These sleek electric chargers could soon be all over New York streets

In London, there are thousands of EV chargers lining city streets. In New York City, by contrast, there are only 100—though the city wants to add 10,000 before the end of the decade.



One startup, called Itselectric, wants to help it get there with a sleek charger that can be installed more easily than the technology that’s commonly in use now. The company saw a gap in where most EV chargers are being rolled out now, with a focus on drivers taking longer trips. “It’s all based on the assumption that when you buy an EV, you can easily put a charger in your driveway or garage,” says CEO Nathan King. “That doesn’t work well in dense urban areas.” It also doesn’t work, he says, for people who rent homes with a garage, since it’s not easy to convince your landlord to install a charger.



[Photo: It’s Electric]



When the company looked into why curbside chargers have been slow to roll out in New York compared to cities in the U.K. and other parts of Europe, they realized that permitting was a challenge. The usual process requires an interconnection agreement with the local utility, something that can take weeks or even months. Then, it typically means digging deep into the street to set up a new connection to the utility main and a meter.



[Image: It’s Electric]



The startup sidesteps this by paying property owners to share their extra power, so adding a charger doesn’t require a new connection, and it’s not much more complicated than if someone was doing it at home for their own use. “If you’re a driver who owns your own driveway, you can get an electrician to come over and install a reasonably fast charger in your garage—that’s usually what most EV drivers do,” King says. “That whole process is fairly inexpensive and can be done very quickly. We’re sort of replicating that same process.”



Unlike most public chargers in a Whole Foods parking lot or gas station, which might be able to fully charge a car in 30 or 40 minutes, the street chargers are much slower, but can still fully charge a car overnight. The slower speed means that they don’t have excessive power demand. And for someone who normally parks on the street, it can be more convenient than waiting for a fast charger to finish at a store.



The design is slimmer than typical chargers, partly because it doesn’t include a charging cable—instead, drivers bring their own. This model, sometimes called “bring your own cord,” is common in Europe, where electric cars are sold with cables that drivers can keep in the trunk. (Itselectric will give chargers to its customers when they sign up for a membership; as with other chargers, drivers use an app to pay each time they charge.) When chargers break down, broken cables are often the issue, King says, and keeping them separate can also help make its stations more reliable.



The startup’s first chargers were installed this month in a pilot next to two offices in Brooklyn, though most will eventually be in residential neighborhoods. Building owners can share in the proceeds from charging fees; their own electric bill won’t change, since Itselectric will pay the utility directly for the power used by cars, tracked by submeters. More than 400 property owners are now on a waitlist, King says. The company will work both with residential buildings and neighborhood institutions like schools and churches.



[Image: It’s Electric]



New York City aims for one in 10 street parking spaces to add an EV charger to meet demand. City law says that parking spots with a charger can only be occupied by cars that are actively charging, so it’s easy to imagine some pushback from drivers who already struggle to find parking—but it might also incentivize some drivers to switch to an EV more quickly.



Itselectric plans to focus particularly on areas that don’t have much EV infrastructure. “We’re looking at neighborhoods that are a little bit further away from the commercial districts,” says King. “They tend to be lower income, they tend have less access to mass transit options. And the reason we’re looking at these communities is kind of a two-parter: One, drivers who live further away from the commercial centers tend to use their cars more and put more miles on their car for their daily commute. They also tend to be neighborhoods where [rideshare] drivers live and park their cars.”



Later this year, it will begin to deploy more chargers as quickly as possible. Companies like ItsElectric now have access to a wide range of funding, both from the federal government, which wants to add half a million chargers nationally, and from states, cities, and utilities. “There’s no lack of demand from drivers and municipalities trying to get infrastructure to these drivers,” King says. “The biggest problem we have is bandwidth—we just need to become a larger company faster.”