Commercial vehicle charger manufacturer Electrada continues to cultivate relationships with dealers, lenders, OEMs and energy companies.
Electrada’s partnerships with lenders such as Mitsubishi HC Capital (MHCC) and Daimler Truck Financial Services (DTFS) that already have relationships with equipment dealers and lenders helps create a bundled as-a-service solution with Electrada’s charging-as-a-service (CaaS) solution, Electrada Chief Executive Kevin Kushman told Equipment Finance News.
“MHCC has longstanding equipment finance relationships on the vehicle side with dealers, OEMs and customers, and the same thing applies with DTFS, which is a great partner of ours,” he said. “When we look at those groups, we try to leverage those and essentially create a bundled solution with them, so they’ll take care of equipment financing on the vehicle side.”
Through the bundled solution, Electrada can provide a CaaS program to MHCC and DTFS customers, which further develops its as-a-service models, Kushman said. Electrada’s charging stations also provide MHCC and DTFS customers with a fixed-cost solution to commercial charging.
“We come in with a holistic, totally capitalized infrastructure program that matches exactly what the vehicle rollout program looks like,” he said. “It’s essentially creating a transportation-as-a-service through the combination of two trusted partners doing their own thing very well.”
Differing from competition
While Electrada competes against firms including ChargePoint, WattEV and Zeen Solutions, its business model fits better for partners like DTFS and MHCC that already have relationships with dealers and lenders, Kushman said.
“One of the things you might have noticed from others in the market that are doing charging or doing EVs, [is they] try to bundle the vehicle and the charging into the same relationship,” he said. “They have use cases where that applies, but what we’ve purposely stayed away from was trying to disaggregate the relationship that customers have with their dealers or financing organizations.”
A $33.9 million investment from BlackRock’s Climate Infrastructure fund has added stability to Electrada’s capital-intensive model as other CaaS and EV firms go out of business, Kushman said.
“We built Electrada as a single-purpose entity to go at those most critical electrification-needy fleets and do it where we take on all the technology, capital, operation, maintenance, implementation and tech risk, and basically hand them a fuel contract,” he said.
“That was the rationale for pursuing and then ultimately linking up with Blackrock’s Climate Infrastructure fund as our primary investment sponsor, he said. “We have plenty of capital to go out and serve some of the larger fleets in the country doing this.”
Electrada also uses Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy’s microgrid implementation as it targets the transition to a mobility microgrid. The microgrid includes every DC and AC type charger that Electrada seeks to deploy.
Navigating EV ecosystem
To meet customer demand and maximize benefits, Electrada continues to navigate full mandates, partial mandates and other costs, Kushman said.
“If we have a customer that has a national footprint, like a Comcast or a Red Bull, we’ll go in and work with them to locate where mandates exist, where the lowest cost of power exists, the lowest cost of construction and the quickest integration opportunities with utilities,” he said. “Those tend to be Southeast U.S., Mid-Atlantic, some places in the Northeast such as New York, California and then the Pacific Northwest.”
The Pacific Northwest is attractive to Electrada due to lower power and fuel costs, Kushman said.
“If you think about the baseload fuel source in the Pacific Northwest is oftentimes hydro, which is very low cost,” he said. “That embedded cost of fuel rides through our model and depresses the cost per mile almost naturally.”
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