Charge Up Delivers -- On-Demand Mobile Electric Vehicle Charging
Most New Yorkers, like most Americans, live in multi-unit dwellings where reliable access to stationary chargers makes owning an EV extremely difficult. Meanwhile, stationary chargers are concentrated in less dense, more affluent areas where they often sit unused or behind long lines due to broken chargers. The result of this mismatch is that EVs are scarce in exactly the areas where they would make the greatest impact on public health, environmental justice, and economic development.
SparkCharge aims to solve these problems by delivering affordable, mobile EV charging-as-a-service to communities across New York, using our portable DC fast-charger, the Roadie, proudly manufactured in Buffalo. Operations are already underway in three US cities where demand has been consistent and growing since we launched the service in June.
Our intended outcomes are increased EV adoption and, eventually, cleaner neighborhoods. We will measure these outcomes by tracking EV adoption in the target municipality.
The ChargeUp solution aims to have a deep and intense impact on the disadvantaged communities in Buffalo we hope to target. By making EV ownership easy and exciting, and by directly targeting communities that have been overlooked by traditional EV marketing that has been focused on more affluent people and neighborhoods, SparkCharge believes that these communities will see noticeable decreases in their air pollution, emissions, and particulates as a result of fewer internal combustion engines on the road. Success will be measured by fully booked schedules and repeat customers, but also by total vehicle miles and kWh delivered, by cleaner air and quieter streets, and by a cooler planet and a healthier population. Over the three years of the project period, SparkCharge will operate its ChargeUp service and mobile app in the target community, keeping track of metrics that will inform our decisions on incremental expansion into the surrounding areas. Because we have months of data from the three cities we launched in June, we will be able to compare the data coming out of Buffalo to assess whether they are meeting, exceeding, or falling short of expectations based on performance in other cities with adjustments made to account for the relative number of EVs in each location.