What's going on, everyone? It's Daniel Litwin, the voice of b to b, joining you from the irving, Vension Center for Charge Expo twenty twenty four. I'm pleased to be sitting down today with Mr. Frank Huerta. He's director of alternative fuels at lilypad e v, Frank. Great to have you on. How are you doing today? Thanks for having us. Good. Thank you. Good. Yeah. How's, how's the show been so far? You know what? Pretty good. Turn out. It's so so, but, people we've talked to has been very fruitful. So we've actually, really enjoyed our time here for the past couple of days. Fantastic. Well, you know, what I love about these kinds of shows, and, you know, especially these ones are in a smaller convention center, a little more personal, is that they're really focused on the conversations and the collaboration, needed to advance industry. And that's what's, I think, really necessary for this larger industry today, whether we're talking about EV charging or the larger ecosystem of, energy utilities and environmental holders. Right? There's a lot of coordination to be made, a lot of stakeholders bring to the table. And that's something that I know y'all at Lilly Pat EV do a lot of in helping facilitate and execute on major EV charging infrastructure projects. Can you give our audience a little more clarity on the role Lilly Patty plays in this larger movement towards EV adoption. Sure. I appreciate you asking. So our core competency is distribution and consultancy. So, we move boxes Well, and, we answer questions, essentially, is is the main thing that we do. But we we learned very early on in our company that we needed to bring everybody to the table in order to get jobs completed. And so we've developed a nationwide network of electrical contractors, engineers, and designers. So that at any port, a portion of the United States where a project is needed to, to be completed, we have the ability to do it turnkey. So, that's fine. And then that shows us what we do. Nice. Well, then y'all are at the front lines of the deployment of fresh infrastructure across the US. Why don't you give our audience a bit of a pulse check on where the energy at right now. Right? What regions, sectors, industries, are really seeing a mass adoption of EV charging Yeah. Twenty twenty four. Well, it's an interesting time to ask the question because as you might know or viewers might know, the headlines have been a little bit negative recently for EV charging, particularly around like retail public charging. Yeah. Chargers not working, not having the infrastructure, sales being down, things like that. Right. But, we're seeing, adoption of EVs and EV charging all over the place multi unit dwellings. Sure. More apartments and condos. A huge adoption there. But to be quite honest with you, most of the adoptions having right now through coercion, government coercion. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So you're talking, fleets, buses, and that coercion might be of a, a cynical drone. No, but I like it. It's a, yeah. But, you know, like, school buses are great. Sure. Every school district is, that can is applying for EPA grants so that they can get, electric buses and electric charging stations so that they they can get help with, subsidizing the cost of the infrastructure city county, fleets are all turning over to, electric. And we're seeing a lot of, workplaces as well, offering, charging as an amenity, to, to their employees. Interesting. So, okay. When we talk about some of these, more commercialized use cases. Right? When we talk about, school buses, for example, or public transportation, how successful has some of those deployments been over the last several years. And, since a lot of the energy has been there lately, what can the larger industry learn about what has and maybe hasn't been working in those mass deployments as we continue to fine tune this execution strategy. Yeah. Really good question. You know, the the things that have worked well have been, So I like to separate projects from for people who want charging stations to people who need charging stations. Yeah. The the projects where people need charging stations inevitably will work out better. And and that's because they really take their time, and and they want this to be a success because it is, it's a mainstay for their business. What we're seeing is a lot of really good coordination between electoral contractors, between charging factors and utility companies to figure out exactly what's gonna need to happen in order to make the the project a success. Yeah. Utility cooperation is paramount. First and foremost, that is the thing that is needed above all else. Once you get, a really good working relationship with utility, then you can start to build from there. Where are they going to put their transform where where is it gonna make the most sense for the energy to come from and then build your project around that? Right. And so the the things that make these projects successful are, knowledgeable electrical contractors, and not not even necessarily those who have done EV projects, but just those who are willing to learn who come with a a learner mindset versus a know a mindset, and, and and have some good experience within, within, just electrical construction in general. Yeah. And then it it really helps to have a involved manufacturer. We represent charge point a lot, in the field. And, the the thing that they do the best is they help make the chargers hums. When you get them installed, they can plug into a bus, and they can, you know, work just fine. Right. But plugging all of them in, making sure that you just plug them in and walk away, those things take time. People don't realize that you have to kind of dial them in. It's not like a just a a plug play. Right. Situation. It's about how they talk to the bus, and how the bus talks to them. Right. And so, having that manufacturer support the, the back end of the project is is also really, really helpful. Yeah. Well, you brought up earlier too that one of the major reasons why we've seen EV charging in the headlines recently is complaints around they're not working, and there's not enough infrastructure. And, really, what I wanna pick out a little bit is the, user experience Mhmm. Side of that. Obviously, you know, often the market decides at the consumer level and where they want to spend their dollars. And, you know, EVs an ecosystem are still having to kind of validate their utility, and their resiliency towards consumer demand, just day to day operations. And so I'm curious, you know, when you talk about bringing everyone to the table, where does user experience fit into that versation are, you know, usually the folks that are coming to the table, bringing some of their own, you know, it's like we're gonna literally deploy the station with the panel. So where the user experience guys, or are you seeing more focused sort of collaborative user experience conversations across different players when you help facilitate organize the launches of these, mass projects. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, user experience is is crucial. Of course. Retail charging is relatively new. And so when the initial companies were, selling and installing retail charging stations, they would hold on to the user experience themselves because they may have thought of themselves as proprietary Right. Had something that that they wanted to keep control over within within their ecosphere. And so as they've grown and expanded, it's become harder to maintain that user experience. And so one of the things we're saying is like the, the, the detachment, of the manufacturer from the user experience in having localities, like value added resellers or, or the, the owners of the charging station themselves, to have a bigger say about how the charging station operates, how how successful it is, and when things go wrong, how quickly and how efficiently they can get fixed. And so, you know, user experience has to come a long way. Right now, it's not rate. And and one of the things that the industry is trying to do is they're trying to provide a, well, like, for like fueling experience like you would have of the gasoline car. Right? That's, that's really your, your, your only, reference point. And so it's, it's tough, it's tough to, to, to recreate that reliably when that infrastructure doesn't exist. And so it's a waiting game, but, you know, moreover, I think it's it's, allowing people to, to do what they're that, in, in making a success. There's plenty of companies out there who are invested not only in, in, you know, selling and installing chart but actually making them successful and having a good user experience. Yeah. Let's talk standardization a little bit, too, and some of the other conversations we've had, you know, here at charge Expo twenty twenty four have been around, you know, some of the necessity for at different stages in this EV ecosystem, creating some standardization, whether it's in the, you know, power generation side of things, the user experience side of things, the federal charging ports, etcetera. I'm curious where you've seen some progress in the last year, kind of setting us up into twenty twenty four around standardization. Especially as you work with bringing these people to the table and launching these mass projects in every sector across the entire United States, where are you seeing some success in improving those conversations, you know, and again, creating more standardization for the industry. One of the bigger announced this year was the big three manufacturers, GM, Ford and Chevy, allowing their cars to charge with the, the Tesla port after year twenty twenty six, model year twenty twenty six, which is known as the Nax port. That is giant, because Tesla has by far and away, the the most reliable and robust charging network out there, so to allow other vehicles to charge them, that is just gonna increase adoption. So that's huge, huge Along with that, the now that that's going to be the case now other charging port stations are going to allow for teslas to charge on airports. So the NAC port is now kinda coming in and ahead of all the other ports as a as a standardization, in the industry for for what what port is gonna be the one. Right? It's still, I guess, still to be seen, but it looks like Max is gonna win the day. So, so from that standpoint, I think that's huge, because there's been I don't know, five, six, seven different iterations of charging ports that are out there and, different from level two and level three, and it makes it really difficult. And, you know, manufacturers are gonna need to keep up and replace. And, and so I think that is, of all, the, like, the biggest, the biggest and, and, and most encouraging news, to come from a standardization standpoint. Definitely. And, you know, I I think what makes it so powerful too is that it's introducing an OEM level standardization that is premised around ease of user experience. Right. And, I think any kind of investments that can help make the end user feel like their investment to an electric vehicle is gonna be something worth their time and energy. Unintended. I gotta toss those in there in there. You know, I think the better. Right? So, yeah, that's that's really encouraging to hear. I agree with you there. So if we look ahead now at the rest of the year, what are some of the key conversations that you hope to foster through Lilly Pat EV, or that you hope the industry has, at large, in terms of better collaboration and better coordination on things like standards, types of projects, types of industries that need e v validated to them. Right? Where should some of that cross industry, cross stakeholder collaboration, happen this year in your opinion. And why? Yeah. I think one of the things that needs to happen, the conversation that needs to happen, really, I think where of public needs have a a a really good understanding is that we're asking the call it the grid, right? Like, the grid as a whole. We're asking the grid to expand in a way that it's never been asked to expand before. Right. This is really exciting news. One, because it's essentially turning over the fueling infrastructure of America. Just, I mean, I I think that's an incredible thing. But but two, it's it's well needed, in, in terms of our reliability for, for our electrical infrastructure. And so what we're asking these electric to do with something that really they haven't been asked to do before is to on scale, provide, massive amounts of power these things take time. And so I think the goal of, you know, turning over to EV is, is a noble one, and I think that there needs to be some understanding about what we're asking the, the infrastructure of America to do. And in that respect, I think the conversations that need to had, are going back to this user experience. Right? While we're in something of a lull where we're waiting, for the expansion of this grid, to, to keep up with all of the funding that's been provided for it in the, bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed in late twenty twenty one. You know, there was seven and a half billion, partitioned for for EV charging. Five of that five billion of that will go, directly to the states to put in public infrastructure. It's gonna take time for the grid to catch up to, being able to support that. In the meantime, I think what we need to do is we need to change the narrative on, what EV charging looks like for the general public, because right now, it's not great. But but there's plenty of ways to do that. There's low hanging fruit. There's, ways for, manufacturers to have with third parties who want to go out there who want to, employ technicians to go out and make sure, that there's some sort of standardized testing or there's some sort of standardized maintenance, so that we know that our charging stations are being looked after. I mean, think about if a gas station, wasn't, inspected, once a year, let alone once a month, which is the standard at gas stations. There's none of that right now in the industry. There's no standardized testing. There's no standardized maintenance. It's when something is broken, then we go out and try and fix it. Right. Which is obviously gonna be not defective. So much downtime. Yeah. You bet. So so the collaboration needs needs to happen with where where the the third party companies who want to make solutions for the problems that are there. And the manufacturers who, who might have, a little bit of, you know, stonewall up against that I think they need to start collaborating. They need to start having conversations on how they can both work together and and, make for some better charging experience for me. For consumers. Yep. The maintenance and upkeep side of it. That's a really interesting one. Right? Yeah. Because it's like, who who who is that task force? Who do you, like, is it that each manufacturer needs to build out its own teams of service agents, you know, is it that there needs to be more industry organization level standardization on maintenance and upkeep standards? I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Well, if you look at what the current, maintenance and, repair network looks like for gasoline station. There's a standardized testing that needs to happen. I believe it's once a month. Yeah. And and then there's routine maintenance that that is, provided through twenty fourseven monitoring. So every gas station is monitoring twenty fourseven. And so you have these redundancies in place. And so even though you don't know it, you know that you're going to a gas station survival gas, you know, ninety nine percent of the time. Right. And if it's not, it's there's cones and it's taped off and things like that. There there is no, sense that, there's any sort of anyone's looking after these charging stations. Right? They're just out there. If they work, great. If they don't, that's probably to be expected. So, yeah, I mean, it it's it's gonna be it's gonna be third parties. It's not gonna be the manufacturers. They need to focus on what they're good at, and and that that is, providing good on charging hardware and the the network and software to back it up, continually making upgrades, focusing on what can be standardized. And then, there are, you know, there are people out there who are chomping at the bit to do, this, this repair work, or maintenance work, or, testing work, things like that. And, and I think these, these two parties need to meet and, and come up with a solution that that we're sure everybody because if nobody is gonna feel comfortable, adopting TVs, then then what are we all doing here? Yeah. Literally. Yep. I love that. And I think, we'll wrap on that note. You know, I I think encouraging that kind of dialogue and cross industry collaboration to instill trust. Mhmm. Right? For the end user, you're gonna key and is going to, I think, help endear a lot of, maybe, skeptics to the industry that, no, the industry is putting, you know, its focus on what's necessary with the strong foundations that, build up the industry and that everyone can take advantage of and then compete on top of. Yeah. You bet. Love that Alright. Frank Werta, thank you so much for your time. Again, folks we've been chatting with Frank, he's director of alternative fuels at Lillypad EV. Frank, if folks wanna learn more Lilypad EV, some of the work y'all are doing in the space, maybe even get in touch. Where can we point them? Yeah. Lilypad e v dot com. It's the best place to reach us. You can find me on LinkedIn. My first name, Frank, name with the h u e r t a. And yeah. Cool. Easy enough. Lily pad e v dot com. Alright, Frank. Thank you so much for your time. It's really been a pleasure. Looking forward to seeing all the great work you and your team do this year. Alright. Thank you so much. Yeah. And thank you everyone for tuning into this interview here at Charge Expo twenty twenty four. We'll catch you on the next
