01-04-2025
How Revel is fast-tracking new EV chargers through a deal with PG&E
Want to know why EV chargers can be so hard to connect to crowded urban power grids? Just look to San Francisco's latest public charging station, opened by startup Revel last week.
At first glance, the station, Revel's first foray outside of its home city of New York, doesn't seem like it should be that tricky for Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric to connect. It's a fairly small parking lot in the city's Mission District, right next to a major freeway, featuring a fairly standard number of high-speed chargers — 12 — that are available 24/7.
But when all those chargers are used at once, the total demand on the grid adds up to 1.3 megawatts, Neema Yazdi, a strategic analyst on PG&E's clean energy transportation team, said at the ribbon-cutting event last week. That's equivalent to roughly one-quarter of the power demand of the city's tallest building, the 1.4-million-square-foot, 61-story Salesforce Tower.
'That's a big feat for a utility to energize,' he said — 'and to do something like that is impossible without the close collaboration of our customers.'
More such challenges and collaborations are on the way. Revel plans to start construction this year on seven more Bay Area sites with a total of 125 fast-charging plugs. It's an ambitious pace in a state with notoriously long wait times to bring EV charging hubs online.
One way Revel hopes to achieve this plan is by entering two of its upcoming stations into a new PG&E program to fast-track EV charging hubs. On one condition, that is: Station operators have to be willing to reduce the power that chargers can deliver at the times when PG&E's grid can't handle the maximum draw. PG&E and Revel will pursue this 'flexible service connection' approach at one site in the city of Oakland and another near San Francisco International Airport.
Under standard utility practice, customers can't connect if their maximum power draw threatens to overtax the grid, even if only during a handful of hours per year when grid demand peaks. That's despite the fact that many EV charging sites are highly unlikely to have enough vehicles charging at once to reach that limit — and that they can theoretically dial back their power use during those critical hours.
Flexible service turns that theoretical capability into an operational reality. The process is straightforward: PG&E forecasts its grid needs and, a day ahead of time, sends customers instructions for when they need to curtail power use.
Both customers and utility win out, Yazdi said. Customers can 'connect quickly and more seamlessly' and charge at full capacity most of the time, as they wait for PG&E to complete grid upgrades that will eventually remove the constraints they face during peak hours.
PG&E, meanwhile, gets to expand EV charging more quickly than it would otherwise be able to. That's not just good for meeting the state's carbon-cutting goals but for reducing rates for customers at large. That's because the program helps reduce immediate pressure on PG&E to make grid upgrades, which are a primary driver of rising electricity rates in its territory, while also quickly expanding its electricity sales.
'Only a few utilities in the United States are doing this nowadays,' Yazdi said. 'This is really forward-thinking, and we're really excited about it.'
So are the authors of a February Environmental Defense Fund report that highlights PG&E's leading position among U.S. utilities on the flexible connection front. Southern California Edison is pursuing a similar pilot project, the report notes, and utilities and regulators in Illinois and Colorado are exploring approaches to flexible interconnection as well.
Finding ways for EV charging stations to connect more rapidly provides 'both economic benefits to the fleet that can put its newly acquired vehicles and chargers to work, and societal benefits where these electric trucks and buses are displacing fossil fuel vehicles earlier than otherwise possible,' the report's authors wrote.
It took PG&E more than a year to establish, test, and gain confidence in the underlying technology needed to complete its first flexible interconnection at a Tesla charging complex in California's Central Valley late last year.
With initial projects proving the technology is reliable, PG&E started looking to expand its use of flexible connections, including at several more EV charging sites in the Central Valley — and Revel's two sites in the Bay Area.
Revel has been working with PG&E for about 18 months to identify sites and plan for its flexible connection projects, said Jake Potent, the company's vice president of corporate affairs. 'There are a lot of times we don't go forward because we're grid-constrained.'
In New York City, Revel has already built five locations serving a total of 88 fast chargers and plans to more than triple that number to 267 chargers by the end of the year. But finding spots with enough grid capacity to serve those concentrated power demands hasn't been easy, Paul Suhey, Revel's chief operating officer and cofounder, told Canary Media back in 2021.
At last week's ribbon-cutting, Suhey emphasized that building urban fast-charging stations is 'kind of hard — well, it's really hard. It doesn't happen overnight.'
But finding ways to fit megawatt-scale charging into cities is important for localities in states like New York and California, which have set aggressive goals to end sales of new gasoline-fueled cars by 2035. EVs now make up about one-third of passenger vehicle sales in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie said at last week's event, well above the national share of around 8%.
Those adoption numbers gave Revel confidence its fast chargers would get enough use to earn back its costs, Suhey told Canary Media. In New York City, where EV adoption is lower, Revel also operates an all-EV rideshare fleet rather than relying solely on public customers to make the economics of its charging sites work out. New York City and California have mandates for rideshare companies to switch to EVs over the coming years, which further heightens the need for charging sites.
Cities also struggle to bring public charging stations into neighborhoods where most people rent their homes, said Joe Piasecki, public affairs and policy coordinator for the San Francisco Environment Department.
That's a big problem: Most people charge their EVs at home, but renters face an uphill battle in convincing landlords to install EV chargers on their behalf. That means renters tend to be disproportionately reliant on public EV charging while also having worse access to it. About 70% of San Francisco residents live in multifamily housing, Piasecki said.
The economics of urban EV charging have been helped along in California and New York by regulator-approved programs that instruct utilities to cover the costs of 'make-ready' infrastructure — digging trenches, installing transformers and switchgear, and other work required to connect charging stations to the grid — that the site developer might otherwise bear. Similar programs support EV charger installations in Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states.
But make-ready work is just one of the expenses that EV charging creates. Sometimes, big sites might force utilities to upgrade the substations serving entire neighborhoods. Flexible interconnection can allow utilities to postpone those 'upstream' upgrades until they can be conducted as part of a broader strategic grid expansion plan.
Demand for those upgrades will increase as high-speed charging expands — and as the latest generation of chargers requires even more power to charge vehicles faster. Electrify America's flagship indoor charging station in San Francisco, which houses 20 high-speed chargers, required PG&E to deliver high-voltage power typically reserved for transmission grids and major industrial customers.
Public fast chargers aren't the only option, of course. Slower Level 2 chargers can be installed in garages, along curbs, or into street lights. Even slower Level 1 chargers could offer overnight charging options for multifamily buildings.
But fast chargers that replicate the experience of fueling up at a gas station are widely seen as a vital amenity to expand the pool of people willing to switch to an EV. 'Without widespread, easy to use, convenient, reliable fast charging, dreams of EV adoption are just that — dreams,' Suhey said.
