So Where Exactly are all the evs charging?

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Connect With Stefanie Padgett

Transcript

Elena: I have Stefanie here on the show today and I am so excited to see you virtually, although I did see you live at MOVE America. So Stefanie, thank you for being here.

Stefanie: Yeah, thank you. I’m very excited to join your podcast.

Elena: Well, you have a wealth of information and knowledge on not only what’s happening in the ecosystem, but utilities, and specifically so before we get to that part, I would love for you to talk about your background, your story, and how you got to where you are today.

Stefanie: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, it’s almost a circle in my career that I’ve made. I’ve started. I’ve been supporting utilities for almost 20 years now. First half of my career started with companies like ABB and GE, supporting utilities with transmission distribution generation. At one point I had all the power plants in the southwest. So this is before kids, I would get in my car on a Monday I would drive from plant to plant, which if you’re familiar with power plants in the southwest, very different than the northeast, they’re, you know, spread very far apart. It took a long time to get from plant to plant, but I would leave on a Monday come home on a Thursday. And that was that was what I did for many, many years and I absolutely loved all power plants, all technology. It was pretty amazing. Back then, from then I decided I wanted to go into renewables. And I transitioned over to solar and I focused on the OEM side so as services How do you drive costs out using analytics and absolutely loved that. From there. It was pretty clear that it was forever going to be solar plus storage. And I wanted to better understand storage and so I joined another company that focused on on the software side of storage, and really got to understand how the two interact and how they work together. And then that really opened up the door to join Rhythmos and Rhythmos is sits at the intersection that we were just talking about between, you know, utilities and mobility. I and it’s focused using software to enable that that new industry that’s being born as we speak, and allowed me to come back to utilities to focus on the equipment that I sold back in ABB. So transformers which I know really well so I’m focused on how to get more out of those transformers and supporting utilities with this this new industry that they’re moving into with the lead electric vehicles and the opportunity that they’re getting to see. So it’s it’s been it’s been an incredible journey. And I’m really thankful of all the opportunities that I’ve had within all of those different organizations and industries.

Elena: So let’s talk about what we mentioned previously, before I hit record on this episode, which was we now have this interesting relationship between the automotive industry and the utility industry, these two giant behemoth incumbents that have been around forever. Where do you where do you see it going in the next year?

Stefanie: Yeah, it’s absolutely incredible because they’re both going through such a significant transition, you know, to take the utility industry that has been pretty stable for the last two decades, not a lot of low growth and that low growth was handled through efficiency gains, to now they’re going to see the biggest opportunity in revenue and low growth that they’ve ever seen. And it’s going to happen quicker than they’ve ever you know, they’ve ever responded to in the last couple of decades. So, it is it is a challenge for them, but man and opportunity and then on the on the OEM side, I mean, the transition from you know, these fossil fuel vehicles ice vehicles to to EVs, you know, it’s kind of, it’s spinning their entire process in their system. They’re all getting on board and thinking about it differently. You know, we’re starting to think in different terms of how we drive and how we charge and so yeah, it’s it’s, it’s incredible to see both of these industries, making that transition and then having to come together in order to be successful, right, but they, they are going to feed off of each other on on how and where we take this new industry. That’s being born, you know, between utility and energy and transportation. It’s gonna it’s gonna be exciting. It’s already exciting for me to watch you know, I sit in that space, but I think for others, you know, just watching on the sidelines the next couple years is going to be pretty incredible.

Elena: You might have a different perspective to maybe the mainstream thinking of, we need more public charging infrastructure. We need more and more and more, more and more, but your perspective runs a little bit counter to that I would love to hear your perspective and why you think that way.

Stefanie: Yeah. I mean, when you think about charging our vehicles, you know, we all know it’s at least over 80% and in some region, some areas, it’s as high as 90% of charging is done at home. And so we really need to think about how are we going to support charging and make sure that the grid can handle that charging, because that’s where it’s going to happen. As at our house, I have an EV, I charge at night. I rarely use, you know, public charging, so we really need to put some focus on the equipment that’s there to support that. That’s that’s really where with most steps and it’s helping to understand the existing equipment and instead of, you know, upgrading everything to handle that new load or building out additional infrastructure, we can really use the tools and software that’s available today to help that acceleration and help that adoption at the lowest cost to the grid, and therefore the lowest cost to the driver. Right? That’s really what we want to focus on. And we can use those tools to get more out of the existing equipment before we have to start building and I was mentioning that that’s so critical because you know, as we’re starting to to bring on more charging the amount of revenue the utility will get from that charging is enough to then justify that additional investment in infrastructure. So we want to really help the revenue match the cost. And we do that by being able to get more out of the existing system, the network the grid today, and we do that with tools, primarily software. I want to also jog your memory a little bit back to move America we had kind of brief conversation with you there. And I remember you telling me this story. About a customer and energy customer I think they were in Arizona where they started charging their their EV vehicle. They got like this crazy bill because the energy company didn’t know where to allocate the additional power draw. I go around and I talk to a lot of utilities and it’s my job right? And we talk about you know, what, what should they expect? What’s happening when all these EVs are showing up in their system? You know, most utilities today are using registration data to try to figure out where cars are going and where they’re charging. We talked about at home right but what we’re figuring out is just because you register a car somewhere doesn’t mean it it could be charging there so they’re really struggling to wrap their head around. You know what, where are the EVS? When are they charging? How are they charging? Should I be concerned? And what do I do to mitigate the risk? And so I go around and talk to a lot of utilities and I had a utility come to me, and they said, You know what, you’re exactly right. We had, you know, a neighbor shows up with an electric vehicle. She’s all excited she gets her neighborhood all excited. The next neighbor shows up and gets an Eevee and before you know it, they have five EVs charging on that one distribution service transformer. And I don’t know if you’re aware but every single time you add and Evie to that transformer it’s like adding another house load to that transformer. So now all of a sudden you’ve added five new homes to that transformer. Right. And the the transformer failed. Yeah. And when when the transformer fails, you know, there’s no power to that neighborhood, right. So the utility had to come out, which they did. They assessed the problem. They then realized that there were five EVs charging on that one transformer. Yeah. And then so of course they knew nothing about that, by the way, right? They weren’t they weren’t doing EV detection. They did not know that those EVs had shown up and that they were charging on that transformer when it failed. And so then they build the fifth Evie, driver $20,000 to upgrade that transformer. Unbelievable. Imagine getting a $20,000 bill from from the utility company, I think I would pass out. And it wasn’t just like it was just randomly assigned to that fifth driver. I have no idea how that was determined. Why that was determined and the person that handed it over that bill or made that bill I don’t know. I don’t know how that kind of decision is but I mean they didn’t even share it across the five drivers right.

Stefanie: Poor person who of course is so excited to have bought that their new EV you know got it all set up, paid the money to be able to charge and all of a sudden, you know, they’re getting a knock at the door from the utility. Very, very interesting. So that that driver by the way, I refuse to pay right briefly.

Elena: So yeah, I think a little bit of a tantrum.

Stefanie: Yeah, yeah. And so that utility had to cover the cost. And I think they realized, wait a minute, this is a real problem. You know, we need to start figuring out what to do. And we need to start with how do we find these EVs before these problems occur? You know that transformer as you know, $20,000 those prices for transformers have continued to go up. The demand is really high for transformers across the grid, and lead times I’ve seen lead times up to three years so now you know an asset that used to be a commodity right, you know is now a critical asset for the for the utility and they need to start understanding the impacts charging is having on those transformers and then start to plan you know utilities. They typically do, you know, transformer load study, and they do that for planning purposes to know where they need to upgrade transformers, but they do that on an annual basis, sometimes twice a year. In that, you know, you saw that we just talked about that story where you can’t find those EVs and understand the impacts twice, or once a year. This is something we have to start thinking about almost in real time. And that’s really where we focus is how do we help these utilities? Really understand what’s happening? How do we detect these EVs on their system? How do we show the impact Trump’s Evie charging is having on transformers and then how do we help them make the right decision? You don’t need to upgrade every transformer. There are alternatives. You know, I think you talked about managed charging on one of your previous episodes, you know, manage charging done through the lens of what ritmos does, which is really looking at it through the utility asset as opposed to just the vehicle right or the drivers needs. If you add in what is the existing constraints of the system? Then you can orchestrate charging in a way that never overloads you know, we’re talking about the transformer so never overloads the transformer and then all of a sudden you can double the number of EVs charging on that transformer. So that transformer didn’t have to fail right with those with those five EVs. If they had had our software in place. One they would have known that the EVs were there, too, they would have been able to see the impact on that transformer and know that they needed to optimize charging in a way that didn’t that didn’t cause that transformer to fail. So there are options out there and there are amazing people creating these these very sophisticated tools to help utilities. And I think utilities are finally getting on board to say, hey, we can’t do this alone. We need your help. Right. I think it’s a great time.

Elena: Thank you for sharing that story. Because I that was the one thing that really kind of stuck in my head and I was like, oh, yeah, well, I talked to Stefanie about that crazy story.

Stefanie: I know I keep coming back to this but the idea that we can we can lower the total infrastructure cost to advance and accelerate Evie adoption is is really what excites me right? That we can start to think in the mindset of yes, you know, there’s so there’s so much information about how much it’s going to cost us $2 trillion to upgrade the grid to support EVs, right? That’s the number that’s out there. You know, we have the opportunity to reduce that, you know, by over half, right, we can talk right into that bottom line today as we continue to build that out. And and, you know, the idea of utilities pushing into a lot electrification of transportation, to me is like this rebirth of utility.

Elena: Stefanie, if people want to reach out to you, they want to connect with you learn more about what you’re working on. Where is the best place for folks to do that?

Stefanie: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, visit our website ritmos.io. Some great videos, and I’d love to if anyone’s interested. I’d love to give demos of our platform. You can reach me at Stefanie which is Stefanie@rhythmos.io. And I’d love to reach out on LinkedIn. You’ll find me there.