Uh, you know, really hardcore on developing this and testing it and ended up getting an EV during that process. So, uh, that worked out nicely and, uh, have not looked back and been gone ever since. So that’s, that’s the very brief history of me. Yeah. And, and I can get back into kind of what happened back when you were just starting out and, uh,

yeah.

Yeah. Let, let’s, let’s back up and start there. Like, yeah. So fill us in there.

Actually, I think, I think we connected over the Sense Energy Monitor. Um, yeah, I, I had done a video on that and then you did a video and, uh, we talked a little and then I ended up winning the charger. Yeah, it was signed by Elon.

It was your referral charger. Uh, so yeah, I, at the time I was like, boy, if I get this charger, what am I going to do with it? I don’t have an EV. I was like, well, I could, uh, Put it in my basement and try to run this out to the street and have a retractable cord reel in the ground. This is kind of where I started with that.

So, uh, and then I won it, I was like, okay, now I got to do this. So that was, that was your contribution, um, ended up, you know, as I dug into it and it was like, well, This retractable cord reel, you know, you can imagine, uh, think of like a hose, you could use it for a garden hose, but like a, uh, air hose sort of style retractor.

It’d be a really cool way to store up a charge cable, but I was going to put it underground and, uh, there’s moisture concerns, water, flooding, all that. Plus it’s really expensive. So, um, that, that we eventually changed our form factor. So I can get into that.

Before we get into that, I do have a question about like, A little bit about you and your particular background, because I wasn’t aware of this.

You have some kind of engineering background in what you do, because like, what you guys are doing with Coul St. You’re doing something very boutique, very particular. And it was kind of fascinating because I’ve been watching your YouTube channel where you’ve been doing updates on this. It’s fascinating to watch how you’re pulling this together.

So what is your background?

Yeah. So I’m a mechanical engineer by, by training and profession. And in particular, it tend to be on the Not really electrical side. This is a bit of an adventure for me diving into electrical things. I’ve been more on the thermal side of things, energy engineering, things like that.

And, you know, I’ve, as an engineer, you kind of learn how to think through stuff. So it hasn’t been that big of a challenge to, to migrate over to electrical, but, uh, yeah, that’s, that’s my background, pretty hardcore engineering.

Yeah. So you were saying it’s like getting the, getting the power out to the street was a challenge.

How you’ve evolved and it’s over your shoulder right now. The one of the prototypes. Yeah, one of

the prototypes

is right there. Yeah. Yeah. So the basic premise, if I’ve got this right, They’re doing something similar to this in some European countries where on street parking for somebody who has to park on the street In front of the like apartment buildings or houses, you just have a little post That just has like basically like a little outlet in it, and then the driver comes up to that and has the charging cable in their trunk.

They pull it out, plug it in, plug it into their car, and then they’re off to the races. They’re charging. So they have the cables in their cars. It’s not part of the structure. And what we see here in North America is of course, you know, Tesla superchargers or Electrify America charges or EVgo or whatever it is.

And it’s always these gigantic cables that are coiled on a gigantic machine. So you’re taking a different approach where you’re, you’re trying to do it the path that they’re doing in Europe, which is cable should be with the owner of the car. And I was curious why you went down that path.

Yeah. So we’ll go back to my crazy coiled cable under the ground.

Yes.

I’m guessing it relates heavily to that.

Yes. The original idea was to keep the cable attached and yet out of the way hidden. Because if you’ve ever lived in a streetscape in a city, uh, particularly think not Manhattan, so not a real high urban density, you want something that looks nice. And you want something that’s hidden, keeps the curb appeal.

And so, you know, hiding it away made a lot of sense. The complexity of that was overwhelming or too much for the cost that it was worth to do something like that. And then I realized, okay, this is what Europe’s doing. Why can’t we do it? Looked around at all the regulations and, you know, UL listings, all that sort of thing.

And nobody spoke to it. In fact, there was a blurb in the UL listings that made me think that this is possible. So I was like Okay, let’s try this. And, uh, threw together some prototypes, tried it out, it worked really great. The problem ends up being, when you have, uh, cable management is a huge, it’s a huge thing.

So if, if you’ve ever seen, uh, some of the current, uh, Street charging infrastructure out there today. They have these large towers on them, and the tower is strictly there to have a spring loaded cable that pulls the cable up and away off the ground. If you don’t do that, you gotta coil it on the charger, or it lays on the ground, like some of the ones in my community.

Um, and so you can start to see the, You either have a huge charger that looks like a gas pump, or you have a big cable mess around a small charger. And by taking the cable off, you eliminate both of those problems.

So when you were prototyping this, did you literally just install it in front of your house?

Like on the street? So, so how long have you been testing it out? Has it been going on for the past year or so you said?

A couple of years. Yeah. It actually, it works, it works surprisingly well. Like once you actually start using a detachable cable. Uh, you think it’d be a big pain? It’s not. It’s, it’s very easy.

And uh, you use, you know, you use a standard car plug on the socket and they plug in really nicely. So it’s much better than plugging in like a regular outlet, like you would plug into your house.

What do your neighbors think of this? Nobody minds. Does anybody noticed it? Have you gotten questions about it?

Yes. People ask me about it, but yeah, nobody, if anything, it’s like interest and excitement. Yeah. That it would be a, you know, they’re interested in it.

Right.

Yeah.

So I do want to get into the evolution, like the design evolution of what you’ve been doing, but before I do that, I kind of want to get into some more of the motivations and like what you’re thinking that this might be like, would this be the kind of thing where.

You’re expecting homeowners to purchase this and have it installed at the street, versus having the city come and buy, like, you know, we’re gonna do this on five of our streets and they’re coming to you and buying it, or are you trying to go to homeowners first?

We are going to homeowners first. We do envision cities.

The reason why is important. It is challenging in some ways in that you kind of have a piecemeal sort of arrangement. But particularly here on the East coast, as you know, uh, we have less EVs than on the West coast. And in my neighborhood, you know, there’s a guy down the street who got a Tesla maybe half a year ago, but otherwise it was just me, uh, in several block radius, nobody else is going to use it.

So the utilization is incredibly low. There’s not much motivation for the city to put it out there. Plus, by running it off the home’s power supply, you don’t need to run new service connections for it. So you can put one out. You don’t have to put out five or ten to make it worthwhile. Because if you put five on my street, Nobody’s going to use them for a long, long time.

But to put one out is incredibly expensive. Tens, uh, you know, I don’t know if it’d be hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it could be, I mean, it’s a very expensive thing to do and it takes a long time. Plus the homeowner can’t take advantage of the really low electricity price of their home. They have to go through the city and if the city, you know, they set that price, if they make it high.

That’s, you know, a drawback. Maybe the next follow up question to that would be, what do you do if somebody parks there? Um,

That was, that was, it’s going to be the next question is cause like, I’m assuming you don’t have a set spot cause you’re parking on the street, which means some rando can come up and just like park in your charging spot.

So what happens then?

Yeah. And that, that is a challenge. That’s going to be a challenge regardless. There have been cities that have, you know, You know, allowed you to reserve a spot for only EV charging. Uh, I know Philadelphia did that in the past, for instance. They kind of Stop that program at the wrong time.

But the hope is that we build out a bunch of neighbors in a community who have them, and then they’re all networked on a network. And that network enables you to share power with your neighbors. And so in that scenario, you begin to have this power sharing agreement among neighbors. Um, there would be, you know, the potential to market up a little bit, earn some revenue off of that.

But over time, that issue begins to be solved. Where it becomes a lot more challenging is really high density parking. In a medium to low density parking it’s, it’s a lot better than you would think. That’s our situation. That’s I think many people’s situation. And unless you have neighbors that really don’t like you, um, my neighbors respect, respect that spot really, really well.

Cause I was just thinking about like, I used to live in Somerville, which is a suburb outside of Boston. Pretty densely packed. And like street parking, it’s almost like a blood sport at times. So it’s like there would be no way I could get, put that in front of my building and expect to be able to use it consistently.

So that kind of situation would be challenging, but I can totally imagine this kind of density you’re talking about. It’s a little more in the suburbs, maybe it’s not as densely packed, so you pretty much consistently can park in the same spot. Correct. And it’s a good idea. Okay. Yes.

And you know, modern EVs, you know, With how much you drive, you really only need it every few days.

Um, you know, I drive quite a bit and I only need it every few days. So

the idea of the network is fascinating. So you’re, you’re talking about like, if you had a street, four neighbors out of like 12 people have these posts. I can’t park in front of my spot, but I park in front of their house and I plug in.

I’m actually pulling off of their home’s power, which is going to increase their electric bill. As you pointed out, there’s some kind of like,

it’s metered through the, through the charger. Yeah. Right. So they can actually say,

if it’s 15 cents a kilowatt hour for them, they could mark it up to 18 cents. So they could make a tiny little profit by you charging in front of their house.

Okay. That, that is insanely cool. That is. Yeah.

It’s, it’s, uh, that was the, you know, that that’s been with us since the beginning. And we realized like, okay, this needs to be there. This can’t be just you. For one thing, it’s, it’s in the public setting. So it needs to be publicly addressable. It needs to be used by other people.

And so that key unlock there. Now if somebody wants one for their home and they just want to use it for themselves, they can do that too. We’re not going to stop them, but you know, having that capability there, we think is really important. Right. Critical.

Yeah. I’m just thinking back to like, If watching your YouTube channel, I’ve seen you review a bunch of different EV chargers over the past year or two on your channel.

Was that market research that you were doing? Because you know what I mean? It’s like, it’s like, because I remember there was a review of an EV charger that you had that was, you know, a small box and they kind of networked together. It was meant for like, you could put it on apartment buildings. And it’s like, it seems like a lot of the things that you’re, done You may have been seeing like, Oh, that’s an interesting concept.

That’s an interesting concept. And then tying it together in a new, unique way. Did you take inspiration from some of the other companies that were doing things that not in the setting you’re doing, but in like in an apartment building or a condo complex? And taking some of those concepts and try to apply it to those.

Yes. The one you’re referring to, I’m actually, I’m friends with them. I, we kind of, uh, not at the time, but since then, and, uh, but yes, that was strictly market research, why I got that unit. And it’s, uh, uh, you know, our relationships evolved since then because of, because of those videos, a lot of the other chargers were, you know, kind of looking at hardware, seeing what is in the hardware, how it’s constructed, you know, kind of.

Best practices on how you make these things less on the, the networking side of things, um, because most home chargers, for instance, don’t really enable that. And the chargers that do are going to be commercial chargers and that’s kind of a different price sphere. Uh, you’re going, I don’t know if it, I mean, it can be an order of magnitude more than home charging equipment.

And we obviously need to hit that home charging equipment price point. And that’s where, you know, it becomes a lot more, yeah, homeowners aren’t going to put out a 10, 000 charger.

No. So to go to your charger specifically. What kind of iterations have you gone through? Like what, what have you learned over the two years of experimenting with this?

Like what’s, what state, like what iteration of your design are you on right now? And like, what have you learned along the way?

Yeah. So we call them, I like the term mark, I guess it’s kind of like the VW golfs or, you know, there’s Canon cameras. So this here is what we call the mark four. So that’s kind of roughly the fourth iteration.

But now we’re up to like six or yeah, I think I’m working on six right now. And the Mark four is, is what I’m kind of currently going through on YouTube right now. This is not up to date. It is kind of what I still use though, personally, and the newer iterations, we’ve changed a few things, and so I’ll put that into the learning category.

So we started off, we, you know, we knew we needed a 3 foot, 4 by 4 metal post, which is essentially what this is, and we needed a socket in that. Now, we put the electronics in the post as well, so basically there’s a full EVSE inside the top foot of that post. Just like you would have. on the wall of your home, but it’s inside the post and then there’s a socket on it.

We did that for installation reasons. It ended up being easy to install. You just, electrician just runs the wires out, plugs it in. And we’ve received some feedback that from cities, you know, when we’re talking to them about this, that running live wires out there. They had some concerns. We could make it safe.

We could have some safe disconnects and ways of doing it. Uh, but we decided to move the electronics out of the, out of the post. So that’s changed the form factor quite a bit. The, the electronics will be moved inside the, the house or the building. And then the, the socket is remote to that. Um, and then it’s protected behind a relay basically.

So if a car is charging that’s the only time you have power going out there. Every other moment of time, or if the car gets knocked off the post, or whatever, the power shuts off. Um, so it’s inherently a lot safer. Also, you have much better communication. You can run Wi Fi really easily into the building.

You don’t have to worry about, you know, running a cellular network, things like that. Um, so there’s a few other advantages to doing it. I It was a bit of a sacred cow for me. I, I resisted that for a long time. I, I liked it in the post, but eventually I was kind of like, okay, I think we got to change this.

And the, the really interesting thing about that is it actually, part of the reason we did it was to take us beyond a post. We don’t have to be in the post. We’re not tied to the post anymore. Uh, we can drop this into a, a very small socket form factor that can go on a wall or, you know, in a parking garage, something like that.

Oh, interesting. So by moving it inside, now it’s like it’s giving you more opportunities for more installation options. Yes. Yes. And that was part of the reason for that.

Yeah,

that’s really slick. So it’s interesting that the cities Sent you down that path.

Yes.

Yes. And it’s actually probably a good business change.

That. Yeah. We, we realized like, okay, if we change this, this makes business sense. Um, cause we can open up these other markets for the same product. So

yeah. So one of the things from a customer point of view, obviously this is not a product somebody can buy today cause you’re still iterating at mark six.

He said, what would the kit look like? It would be, it would be the post dumb terminal kind of a thing. Probably the cable for your car and then whatever equipment’s needed for the inside where the electrician would be wiring things up.

Yeah. So essentially inside you have a, a box that looks very much like some level two chargers, a very plain box.

It’s not as fancy as some of those. And That plug, you know, that plugs into your circuit breaker, just like a level two charger would. And then out the outlet of that is a line and a conduit that runs out to the socket, wherever the socket is. Uh, it could be in a post, so we would offer a version with a post, which would be obviously a little bit more expensive.

Um, as well as a version that is just the socket itself that can be mounted in, uh, you know, on a standard electrical box, basically. And then the cord. People can buy extra cords if they want to buy extra cords, or if, you know They break the cord. They’re quite inexpensive. Half the price of, say, a typical level 2 mobile charger, so it’s quite a bit cheaper than that.

It may be too early to say this, but do you know what kind of price point you’re aiming

for? We’re aiming in It depends on the configuration there with the poster without the post, but, uh, 600 to a thousand dollars range is kind of the, the range we think we can have. Wow. So

it’s actually a little lower than I was

expecting.

Yeah. We, we wanna be, yeah, maybe, maybe you all shouldn’t hold me to that a hundred percent, but Yeah. That we think that’s achievable. Um, there’s nothing too revolutionary here beyond a, a typical level two charger.

I’m guessing the only challenge would be the. Or expense would be the getting the electrical line run to where it needs to be.

That’s the bigger expense. Yes. Yeah.

Okay.

Now, if you think about, uh, yeah, cause trench, if it’s on a post, particularly at the curb, you, trenching is always going to be involved. You know, that, that varies in complexity. Are you going to have to cut the concrete? Can you tunnel under concrete? Uh, do you not have to go through concrete?

There’s A bunch of variables there that can, can make that cost more or less, but you know, if you’re running power out to a garage or something like that, you’re going to be trenching anyways. Um, so it’s not, it’s not out of the realm of what you would see for a typical level to install, unless you have a panel in your garage, that’s gonna, that’s going to be quite a bit cheaper.

So you, what I love about people like you, especially like mechanical engineers, people who build things, when you see a problem. You just do it. It’s like you, you’ve come up with a solution for it. This is like that for me, it’s like the, this is the wrong term, but like the last mile, it’s like, we have, we figured out like for people who have homes with garages, EV charging, it’s not a problem.

You just put it in your garage for even apartment complexes and condos. We kind of got that somewhat figured out. We’ve got DC fast charging rolling out across the country. But the one thing that keeps coming up every time EVs are talked about is, I live in an apartment or I live, you know, in the city, what am I going to do?

Because there’s like no place for charging. So clearly you’re trying to tap into that. Why do you think? Public infrastructure, like why cities have been slow to try to address this and in your conversations with them, because you’ve talked about, you’ve been talking to cities about this, do you think they’re leaning more towards a solution like what you’re providing?

Because it seems like yours is going to be a little more, um, ad hoc, a little more flexible, um, to roll out slowly as needed. We like

bottom up, but yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Bottom up, that’s a good way to put it. I mean, it’s like, why do you, is that the main root of the problem is that cities typically would be looking at just massive projects where you’re coming at it from bottom up or it could just be sprinkling in as needed?

I think that’s part of it. And that was, you know, from, from when I started looking at this problem back, you know, four or five years ago, the only solutions were top down. There is a few today that are sort of close to us, but it’s still top down in that the chargers are managed by a charge point operator.

They’re not owned by the homeowners. Uh, and we think there’s an important distinction there in giving the homeowners Kind of control over getting stuff out there. Yes, it does mean they have some of the expense, but then they have more of the control. They have more control over what they pay, you know, things like that.

There really isn’t many solutions, or there wasn’t many solutions for cities. There is a, now three companies, I would say, that are kind of working in that space that I can think of, big companies. It used to just be one, maybe two. And, yeah, there was limited options. They were all very big, expensive units.

You know, I think 10, 000 is too cheap, probably more like 20, 000 for those units. And, you know, if the city’s put them out there and nobody uses them, that’s a huge expense. So, you know, it’s like we envisioned a way to kind of take the load off the city, where it’s not the city’s responsibility to spend that money to get it out there.

And that was where we saw a hole in the market. I don’t think other companies were Doing that because you can’t do market research to like, exactly figure out what this market is because none of these people have EVs. Well, some do today, but in the past, you know, like 80 percent of the people who drive EVs have a garage.

So, it’s a market that is there. There’s 40 million people in the U. S., something like that, but it’s a bit unknowable because it’s a, a new, You know, people need to get the EVs to even maybe even realize they have the problem. My impression is that’s why these companies have not moved into that space because a large company, it is a, it’s a big investment for something they can’t justify, um, as a, a need.

It’s kind of the chicken and the egg problem. It’s like, there’s not really people buying them, but

they’re

probably not buying them because they don’t have, they think they don’t have easy access to charging. And if the easy access to charging was there, they might be more inclined to buy an EV. So it’s, there’s a catch 22 going on there.

That’s the huge problem I saw was like, it’s less of a problem today. Uh, you know, through COVID EVs got a lot more popular through the last couple of years here. But there was a period of time there where it was like, yeah, if you put chargers out, nobody’s going to use them. I, I went and charged on some street chargers near me, a smaller town, uh, this was last year.

And the guy who lived there, I was filming for a video, he came out and talked to me. He’s like, you’re like only the fifth person here in the past three, four months at his charge. So, you know, it’s, uh, it’s that sort of, uh, Scenario.

You’re clearly trying to tackle a very clear problem here. Now, obviously you’re still developing the current technology, but have you looked down the road a little bit?

Have you thought about things like vehicle to home, where you could do reverse charging, where you can discharge your car to your house, or things like that? Or are there other things that you’ve been considering that would be like, that you could talk about or want to talk about that might be kind of a vision of where you want to go with this?

Yeah, I can’t speak to vehicle to load or vehicle to grid too much other than it can be supported. You know, obviously in a distributed power, if you’re charging at your neighbor’s house, that might be weird to charge their house? But maybe in a disaster situation, this is great. Maybe you can pop over there and give them power and pop over here and give, give you power.

You know, there’s, there’s all sorts of weird scenarios that can play out in situations like that. As for the future, our vision is kind of to have charging, Sockets everywhere people park for a long period of time. So if you do that, uh, the need for level three charging or fast charging goes down a lot.

And as you know, I mean, most of your, almost all your charging can be level two or level one. And so, you know, if you’re at the country club, if you’re at home, potentially at work, you know, there’s just a socket there that people can plug into. You know, I think eventually down the road. Parking meters, you obviously have to run power out to them, but if you can start having an, if detachable cables can catch on to the point where they come with a car or everybody is buying them, uh, suddenly you can start putting these in downtown locations.

Cities can roll them out. You know, I, I do think there’s a place for cities to roll them out, um, because you, you kind of need that in places where you have high parking density. You, you can’t, ad hoc is, is not going to work so well there, I don’t think. And so. Eventually, yeah, just having sockets kind of lining the streets everywhere people park would be, uh, Really, you know, I think that’s where we need to go.

And for, for right now, how many people do you have testing these? Is it you, just you, or are there more people?

Primarily me. I’m working with a few other people right now to, to get some beta units out.

Hey, are, would you, are you looking for more people to be willing to test?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So one of my questions for you was, is there anything like we can do to help?

Like is there, is there, would you prefer not people to deluge you with the requests right now? Or would you be open to people kind of like reaching out and saying, Hey, I’d love to be a beta tester.

I got deluged this summer a little bit, uh, it was a little bit, a little bit more than I expected. Um. No, we definitely want people to reach out.

I, if you go into my videos, you’ll find my email in there. Uh, or you can go to our website and sign up on a wait list. Yeah, we, we will have more details coming shortly as to when we can expect rolling out more things. Uh, and yeah, we do, we do want to fill out a few more beta testers here over the next few months, uh, to test some of these out, so we’re definitely interested in that.

Talk, talk. Like how, how,

how, how much more time do you think it’s going to take before you start kind of opening up a little bit more? Cause it’s going to take a while to kind of work this out. So are you thinking about like in like six month cycles, three month cycles, are you kind of like, is there, how are you envisioning this kind of slowly rolling out?

Like what’s the timeframe we’re talking about?

Yeah. So, you know, right now we’re, we’re kind of testing our, What we think is our final beta prototypes that we can roll into to something production ready next year We would like to have something on the market by you know in the In the summer to Q3 of next year, somewhere in that timeframe, it wouldn’t be a unlimited release.

You know, it’s going to be somewhat limited because we, uh, we’re still ramping production. So, you know, thinking, uh, a hundred, hundreds of units or something like that, we don’t want to jump, jump to tens of thousands or something. And then, yeah, I like your approach of, you know, when we projected out kind of a six month ramping from there of, okay.

We jump to the next level, jump to the next level, um, going forward. But yeah, we’re shooting to have units out, out next year. There, there’s a bit of a process. Even once we, we finalize our testing, then we have to get certifications and finalize the, you know, the manufacturing.

I’ve heard that getting like UL listings and things like that can be, uh,

it can be a little

challenging.

Yeah. You got to destroy a bunch of equipment to get through that.

It takes time and money is what I’ve heard is it takes, it takes a lot of effort to get it done. Is, is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you’d want to touch on?

Yeah, no, I think, I think that covers the majority of, of what we’re working on.

You know, I think there’s some interesting things in the future too, with load sharing for multifamily and things like that, that we, we find interesting. I don’t, I don’t know how much you’ve dug into that. Well, you, you have your, your smart panels and your, Yeah, sense obviously. Um, so yeah, looking at, you know, when you start moving into, uh, larger systems where you have multiple of these chargers kind of connected together, say in a parking garage, if you had 10 of them in there, uh, suddenly that becomes, uh, something that’s very interesting.

And what we think is unique about This scenario with a, you know, kind of a central unit and sockets is you have the chance to kind of aggregate all of your control electronics in one location, and then just kind of send out lines to your sockets so that you can do all that power management pretty easily.

You don’t have to have communication over big distances to do that. So yeah, that’s one other area where we’re considering.

Kind of like a node approach where things are just kind of spidering off of a central node. Kind of. Yeah.

Yeah. But it only really works in, you know, large installs, but in those installs, power management is super important because, you know, you can’t be running 10 or 50, 40 amp circuits probably. You’re going to have to dial them back or, you know, managed power based on the need of the folks.

Yeah. The load balancing of five people charging at once versus two. Correct. Right. Yeah. Well, one thing I always like to ask innovators, people that are building stuff like you are, what advice would you give somebody that is kind of just starting out, wants to do something in the EV space, sustainable technology space, whatever it is, what advice would you give somebody that’s just starting out?

Yeah, my, my journey through that’s been kind of interesting. I would say follow what you’re interested in because there’s so many different areas this can go and, and I’ve, you know, EV charging is one of the areas over the years I’ve touched on in that space. But really, what area do you want to be in?

And then find the people in that area who are doing the things you, you want to do. Reach out to them, start talking to them, building those connections. I mean, it’d be just like any other industry, I guess, where you’re trying to break into it. I know in the people who have talked to me, reached out to me over the past few months, the ones I

I tend to talk to a lot are the ones who are very interested and, you know, really, I can tell they’re, they’re passionate and they’re, they’re just digging into stuff, going for it, even if they don’t have a job. So, you know, in the industry, they’re, they’re researching it, they’re building things, they’re trying to, you know, You can tell they’re just, they’re in.

I think that’s the biggest differentiator I see with people is what’s their degree of passion. If you’re really passionate about it, you’re gonna do something. So just, Do something and get started.

Channel that passion is essentially it. Correct.

Correct. Yeah. I’m not sure there’s a, there’s not a magic, um, pathway to follow.

I, uh, interestingly enough, I, I started out in the coal industry, um, when I went to grad school and it was just because that’s who funded my, my research. Now it was carbon capture for the coal industry. So it wasn’t. You know, it wasn’t strictly coal and that, that led to all sorts of interesting things that I couldn’t imagine.

So sometimes you, you know, going, going into, into that conversation with that professor, I was hoping his energy stuff was like wind and solar, and then it ended up, it was coal. Um, But it ended up being a perfect place for me to land. And, and I’ve done so much in say, carbon capture over the years. Um, and it’s, it’s been very interesting.

It’s, it’s led to all sorts of other opportunities. So yeah, just cause it doesn’t look a hundred percent like you, you want it to, it might be, it still might be good.

It might be a winding path, but you can still get to where you want to go.

Yeah.

Good piece of advice. Josh, I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

I’m very I’m very interested in what you’re doing. I’m very excited about what you’re doing because you’re doing something that nobody else is doing. It’s just like, it’s one of those, I love to describe it as it’s kind of like the facepalm technology. Like, it’s like when you see and hear what the idea is, it’s kind of like, why are we, why are we not doing that already?

It’s like, it just seems like such a obvious answer that nobody was coming up with. So good job on that. And I really hope it works out. Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

So viewers, listeners, what did you think about this conversation? Our thanks of course, to Josh, and we look forward to hearing what you had to say about all of this.

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