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By: Hellen Zaboulani
Brooklyn-based startup, It’s Electric, is looking to make its mark on New York City by changing how electric vehicles get charged. As reported by the NY Post, the company has been installing public curbside chargers in front of commercial and residential properties and compensating owners for the electricity they provide. The company in turn charges New Yorkers for use of the EV chargers. This is becoming a vital resource for many New Yorkers, because not everyone has private driveways with their own charger, and many car owners in the city park on the streets and don’t have access to the chargers at a full-service parking garage.
Across the US, electric vehicles have gained in popularity, with the government announcing the goal for half of all cars sold by 2030 to be electric. NYC itself expects EV registrations to grow from the current 62,000 to roughly 3 million by 2030. So, EV chargers are a worthy growing business base. In fact, the charging industry alone will be worth an estimated $150 billion by 2030.
It’s Electric was co-founded by Nathan King and Tiya Gordon in 2021, after they bought an electric car and realized how hard it is to find a charger in NYC. The company is aiming to help NYC’s charging network grow from 1,400 EV chargers to 10,000 by 2030.
The company, headquartered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has raised a total of $11.8 million from major venture capital firms including Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and Uber. The ride-share giant is looking forward to growing its fleet of electric vehicles, and will need its drivers to have the ability to charge.
Per the Post, the chargers made by It’s Electric are smaller than a fire hydrant. “We’ve removed the big, the bad and the ugly [from charging stations],” co-founder Nathan King told NYNext. Customers using the charger pay around $10 per session and can use a credit card to pay or can download the company’s app for the charge. Most of that money goes back to pay the owner of the property who is actually providing the electricity. “We’re just putting a little charger in front of someone’s building on their curbside,”
said co-founder Gordon, who is also Nathan’s wife. “And they’re earning potentially thousands of dollars per year — offsetting their annual electric bill [and] putting money in their pocket.” An average home-owning family in NY who shares access to their electricity could expect to make $3,500 a year for letting It’s Electric install a charger there, as per the company’s estimates. “And their electric bill never even goes up because we separately meter the use of our electricity that’s used by the charger,” Tiya said.
Per the Post, the startup is focusing on so-called Level 2 chargers, which use comparatively little electricity but take between 4 and 10 hours to get a car fully charged. These chargers are ideal for neighborhoods where people park overnight and wish to charge their car at that time. By contrast, in office parking garages, Level 3 chargers are used—and they can fully charge a car in less than an hour but require far more energy. Because of the difference in the amount of energy used, the Department of Transportation’s Office of Energy and Transportation is pushing to build seven times more Level 2 chargers than Level 3 chargers.
The Level 2 chargers each cost a few thousand dollars, and its more to install them.
