The push to transition away from gas- and diesel-guzzling vehicles to battery-powered ones is being driven, at least in part, by the environmental imperative to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
But not everything about EVs is clean—take, for example, the electricity powering them. Fossil fuels still generate about 60% of electricity in the US, after all.
But what if your car could run on sunshine?
That’s how Desmond Wheatley, president and CEO of San Diego-based Beam Global, describes the clean tech company’s off-grid EV charging solution. Beam’s flagship product, the EV ARC system, is solar-powered. The canopy-like system features a solar array that tracks the sun, yielding higher electricity generation; fits into a conventional parking space; and can charge up to six vehicles at once.
“We’re quite different than anybody else in the industry in that our products generate and store their own clean, renewable energy and deliver those directly to vehicles, unlike everybody else who’s connecting to the utility grid, which is still 60%, 65% carbon-based in the US,” Wheatley told Tech Brew. “And that’s pretty much a fact globally.”
And soon, Beam—which is publicly traded, with a market cap of more than $85 million—plans to take its technology to the curb; it’s slated to introduce a streetlight replacement that offers solar- and wind-generated EV charging on city streets.
“We can offer meaningful EV charging at the curb—most of which will be renewable-energized, immune to blackouts and brownouts, with a very low utility bill,” Wheatley said.
Not only does Wheatley expect the forthcoming product to be a major new revenue generator for Beam, but he sees an opportunity to improve EV charging infrastructure as we know it, i.e., at home or in parking lots of places like gas stations, shopping centers, and rest stops.
“Many cities in the world don’t have either thing; you can’t charge at home, and there aren’t big, flat parking lots. People park on the street. That’s true in American cities, too—San Francisco, New York, Chicago,” Wheatley said. “We have to solve that, and we have a very elegant solution for it.”
Beam Global was founded in 2006 and went public in 2019. Spurred by strong sales in its home market, the company recently expanded into Europe, where executives are eyeing further growth in a market that’s further ahead on the EV adoption curve.
Beam entered the European market via its acquisition last year of Amiga DOO Kraljevo, a Serbian manufacturer of energy infrastructure. The $10 million deal effectively doubled Beam’s workforce, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, and opened up access to the 16 nations Amiga serves. Beam announced in December that it had landed $1.2 million in orders from a European telecom provider.
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Stateside, Beam has attracted some high-profile customers for its ARC system, more than 1,000 of which it’s installed across the US. A recent $7.4 million order for 88 ARC systems will help the Army comply with the Biden administration’s push to decarbonize the federal fleet.
The company has worked with New York City for years, integrating its off-grid solar-powered technology onto ChargePoint chargers that power the city’s fleet vehicles.
Wheatley points to this example to explain the benefits of off-grid, solar-generated charging.
“In New York City, it takes an average of two years to go through the permitting and zoning and engineering and construction electrical projects required to make a charger work in a parking space,” he said. “We take the same charger, and we deploy in the same parking space in under one hour. You never get a utility bill, and if there’s a blackout or a brownout, which there increasingly are, the charger continues to work.”
One of the big advantages Beam touts is reduced reliance on utility grids, which often run on fossil fuels, can be unreliable, and face capacity constraints.
That’s what makes the technology compelling to Hooman Shahidi, CEO and co-founder of charging provider EVPassport.
“Do I think a product like solar and the integration of solar toward EV charging is overall fruitful for where the industry’s going? Yes, absolutely,” Shahidi told us. “I think the more solutions that we can create that minimize the reliance on the grid, the better.”
EVPassport itself is working on off-grid charging tech, including solar generation and battery storage. In the future, Shahidi hopes to see solutions that more seamlessly integrate the technology into the chargers.
“I don’t know if the industry is headed that way; I think the industry is cognizant of the fact that it needs to find alternative solutions to minimize reliance on the grid,” he said. “If you want to build a company that’s focused on reliability, security, and long-term success for the communities in which you serve, you have to think about it.”