GigaOM » Coulomb

BMW backs electric car charging startup Coulomb

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:51:21 +0000

BMW’s venture fund, BMW i Ventures, has invested in electric car charging company Coulomb Technologies, according to a release. BMW launched its $100 million fund — its first to date — last year to focus on “mobility,” including mobile apps, in car services and auto navigation.

Five-year-old Coulomb installs and manages electric car charging stations for its customers, like businesses and government agencies. Coulomb says it operates the largest global electric car charging network in the world. Electric cars are still a small and emerging market, but companies like Coulomb are looking to get in front of the curve as more cars like Nissan’s LEAF, Tesla’s Model S and GM’s Volt make it onto the roads.

Coulomb announced a large round of $47.5 million in funding in May, but back then hadn’t yet announced BMW i Ventures as an investor. Other investors in that round included new investors Kleiner Perkins and Toyota Tsusho, and returning previous investors Braemar Energy Ventures and Rho Ventures.

BMW’s investment is interesting because it shows that the car company’s venture arm is also interested in strategically investing in electric car technology, not just mobility tools for traditional vehicles. BMW has only been modestly interested in electric cars — the company has their prototype Mini-E’s and has talked about creating its MegaCity Vehicle by 2013.

While the electric car market is only emerging, charging stations could one day be a substantial source of revenue. Other companies that are building electric car charging networks include NRG Energy, which won a controversial deal in California recently, and Ecotality, which has sued California regulators to stop the NRG Energy California deal.

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Why solar and electric cars should be friends

Ucilia Wang — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:50:00 +0000

Solar power and electric cars are an ideal match. Both are tied to the grid and disruptive technologies, which are in an early market stage and which are trying to reduce costs. It just makes sense to partner up, and that’s exactly what some solar panel companies and EV developers and chargers are starting to do.

For example, on Tuesday, solar installer REC Solar announced it will start selling General Electric’s WattStation, a level-2 charger that should fill up a car in under eight hours. REC will bundle the charger with its solar projects, and also sell the charger separately.

“The concepts of EV and PV have been around for a long time. [But] for Americans to buy an EV car and get a PV system with a nice functioning WattStation – that collection hasn’t been readily available,” said Lee Johnson, CEO of REC Solar.

The idea of marrying solar with electric car charging has grown in popularity as more automakers have been rolling out plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars. The Nissan LEAF recently passed 10,000 units sold globally. However, the numbers are still tiny for EVs, so joining with larger solar firms is a real asset.

At the same time, the plummeting price of solar panels probably has helped to encourage solar companies to look to diversify and to add on other lines of business.

In addition, the two groups’ customers probably aren’t all that different: early-adopter home owners who are well-off and lean environmental. Customers who have already committed to spending tens of thousands of dollars on rooftop solar projects are likely more willing to spend a few more thousand dollars on a home EV charger, if they also have an EV.

There’s also a good PR strategy to the partnership. The combination of solar and car charging helps to quell criticism that running electric cars on power from dirty fossil fuels undercuts the notion of driving a low- or free-emission vehicles.

Solar chargers

REC Solar has also been working on putting solar panels on carports for a while, including a 2.9 MW project at the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System. Solar carports can provide shade for parked cars and juice for EVs.

SolarCity has installed more than 100 solar home charging stations for Tesla owners, and has also installed solar charging stations at branches of Rabobank between San Francisco and Los Angeles for Tesla owners. (SolarCity’s Chairman and investor is Elon Musk, who also founded and leads Tesla). SolarCity also recently inked a deal to install chargers from ClipperCreek.

Electric vehicle makers in particular have gotten on board with solar carports. General Motors announced a $7.5 million investment in solar project developer, Sunlogics, in June this year and hired Sunlogics to build solar carports at Chevy Volt dealerships (check out our photoslide of a Sunlogics solar carport featuring MiaSole panels). Nissan Motor began building a solar charging port at the site of its future LEAF factory in Tennessee, as well as solar charging stations at its headquarters in Japan earlier this year. Toyota, meanwhile, has been working on a solar charging kit for electric cars.

GE itself has invested in both electric car and solar technologies. In addition to its WattStation electric car charger, last month, the company announced a plan to build a 400 MW factory in Colorado to make cadmium-telluride solar panels.

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The cloud: now for connecting electric cars

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:36:25 +0000

The car, in particular the electric car, is the latest device to get plugged in to the cloud. Coulomb Technologies, which makes networked electric-vehicle charging stations, plans to start selling cloud-based services to allow charge-station owners to manage charging and billing. The service also uses the cloud to connect an EV driver to the nearest charging station and deliver on-demand support and billing services.

The service can be used by the electric-vehicle-charging-station owner — such as a utility, a commercial building owner or an employer — to manage the rates and billing of the service, recoup the investment of getting the stations installed and track the usage of the stations. A charging station can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $6,000, depending on the features of the equipment, according to a recent report from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

A corporate customer like Google, which installed 70 Coulomb EV charging stations at its headquarters, can monitor how many carbon emissions it’s saving with its installation, and it can also dig into the data to learn more about electric-vehicle charging habits (something Google has been particularly keen to learn about).

If electric vehicles ever become mainstream, utilities will have to manage the charging times and rates so that EVs don’t overload the grid in certain neighborhoods. The cloud-based Coulomb services will enable utilities — like current customers Austin Energy and Orlando Utilities Commission — to manage EV charging alongside their grids. According to the EPRI report, five utilities already have done a lot of research on how to provide management services of EVs: Southern California Edison, Detroit Edison, Progress Energy, Georgia Power and Sacramento Municipal Utilities District.

Internet companies and automakers are also looking to build cloud-based car-connected services. Microsoft and Toyota announced earlier this year that they’ll jointly invest $12 million in a bid to build a cloud-based platform that will connect cars, homes and electrical smart grids. Eventually, Toyota says, nonelectric cars could be connected into the service, too.

Using the cloud to connect cars and EVs makes sense, as there will continue to be more and more data associated with these essentially extra-large and expensive devices. GM’s electric car, the Volt, has 10 million lines of code and an IP address. Keeping EVs connected to the cloud via wireless networks also could be a valuable tool to fight range anxiety, or the perception that an EV’s battery has limited range and will run out of power, leaving the driver stranded.

Image courtesy of Nissan

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Report: Cut Battery Costs out of the Electric Vehicle Equation

Jeff St. John — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:42:15 +0000

Cutting the cost of the battery out of the cost of owning an electric vehicle could be a key way to push electric vehicles into the mass market. That’s according to a report (“Changing the Game”) released Thursday from consulting giant Accenture, which studied EV pilot projects from the Netherlands to the U.K. to Japan.

The report found that amidst the many technical, regulatory and market challenges that remain between today’s nascent industry and President Barack Obama’s call for 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015, the main barrier is cost of EVs — and not surprisingly it’s the batteries’ fault.

“Until the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) [of a battery] dramatically decreases (to reach approximately $300/kWh), consumer uptake is likely to be limited to a dedicated and niche consumer market segment,” the report states. The problem is, most EV batteries nowadays cost at least $450 per kWh — and that’s after decades of researchers making significant efforts to lower the cost. The limits of today’s battery chemistries just might have mostly been reached.

The solution, Accenture suggests, is “disaggregating” battery costs from the car, usually via leasing either the car or the battery itself. Not only would that bring down vehicle costs, but it would help deal with thorny warranty issues, given EV batteries will likely end up having a lifespan of 10 years or less.

Automakers would have to arrange those battery financing terms on their own, or they could partner with a player like Better Place, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup with plans for developing battery-swapping stations around the world. Changing out car batteries every 100 miles or so will require working with the EV manufacturers on warranties, and Better Place will have to figure out ways to pay for all those standby batteries.

Beyond the key battery-leasing concept, Accenture dived into how geographical differences will play into EV charging pilots. For example, BMW’s tests of its Mini-E plug-ins in key U.S. cities found range wasn’t as big an issue in New York and New Jersey, but all its drivers tended to have more than one car in the garage. BMW’s ongoing Mini-E tests in the U.K. and Germany may well yield different results. No doubt EV “roaming” (charging EVs across various service providers) will have to be worked out between utilities and charging infrastructure or automotive partners.

Utilities around the world are prepping for plug-in cars via pilot projects, and tools like PG&E’s new EV power pricing website are coming online to help consumers make sense of it all. Companies are partnering up to serve this new market, including Cisco’s link-up with car charging company ECOTality (c csco), Siemens’ co-marketing deal with Coulomb Technologies and General Electric’s pilots with Better Place.

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Image courtesy of NScale7 via Creative Commons license.

NRG Energy: Pros and Cons of a Multi-Pronged Green Strategy

Jeff St. John — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:00:10 +0000

NRG Energy has taken big stakes in solar and wind power generation, has a lot of green power retailing clout and is planning the first-ever for profit car charging network in the United States. What are the strengths and drawbacks of this end-to-end green power moneymaking strategy?

NRG Energy: Pros and Cons of A Vertical Green Energy Play

Jeff St. John — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:00:39 +0000

NRG looks to be trying out a vertical green energy play from generation to consumer. It’s one of the biggest producers of fossil-fuel-based electricity in the U.S., it’s been diving into wind and solar power, and it’s also building a green consumer strategy with newly acquired Reliant Energy and Green Mountain Energy and its launch of eVgo, the country’s first for-profit, privately financed car charging network.

Will it work? In my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), I take a look at some of the pros and cons inherent in such an approach.

First, NRG bought about 450 megawatts of wind power in Texas and more than 1 gigawatt of solar power in California, most recently with its $450 million investment in SunPower’s 250-megawatt California Valley Solar Ranch. But while California’s mandated renewable power market represents one market for NRG’s green power, its $350 million purchase of Green Mountain Energy in October gives it another, direct-to-consumer version of the green power buys corporations now use to bolster their green credibility.

With the launch of its eVgo project, NRG is trying out yet another form of power retail innovation — charging cellphone-like flat fees for car charging. EVgo customers, including new Nissan Leaf buyers in Houston, can pick monthly payment options from $49 per month for a pay-as-you-go home charger to $89 a month for all the electricity they can use from its planned public network of fast chargers.

Of course, NRG’s retail operations are now limited to deregulated power markets such as Texas, New York city and parts of New England and the Midwest. Different models will have to be developed in regulated markets, such as the municipal utility-controlled Austin and San Antonio, where NRG hopes to roll out its eVgo network via a partnership with Hertz.

Deregulation also brings its own set of risks. NRG’s flat-fee car charging offering is susceptible to swings in the price of power NRG buys on the wholesale market. With Texas’s current low prices for electricity, NRG’s monthly fee structure seems like it will be plenty profitable, but those prices could go up. In any case, much of NRG’s monthly fees will go to pay off the financing costs of installing the chargers themselves, rather than the power they’ll be delivering.

That means NRG will need lots of customers to make good on its investment. But with plug-in cars expected to remain a tiny fraction of the U.S. and Texas market for some time, NRG expects four to five years for eVgo to reach profitability.

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Coulomb Technologies Picks Up $14M for Electric Car Charging

Josie Garthwaite — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:53:57 +0000

With plug-in cars like the Chevy Volt, Tesla’s Model S, the plug-in Prius and Nissan’s LEAF all set to hit the market in the next couple of years, get ready for an electric vehicle infrastructure boom. Investors are — this morning Coulomb Technologies, an EV infrastructure startup based in Campbell, Calif., announced that it has raised $14 million in second-round financing. Voyager Capital and Rho Ventures led the round, while Hartford Ventures and Siemens Venture Capital also joined.

At more than triple the size of Coulomb’s$3.8 million Series A round funding round a year ago, this latest funding suggests a serious ramp-up ahead for the 3-year-old company. Coulomb says the new funds will help it expand research and development, operations and sales, and gain ground in markets in Asia and South America — the latest targets in the overseas expansion Coulomb began last year, focusing initially on Europe.

With the governments of China, France and other countries investing heavily to build out national infrastructure for plug-ins, early movers in Coulomb’s space have a significant opportunity. Raising this capital to accelerate its efforts in foreign markets could help carve out a larger piece of the increasingly competitive, but still nascent EV infrastructure market.

Coulomb offers smart charging — coordinating vehicle charging and discharging according to the power grid’s needs and user preferences through software. Coulomb’s subscribers can get a lower rate for charging sessions if they agree to allow the utility to temporarily suspend their charging when needed. A company like smart grid firm GridPoint can connect the dots to let utilities dynamically shed portions of that load based on set parameters.

Coulomb’s business model involves selling subscriptions for access to the charge points, and also collecting fees from retail stores, home and building owners, and other entities to install the equipment. Those property owners will get to keep single-use fees to cover electricity costs (with more to spare), while Coulomb draws revenue from subscribers with pre-paid charging plans. According to today’s release, more than 120 customers, including McDonalds, Dell, as well as municipalities like San Francisco, have signed up for Coulomb’s charge points, which are used by ”thousands” of electric vehicle drivers.

By selling access, rather than electricity, Coulomb could avoid a potential roadblock now facing companies like infrastructure startup Better Place, which plans to provide electricity sell electricity directly – generally the province of utilities — to drivers through a network of battery charging stations (see “5 Misconceptions About Electric Car Charging“). In California, expected to be one of the largest early markets for electric vehicles, it remains unclear whether and how the state’s Public Utility Commission will regulate third-party electricity providers.

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Symbian for N-series Giving Way to Maemo by 2012

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:53:16 +0000

Are you liking what you’re seeing from the Nokia N900 and its Maemo operating system? Nokia hopes so because it let loose that Symbian S60 is hitting the recycle bin by 2012 on its N-series line of devices. Assuming that the Mayans don’t get involved in any calendar tomfoolery, you’ll see Maemo on all N-series handsets by then. That’s the word from a Maemo event held yesterday in London — bear in mind that it was a Maemo event, meaning that Nokia hasn’t officially stated this in any formal capacity.

The news makes sense in several way, though. By comparison, the S60 user interface is looking older than that Mayan calendar as each day goes on. And Nokia left the door open for this very scenario back in August when Om asked the company about a potential dumping of Symbian. Here are quotes back then from a Nokia representative, emphasis mine:

“[t]here is logically not just one software environment that fits all consumer and market needs,”

“In addition, as we’ve stated before, we also continue to explore opportunities around a new class of devices that we see as the next segment of high performance mobile devices.”

Those opportunities are surely Maemo at this point, with the N900 currently starting to ship. “Consumer and market needs” are indeed changing as well — and Nokia must change with them, or else become irrelevant. The bulk of the company’s handsets are low-end, low-margin feature phones, and the rising trend of smartphone sales tells Nokia where the near future is. For Nokia to regain lost market share and earn more profit per handset, it needs to reinvent its smartphone line. Maemo looks to be it, while I’d wager that S60 moves down the line to become the “new” feature phone-plus for Nokia.

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Smart Move: Smart Charging Startup Coulomb Scores Deal for Electric Smart

Josie Garthwaite — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:04:22 +0000

For the second time this year, a startup is joining the ranks of companies helping to roll out the electric version of Daimler’s Smart Fortwo city car. The German automaker teamed up with Silicon Valley’s Tesla Motors in May for battery pack technology and this morning charge point maker Coulomb Technologies, based in Campbell, Calif., has been named the preferred supplier for charging stations for the electric Fortwo in the U.S.

For Coulomb, today’s deal means the company will have distribution for its smart charging systems (see our 10 electric car smart charging players to watch) through the national Smart dealer network. Getting in on the ground floor with a major automaker’s inaugural electric vehicle launch, slated for an initial rollout next year and mass production in 2012, represents a next step for Coulomb, boosting its profile among consumers and giving it some industry cred. According to Jerry Reich, CEO of Green Power Technology, which will oversee the Smart program and is currently exclusive distributor for Coulomb’s equipment in the Northeast, this is the first time a major auto manufacturer has chosen an infrastructure provider to go with its electric vehicle.

Reich told us that today’s deal is exclusive as far as the pilot launch of the electric Fortwo goes, and he’s hopeful that Coulomb will remain at least the “primary supplier” for the model when it launches commercially — helping Coulomb “enter into a new phase of our business,” the home charging market. Electric Fortwo buyers will have the option to sign up for a charging system installation at the dealership along with their vehicle purchase, and so Reich expects Coulomb’s uptick in sales to be directly correlated with sales of the car — “several hundred units to start with and thousands of vehicles over time.”

Coulomb’s latest agreement is not with Daimler itself, but rather with the exclusive U.S. distributor for the Smart Fortwo in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, which is part of the behemoth Penske Automotive Group. Previously, Coulomb has announced mostly agreements with local governments, including San Jose, Calif., and Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as small installations for McDonald’s and other companies. Earlier this year, the startup raised $3.8 million in its first venture capital round from Berlin, Germany’s Estag Capital.

Coulomb’s business model involves selling subscriptions for access to the charge points, and also charging retail stores, home and building owners, and other entities to install the equipment. Those customers will get to keep single-use fees to cover electricity costs (with more to spare), while Coulomb collects revenue from subscribers with pre-paid charging plans.

Here’s where the smart part comes into the smart charging: Coulomb’s networked charging stations use software to coordinate vehicle charging and discharging according to the power grid’s needs and user preferences. Coulomb’s subscribers can get a lower rate for charging sessions if they agree to allow the utility to temporarily suspend their charging when needed. A company like smart grid firm GridPoint can connect the dots to let utilities dynamically shed portions of that load based on set parameters. Users are then alerted via text message when the car’s juiced up, and with a swipe of a key fob the driver is good to go — ready to drive off in a smart-charged Smart car.

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IBM Launches Software to Act as Smart Grid Glue for Startups

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:59:48 +0000

It’s always been hard to explain IBM’s role in the smart grid — the computing company has its hands in dozens of utility smart grid deals by way of software that can act as a facilitator for smart grid buildouts. This morning IBM detailed a bit more about how it’s acting as a sort of glue between utilities and third-party smart grid vendors, with the announcement of new software called “Solution Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE).”

Any smart grid firm — from a smart meter data management software maker to a home area energy dashboard maker — can build applications and services to be compatible with IBM’s SAFE software, and utilities can easily and quickly integrate the third-party tool into their networks, says IBM. Companies like ESRI, SISCO, Retriever Communications, Trilliant, BPL Global, Coulomb Technologies, eMeter, Enterprise Information Management, Itron, OSIsoft and PowerSense have already built their tools to be compatible with SAFE. Trilliant CEO Andy White emphasized in a statement that it’s critical for smart grid software to be easily and quickly scaled up and standards-compliant.

IBM’s SAFE could be particularly helpful for young startups. The software can offer these companies a standard software platform to build upon, enabling them to focus on their valuable intellectual property. IBM’s announcement quotes Lee Burrows, a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, which has invested in home energy management startup Tendril, as saying: “VantagePoint sees great value in our portfolio companies teaming with established industry leaders like IBM.”

IBM’s software can also help take the risk out of a utility doing a deal with an unknown and tiny startup. Utilities generally like to work with big companies, but given the industry is so nascent, many of them are working with relative newbies, and IBM’s software can help add some needed weight to the equation.

Of course, many startups and smart grid firms won’t want to build their products based on IBM’s SAFE and will want to create their own baseline smart grid software that can act as a standard. And many companies are big enough that they don’t need the weight of IBM when they are making a utility deal. But we look forward to seeing which startups decide to go with SAFE and which decide to make their own way.

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