An electric vehicle fast-charging startup with Portland ties has designs on making it big at convenience stores and other quick-stop locations. So what better place to start than Plaid Pantry?
Seattle-based Electric Era's PowerNode has been piloted at other sites, but its imminent opening at a Plaid Pantry in Northeast Portland represents a full-fledged commercial first — and a test case for the 60-year-old Portland Metro convenience mainstay.
"The question will be, is there a return on investment on it?" Jonathan Polonsky, Plaid Pantry's chairman and CEO, said.
Customer behavior remains to be seen, but Electric Era's promises of reliability and speed give him hope.
Making it work
A study last year found that fast-charging stations outside Tesla's Supercharger system didn't work more than a quarter of the time. Quincy Lee, Electric Era's founder and CEO, blamed the failure rate primarily on outsourced software.
Lee, who grew up in Portland and graduated from Jesuit High School, contrasted that with the approach at Electric Era, which is populated by SpaceX veterans, himself included.
"We have fully developed an extensible operating system in house by former SpaceX engineers," Lee said. "That full ownership of literally every line of code in our software stack is how you make rockets reliable. It is how you make a Tesla very reliable. And it is how we make our charging stations very reliable."
The PowerNode has its own battery, allowing the station to be installed without local grid improvements and to access energy when it's most economical. Energy storage and management also ensure that sufficient power is ready on demand. The system can deliver 100 miles of charging in about 10 minutes, Lee said, though vehicles with older onboard technology will fuel less quickly.
"If the customer wants to stay longer, and they want to buy a food amenity, they can, they get more energy, they get more miles," he said. "But we basically intentionalize that first six to 10 minutes so that the driver leaves with a full tank and a full belly."
That amount of added range would take on the order of hours with slower "Level 2" charging. Polonsky wasn't interested in that.
"That's not what customers want," he said, "and frankly, I don't want cars parked at the stores for an hour or more. Fast charging takes a larger investment, but I think it's worth it."
Will they shop?
What charging customers do during their shorter "dwell time" will spell how quickly Plaid Pantry's unspecified investment in the PowerNode pays off.
"If they're not coming into the store to buy something, I still make money off the sale of the kilowatt-hours, but the return on investment gets extended because of the initial capital outlay," Polonsky said. "Is it going to pay off in a couple of years or 10 years? That's what we'll find out."
The 106-store Plaid Pantry chain has nine outposts with gasoline fueling stations. Expanding that number isn't viable for regulatory and financial reasons, Polonsky said. But if the Electric Era chargers pay off, he could see installing them at 20 to 30 stores.
The first one, at 6060 NE Columbia Blvd., just needs a final permitting clearance and should be live this month. Electric Era, which recently announced a $11.5 million funding round, also expects to open a station at another familiar Portland Metro retail outlet, Space Age Fuel, this fall.
