Who needs charging stations? Q&A Pando founder Aaron Li.
During times of rapid technological development, many companies address the new technology by adapting the trappings of the old (Remember internet portals and online malls?). However, those who think “outside the box” (Remember that tired old phrase? It’s back!) are sometimes able to unlock major savings by jettisoning vestiges of the old way of doing things.
Back in the previous century, we had to stop at gas stations to fuel our cars. Now we need to replace those with EV charging stations, right? Well, maybe not. Pando Electric’s solution for multifamily properties provides simple, compact boxes equipped with standard NEMA 240-volt receptacles, and requires drivers to use the portable charging cables that come with their cars. This means a property can install more charging ports in less space, for much less cost—while eliminating interoperability issues and vandalism risk as a side benefit. But it doesn’t mean sacrificing must-have features such as load management and revenue metering.
Pando founder Aaron Li explained to Charged why he thinks his company’s solution is the best one to address today’s biggest impediment to EV adoption.
Charged: There are many flavors of EV charging, and each has its own technical requirements and its own business opportunities. You’re targeting just one segment—the multifamily EV charging market.
Aaron Li: We’re laser-focused on the multifamily market, because we think this is the biggest pain point for EV adoption in our country. The biggest hurdle for EV adoption is charging, and 80% of charging happens at home. The issue of single-family home charging has been solved, but multifamily home charging, we see that as a big disaster. That is why Pando is focusing on that market. We do two things—EV charging and energy management—and we do them really well.
We’re laser-focused on the multifamily housing market, because we think this is the biggest pain point for EV adoption in our country.
Charged: Your system doesn’t use a charger with the typical 1772 plug. As I understand it, you simply provide a 240-volt outlet, and the driver uses their own portable charger. Is that pretty much the way it works?
Aaron Li: Yes and no. Yes, if you look at the form factor, it is an outlet, so it has all the advantages over an EV charger, such as small size, low cost and zero maintenance. Also, it fits into the tightest parking spaces. But no, it is not as simple as it looks. We beefed it up with a lot of core technologies. Some safety features are baked into the outlet. We also offer revenue metering, so it can be used to report exactly how many kilowatt-hours are used for billing purposes, and features such as tap-and-charge.
Users can activate the charging outlet without the need to connect to a server, and the adaptive load management functions through the local system. We have to connect all the charging outlets, so that they do not blow up the panel, and individually each can support as high as 10 kilowatts—this is like 50% higher than the average Level 2 EV charger. So putting all that together, yes, it is much simpler than a regular EV charger, but it supports all those technologies, making it the most powerful and the smartest charging outlet.
If you look at the form factor, it is an outlet, but it is not as simple as it looks. We beefed it up with a lot of core technologies.
Charged: So pretty much any portable charger will work with your system, as long as it has the right AC connector?
Aaron Li: Yes. We see a big problem with the EV charging industry—a lot that’s happening is about the connectivity. That means not only connecting to the cloud, but also the charger and the car need to talk to each other. There’s a lot of issues there. There’s also a debate between the J1772 connector and the NACS, which is defined by Tesla. There is going to be tons of confusion down the road between those two standards, and all those interoperability issues, but we believe we’ve found the shortcut. With the NEMA 14-50 outlet we are offering, all that is gone. It supports all different OEMs, without adapters.
Charged: Did you develop your own proprietary software?
Aaron Li: Yes, and our system relies on two things: number one, we have an open system for the application; number two, we have vertical integration between the hardware and software.
Regarding the open system, Pando is part of OCA, the Open Charging Alliance. We believe OCPP should be the standard, so if some tragedy happens to a company like Juicebox [which recently went out of business], other companies can take over their networks. That’s the disengagement between a software application and the hardware. And to be an advocate for that, we are the first EV charging outlet company that has its software backed by OCPP.
We have done a lot of things that are firsts. We are the first high-power charging outlet. We are the first charging outlet that has a GFCI baked in. We are the first one to have revenue grid metering. Our API is also open, so that means the Pando charging outlet can work seamlessly with other property technology software, such as smart parking and more—a lot of services can be integrated.
We believe not only that an open platform is important, but also that software-hardware integration is critical. To give an example, we see tons of companies that only make software. They white-label the hardware from Taiwan, from China, from Vietnam. It does not work. It makes the system very fragile when it comes to the firmware and the hardware.
With Pando, we do not see that issue. We design our own hardware. That is why we can define all the features so beautifully to fit the needs of our customers. We have temperature, voltage and current protection because we designed it that way to be safe. We have tap-and-charge through near-field communication [NFC] so that users can activate the charger through their mobile phones. And we have adaptive load management through the ConnectUS application, which means all the chargers are connected to each other to support the best possible load management. All of that is impossible if you build an EV charging company by only making software.
Charged: I believe a big part of the reliability problem is that there are so many different companies involved: hardware, software, installation. Are you providing a turnkey service?
Aaron Li: Yes. We believe that the EV charging industry has a big challenge: people think when you sell the hardware the problem is solved. It’s not the case. We see many charge points that are well-engineered pieces of hardware, but they are dead, not working at all—because the companies fail to think of the lifetime value. Pando does it differently. Number one, we offer a turnkey solution. That means besides hardware, we also think about the installation, the commissioning and even the local incentives and rebates.
Number two is that we care about value for the EV driver. That means we push the uptime to the limit. That means if some hardware is broken, we do not repair, we replace. We want to ensure high uptime because we do not want the customer to be disappointed. That is not only about operations and maintenance—it is baked into the design of our hardware from the beginning.
Charged: We did an article about a condominium complex in Palo Alto that’s a customer of yours. Are there any other customers you can talk about?
Aaron Li: We have many customers. The range is nationwide, from a big apartment company such as Great Star to condo buildings in Manhattan. One exciting project I can bring up is in New York. They had all ChargePoint EV chargers. They weren’t happy with them. They break all the time, and it limits them from upgrading the system. When they have more EVs, people have no chargers to use. They got us, they decided immediately, within 48 hours, they wanted to upgrade. They upgraded from 10 ChargePoint chargers to 30 Pando charging outlets. Not only does this serve more EVs in a much more tightly packed parking space, but they also leverage the existing capacity of their panel because of our schedule-based load management software.
There are tons of buildings out there waiting to be retrofitted for the EV charging solution that the residents deserve. The best solution is to scale up the EV charging infrastructure without upgrading the panel or the utility connection. Coming back to the project in East Palo Alto, this has been a perfect example not only for the city, but for the whole state, and we want to spread it nationwide. If you want to provide scalable and equitable EV charging to people living in multi-family dwellings, this is the right solution. It is so efficient in terms of spending and in terms of operation and maintenance, that we believe this is not one of the solutions—this will be the solution.
Most EVs come with an OEM-provided cable, and the value of that is often underestimated.
Charged: So, the customer brings their own portable EV charger. If they don’t have one, can they buy one from you?
Aaron Li: Yes. Most EVs come with an OEM-provided cable. The value of that is often underestimated. That cable comes with the warranty from the car, so if something happens, the OEM is on the hook. And that mobile cable is the best solution for that car, because it’s provided by the OEM. It is tested all the way to fit that vehicle. But if I l buy a used car, or if I lost the cable, what do I do? You can purchase such a cable online for about $200. [Editor’s note: Make sure you’re buying a cable that’s safety-tested and certified.]
Whenever you move out of the apartment, that investment will continue working for you because when you’re moving into a single-family house, very likely behind your dryer, you’ll see a similar NEMA 14-50 outlet. We believe this is a really good idea. On one hand we think it is superior compared to a regular EV charger. On the other hand, if we consider the cordless EV chargers used in Europe, we see that our system is the best. A lot of other startups are doing that, but you can only buy that particular cable from that startup. If the company dies or if you move out of the multi-family, that cable will be wasted. But Pando’s cable, the NEMA 14-50, this is the standard for the whole of North America, has been for over a hundred years. [Editor’s note: itselectric, for one, uses a J3068 detachable cable, which it says is the same standard cable used in the EU and the UK.]
Charged: Are there any interoperability issues at all? Have you ever had a problem with a charger that won’t work with your plug?
Aaron Li: Simple answer is no. We did intensive tests. We’re humble enough to say that there may be some corner cases, but so far we have seen no interoperability issues with any EVs using our solution.
Charged: Once the system is set up, your customers pay you a monthly fee for maintenance and software support?
Aaron Li: Yes. It’s like 20 bucks per month, or $200 per year. That fee powers the maintenance, the operation, the customer service, the app, the in-app billing with credit cards, the ongoing software support and the warranty, everything. We keep the price very low for two reasons. Number one, we’re confident in our hardware. It’s very unlikely to fail. Number two, we believe this will lower the barriers for the public to adopt EVs.
There’s also a business model where they don’t have to pay that fee. We just mark up the per-kWh rate so that we are still recouping that cost. They pay us and then we reimburse the property. We are working on a system in which we’re able to provide sub-metering—that’s part of PG&E’s new initiative, but that’s not going to be rolled out for a while.
Charged: Tell me about your load management software. Does it allow the property owner to set different parameters?
Aaron Li: Sure. The background for load management is that about 95% of apartment buildings are existing ones, they’re not new buildings. And in California, above 92% of the existing buildings are having capacity issues to support so many EVs. The buildings were not designed that way, and when there’s a capacity issue, it’s super-expensive to make a call to the utility, to upgrade the transformer. It’ll take you years and millions of dollars. That’s why, if we want to support so many EVs in multi-family, we have to do load management. This is not something nice to have. This is a must-have.
I see a lot of companies that do fixed load management. That is, if I have 20 kilowatts, I divide that into 10 pieces. Every car gets 2 kilowatts. That means if I only have one car, the other 18 kilowatts are wasted and it’ll take that driver over 30 hours to get a full battery, which makes zero sense. So, the number-one idea for Pando is to be able to adaptively increase the load.
Given this principle, our algorithm is a schedule-based load management. That means the charging speed is so fast that when every car finishes charging, it’ll only take you about 4 to 5 hours. For overnight parking in an apartment, you park the car about 12 to 15 hours, so it’s easy for you to get every car fully charged for 3 times the possible EV charging capacity for a regular EV charger.
We take that one step further. If some vehicle wants to jump the line—say they have to pick someone up at the airport at midnight—they can pay a premium to get charged first. In that sense, we optimize the whole system. You have to do it this way, otherwise in multifamily, given the limited capacity, if you do not do holistic load management, it is physically impossible to charge every car at the same time.
The last piece I want to mention here is our hardware-software integration. Typically all the chargers right now on the market, they need every charger to be connected through WiFi or cellular to the cloud. But in Pando we see that as a big pain for two reasons. Not only is the installation of those WiFi repeaters, those hotspot routers, expensive and difficult and labor-intensive, but also those are one of the major failure points. They fail all the time. So that’s why we designed our hardware-software integration so it’s no WiFi, no cellular, no problem.
Not only is the installation of those WiFi repeaters, those hotspot routers, expensive and difficult and labor-intensive, but those are also one of the major failure points.
Charged: Where does the load management software run? Is there a computer at each installation?
Aaron Li: Every outlet has a processor board inside it, running on Linux. It is very powerful—it recognizes others in the same network and they talk to each other. If the WiFi is down, if the cellular is off—for example if there is a big storm—the charger will still work. And I want to take it one step further—down the road the whole system will communicate with other energy appliances in the building. We put that into our roadmap. We believe that load management is such a beautiful thing, it should not be limited to EV charging, it should include all the other appliances, say the water heater, the thermostat.
Charged: You said you are laser-focused on multi-unit properties. But it seems to me this could be useful for other applications too, like city curbside charging. Do you have plans to target other markets in the future?
Aaron Li: We definitely have a lot of potential customers who are super-interested in our solutions, say for fleets, student housing and even curbside charging. But as a company we need to see, given the limited bandwidth, how we want to spend our energy and time Our technology is applicable to many different scenarios, but we want to cut to the biggest pain point, which is multi-family charging.
Charged: So that’s a business decision, not a technical limitation.
Aaron Li:You are absolutely right. And although our main business development is towards multi-family, the real estate industry, there are customers knocking on our door, and we are not rejecting them—we have one office building right now that is under the design phase.
Pando is not just a company trying to sell our hardware. We are trying to build the standard to lead the industry. We want to make a robust, healthy, cordless EV charging concept, and make it nationwide, because we believe this is the best thing that can lead to a sustainable future. Not only are we actively participating in lobbying, we want to raise the awareness of the public that cordless EV charging is safe, it’s powerful and it’s very smart and cost-effective. To make that happen, I’m happy to talk with anyone in the industry. I’m even talking to our competitors. I’m talking to the people who set the rules. I’m talking to the legislators and the utilities to promote the idea of cordless socket-based EV charging. And to that end, I’m happy if someone shares a similar vision, wants to reach out to us and build a coalition.
This article first appeared in Issue 70: October-December 2024 – Subscribe now.
