As electric vehicle charging infrastructure development grows in New Mexico and across the country, a startup with roots in the Land of Enchantment recently formed a new partnership to tap into the burgeoning carbon credit market as its charging station work ramps up.
Go-Station Inc., launched in Albuquerque in 2015 with the help of entrepreneur and founder of The Bioscience Center Stuart Rose, recently landed a partner to generate carbon credits via electric vehicle (EV) charging ports. That partner firm, DevvStream Holdings Inc., is a public company based in Vancouver, British Columbia,that helps monetize environmental assets.
The partnership with DevvStream will allow Go-Station to pull in additional revenue by selling the credits generated from its EV charging activity, Go-Station CEO Andrew Hisey told New Mexico Inno. For instance, level-two EV chargers generate around 40 credits per year, while level-three EV chargers generate more than 10 times that number, or approximately 500 credits, annually, per DevvStream estimates.
Go-Station plans to turn that extra money into more chargers, Hisey added.
"Bottom line for us, this is an opportunity for us to generate some additional value that will allow us to expand our charging station development," he said.
Carbon credits, specifically those tied to EV charging, are designed to — as the name would imply — credit companies for investments that offset carbon-intensive activities, like driving gas-powered cars. The efficacy of financial markets for those credits was one of many subjects at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, held in Dubai from late November into early December and attended by New Mexico leaders, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
DevvStream, through what Hisey called a "proprietary blockchain process," facilitates transferring carbon credits to marketplaces where they can then be turned into monetary value. The agreement between DevvSteam and Go-Station, specifically, will see DevvStream retain a portion of carbon credits generated through Go-Station charging ports, according to a Dec. 5 news release from the Canadian company.
Another part of the agreement between the two firms calls for DevvStream and Go-Station to collaborate on establishing EV charging station projects in Canada, a country with its own greenhouse gas offset credit system. Go-Station doesn't own and operate any charging ports in Canada currently, Hisey said.
The startup does, however, have 105 ports it owns or manages on behalf of clients in the U.S. at the moment. Its first charging station project was at Albuquerque's Winrock Town Center, which has seen a 70% increase in utilization over the past year, Hisey said, and Go-Station has recently set up another seven chargers installed at its Port Fueling Center near the Port of Savannah in Savannah, Georgia. That site could grow to include closer to 20 charging stations in the coming year, he added.
Hisey said he expects Go-Station's number of owned or managed ports to "grow substantially" in 2024, as well. The startup bid on several projects to land awards through the first phase of the New Mexico Department of Transportation's National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which is set up to flow federal infrastructure dollars into private charging projects in the state. Hisey didn't provide additional detail on those projects as bids are currently under review, but said he expects award decisions sometime in January.
Revenue from EV charging is a smaller but growing share of Go-Station's business. A larger portion of the startup's work comes from "turnkey client services," Hisey said. That includes working with multifamily and office development firms and industrial clients at airports or distribution centers, for example, to help advance their own electrification efforts.
"Flowing electricity is sort of the easy part," Hisey said. "The trick to adoption is everything around flowing the electricity to a vehicle — it's the user experience, it's how easy it is to pay, it's how easy it is to navigate to new sites, it's the value we create for users or clients outside of the charging transaction, sharing of data. Those kinds of things are the magic to sort of breaking down the complexity of EV charging."
Go-Station recently launched a second version of its flagship mobile application on the iOS App Store, with a rollout on the Android App Store expected by the end of the year. The app, Hisey said, provides users access to over 45,000 public charging stations in the U.S. and Canada. The company also plans to trial a targeted advertisement feature on the app to give users more information about restaurants, stores and other amenities in the areas around charging stations.
Hisey said the app, which was in development last year, currently has around 5,000 users.
