GLOBALVARS
0
The City of New York announced on Tuesday that it will partner with curbside charging startup it’s electric to expand the city’s PlugNYC electric vehicle charging network from 88 curbside charge points today to around 700 by 2030.
“To put in perspective how important this is,” Tiya Gordon, it’s electric’s co-founder and COO, told me. “London and New York City have similar populations. But London has around 27,000 curbside EV chargers while New York City has just 88 so this is a major opportunity for expansion.”
The $60.2 million contract, which covers both installation and five years of operation, is part of New York’s Green Rides Initiative, which aims to replace all rideshare vehicles on the city’s streets with either zero-emission or wheelchair-accessible alternatives by 2030. The program began in 2021 with a pilot in partnership with electric utility Con Edison and EV charging startup FLO. Phase one of the new agreement will involve replacing those chargers with it’s electric models by early 2027, followed by a second phase that will involve installing 600 additional chargers across the city’s five boroughs — the largest municipal curbside charging buildout in the country to date.
The new charging stations will have four chargers apiece for a total of nearly 150 new stations, are just the first step towards addressing this explosion in demand. Each station will come equipped with Level 2 chargers, which can charge a vehicle to 100% of its battery level within seven hours. The city says it will encourage off-peak or overnight charging through “pricing [focused] on affordability while encouraging reasonable turnover,” such as the pilot program’s time-differentiated pricing structure. Where feasible, the stations will beature docking connections to charge e-bikes.
As of February, approximately 13% of New York City’s rideshare vehicles were electric, but that number is growing as both Uber and Lyft’s aim to electrify their entire U.S. fleets by 2030. According to Gordon, commuting to rapid charging stations throughout the city and waiting for a station to become available while on shift costs drivers 30% of their income. Rapid chargers exacerbate the problem; they slow down significantly once the charge reaches 80% to prevent the EV battery from overheating, forcing drivers to either wait for significantly longer or make more frequent stops to charge.
“They’re losing a lot of their income in driving to the limited number of public fast charging stations in New York City — because there’s just two in Brooklyn, two in Manhattan, and a few at the airports,” Gordon said. “Access to curbside charging solves the majority of their problems as they can charge off-shift with a Level 2 charger on the curbside overnight.”
To enable drivers to charge while not on shift, the city will select locations where a greater concentration of rideshare drivers live, especially in outer boroughs far away from the suburban driveways or paid parking garages that typically house charging stations. Incorporating input from drivers, the Department of Transportation has already selected 10 neighborhoods across the city, including Stapleton in Staten Island and Unionport in the Bronx.
it’s electric itself is headquartered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and manufactures its sleek, futuristic charging stations in Long Island City, Queens. Gordon first conceived of the company while walking through Brooklyn during the Covid-19 pandemic with her co-founder, Nathan King, commiserating over the struggle to find an affordable, convenient place to charge an EV. As the company grew, Gordon and King chose to keep manufacturing local not only to avoid tariff or supply chain complications, but also to deliver jobs in New York City across the entire value chain of an electric charging station — manufacturing, installation, operations, and maintenance. The company contracts with manufacturer Boyce Technologies, which also supplies the Help Point kiosks in the city’s subway system.
it’s electric’s design eliminates a bottleneck that often delays the construction of EV charging stations: the utility interconnection and permitting process. Instead of tapping into the grid, its chargers taps into the electricity supply in nearby buildings via a shallow conduit just below the sidewalk, leveraging spare electrical capacity. The charging stations meter and pay for their own electricity use, and in exchange for the building’s surplus power, it’s electric shares its revenue with building owners. While the first tranche of charging stations the company launches in New York City will be traditional utility-connected chargers, the NYC Department of Transportation confirmed to me that it may use the capacity-sharing design in future expansions.
Though it’s electric has installed these capacity-sharing chargers in major U.S. cities including Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, and Washington D.C., the New York City project represents a major step up in scale — the 700 chargers it will deliver for New York City comprise almost half of the 2,000 chargers in its current pipeline. To support these projects and hire additional staff, the company also announced on Tuesday that it has raised a new bridge round of seed funding led by Halogen Ventures, bringing its total funding to $15 million.
Gordon thinks the expansion of EV charging in New York City is significant not just for her company, but for the EV industry on the whole. “It signals to the world that the U.S. is not backing down from electrification and is still moving forward in meaningful ways,” she told me. Next, Gordon is eyeing the global market. “The technology that we have really differentiates us because we can power our chargers from a variety of sources — the utility connection, an adjacent building, or even wooden utility poles overhead. The next announcements from it’s electric will center around our expansion from NYC to other countries.”
