 It is such a pleasure to be at Stanford virtually. I wish I could be there in person. I'm now based in Southern California, because that's where EVGO is. I've been at EVGO for about three years. When the invitation from Sarah and John came in to do this, I asked my partner in crime, my colleague, Evo, to join me. Evo has been working with Stanford and doing some things with ROM on battery technology and knowing the technology appetite of many attendees of the Stanford Energy Seminar. I thought we could do hopefully a gripping show on what's happening for us, what we're seeing, what we're witnessing, what we're trying to lead in EV charging. So with that, I'm going to share my screen. Here's the basic run of what we're going to do for the next 20 minutes or so. Evo and I will give you a little bit of context about what's going on in the EV market. A quick primer on charging 101 and then some context about who EVGO is. Then we'll spend the bulk of the time talking about the forces that are changing the world that we're living in in charging. And there are four major things. There's lots going on, but there's four major categories. And then finally, we'll finish up with what the charging industry, as John mentioned, there's some collaboration. What's the charging industry doing to respond to those dynamic forces? So first of all, EV market growth. The car companies have announced over $300 billion that they're investing to electrify their fleet. There's just no question that electrification of transportation is happening. There will be hundreds of new models coming to the market over this next decade. There'll be a range of different kinds of vehicles, lots of sizes, lower price points to make them truly, truly affordable. And what this means is we're going to go from somewhere around a million EVs on the roads in America right now to, if you look at that chart on the right, over 14 million by the end of the decade. And it couldn't be even greater. It really could be even greater. Now the key factors that are essential to this growth are that the costs are declining. And that's largely, as you would know, because battery costs have declined significantly. And EVO will talk a little bit about that. The ranges of these vehicles, how far they can go on a single charge is also increasing. And you can see that on this chart along, the cars along the bottom, 100 miles of range, up to 600 miles of range. And the third part of it, and that's the part that EVO and I spend a lot of time on, all of our time on, is what's essential to growth of the EV market is the availability of convenient, reliable charging infrastructure. So that drivers know that when they have their car, they're going to be able to recharge it, whether they're at home, whether they're at work, whether they're on the go to go visit grandma, whether they're off on a long field trip. And so that's what we focus on. This, but I would just say that this charging infrastructure ecosystem is not homogeneous. And it's actually not well understood by many people until you actually have an EV. And so EVO will talk a little bit about just sort of the fundamentals of charging. Sure. Thank you, Kathy. And thank you to Stanford for hosting us for this talk. So let's talk about the really basic parts of charging. There are three levels of charging, level one, level two, and DC faster, what is also known as level three. The first two are both AC charging, and they basically represent the lowest amount of energy that we can put into the EVs. EVs will have onboard AC to DC converters to allow for that AC charging to have to take place. And in fact, one of the trends that we're seeing is the size of those converters is actually decreasing as vehicles are coming to market with even further ranges, which is a little counterintuitive, but I'll explain that reason in a little bit. So level one is basically your 120 volt AC plug. It results in about a 1.4 kilowatt charge rate. And that effectively means that the most efficient cars today, which are at the four miles per kilowatt hour in terms of efficiency, get about 5.6 miles per hour, the least efficient that are closer to two, obviously significantly less than that, less than three. We move on up to level two. Most charging today represents 220 volts at 30 amps, resulting in 7.2 kilowatts in terms of peak rate. Although level two in its own definition can go up to 19.2 kilowatt charge rate at 80 amps. This is where the decreasing size of those AC to DC converters in vehicles has actually taken quite a bit of impact. And the reason for that is basically weight. The weight of the vehicle is reduced as we decrease the size of the AC to DC charger. And that of course has an impact on the range and the efficiency of that vehicle. Then we move on up to DC fast and really calling that just a single level gets a little bit complicated, but we basically have charging that extends from 50 kilowatt peak rate to 350, although there are several that call 25 kilowatts a DC fast charger as well. At EVGO, we don't tend to call that a fast charger. What's really tricky about providing a range for DC fast charging is once we begin to understand how in fact the battery management systems on those vehicles behave and the fact that they rarely can take that peak rate over the entire sustained charge curve. So what we typically see on DC fast charging today is somewhere between 60 to 300 miles of range in approximately 30 minutes, but that varies quite substantially vehicle to vehicle. And we'll get into that in quite a bit more detail as we go on. Great. Just one point that I'll make before we leave this slide is again, the relative cost difference between a level two charger and a DC fast charger because again, most people don't understand this. A level two charger, again, that you may see in a shopping mall where you're gonna sit there all day long or workplace charging where you're gonna be there all day long, that the actual infrastructure for that is somewhere in the two to $6,000 range depending on how fancy it is and how much metering it is. Every DC fast charger that we put in, in terms of constructing it, the hardware itself, the software, the communications is in the six figures. So we're talking north of $100,000 for every single DC fast charger. So the business that Evie goes then and I'll take you to the next slide for a little bit of a background on EvieGo is it's a capital investment business. It's like investing in small power plants. So what EvieGo does is we site, build, own and operate the largest public fast charging network in the United States. We have over 800 fast charging locations in America right now spread across 34 states and 66 metro markets. We've got over 220,000 drivers on our network which is fantastic. In fact, even though the market is just getting going now in the United States, over 40% of the US population lives within 10 miles of an EvieGo station right now. We also, as Eva will describe in greater detail, we have different charging types. In the bottom left, pictures of the various different kinds of chargers. We actually also have about 1200 level two chargers on our network. And we also, again, we charge any kind of Evie. So we charge some of the vehicles coming out of Japan which use a certain kind of adapter called a Chattano. We charge the Fords and VWs and the GMs and BMWs and we also charge Teslas. So it's a really, really great position that we're in. All right, so let's look at the life of a DC fast charge public charging station. And so it basically begins with something that we call site development. And this is really critical because these types of chargers are not located like we today locate gas stations whereby they are a specific destination that you go to just for the purpose of refueling your vehicle. But due to the fact that the time to charge these EVs is still quite a bit longer than it is to fill a internal combustion engine car. We tend to site these chargers where our customers or where you already go day in, day out. A great example of this is the grocery store. Hence the whole foods in the picture. The average American goes through a grocery store twice a week and the average time at a grocery store is somewhere on the order of 30 to 45 minutes. Perfect for a fast charge as we just looked at. So what do we look for? We try to identify where are the best sites, where are those sites located with respect to where most of the EVs are in operation today and where we project that they're going to be in operation tomorrow. We then have to do a site assessment which basically has to look at a number of different things but the first and foremost of those being can we actually get the necessary power at that site either directly connecting to the grid or by being able to leverage what that site hosts, the whole foods in this case might have in addition to excess capacity. If all of that plays out relatively well and we can construct a station there, then we move into negotiating a lease for that site with that host. Next comes the actual station design engineering configuration identifying with the utility if a utility upgrade is needed. If one is needed, we typically will work with the utility to install our own distribution transformer, our own meter and then everything downstream from that to connect to the actual chargers. Of course, part of this is also understanding do the project economics of that station play out. So we need to look at how much CapEx do we need to invest all of the equipment costs? And as Kathy said, they are definitely non-trivial particularly if you start thinking about in many cases we cite multiple chargers anywhere from four to eight and sometimes even more at a specific site. So you're talking about a pretty significant asset investment. We then project what kind of revenue we expect to be able to obtain from that station over the life of it. And then we employ as Kathy likes to say Warren Buffett math where basically the revenues need to exceed the costs because only in that way do we bring sustainability as a sustainable and long-lived business. We also have to look at what some of the non-energy costs are in terms of looking at the operations maintenance and so on and so forth. We then very specifically look for public funding as well where we can obtain public funding. We can underwrite a location that may not necessarily have the best economics and of course the more funding than the works the economics could be on a standalone basis. If all of that plays out, then we enter into the construction phase of the project. This is pretty relatively simple. The long pole in the tent tends to be all of the local building and utility permitting and then the utility interconnection. The rest of it is pretty regular civil works and then electrical works connecting it all. With a successful construction complete, we then go into energization of that site, basically connecting into the grid, having the final building and electrical inspections, some testing to ensure that the site is operating well and within all of the necessary safety margins and safety standards. And then we commission and energize the site and make it available to our public. Then comes hopefully a very long and protracted period of the life of those chargers where we serve them up to our retail drivers as well as rideshare and offer a number of other value-added services that we'll talk more about. Along that, we also have to operate and maintain them throughout that time frame. So part of that is offering customer support. So if our customers have any issues or problems with those chargers, they are able to dial a 1-800 number 247-365. We network all of our chargers over that same period. Every single transaction is monitored on those chargers in a internet of things type of network to ensure that they are one correctly done from a financial standpoint, but even more so that we maintain all of the safety protocols of those chargers. If a charger happens to break, then we have to dispatch corrective action. And we also, as we're learning more about the technology, dispatch preventative actions in order to have less of chargers breaking. Great, so that's sort of a whirlwind kind of primer to the EV market and why we need charging, who EVGO is and then what EVGO's business is here. So now let's turn to the real dynamics of, so there are what I say four buckets of things that are changing that are making the old days of EV charging, not that there's that long history, but there is, you know, EVGO has been around since 2010, changing dramatically as we head into the rest of this decade. So they're four buckets, the changing EV capabilities themselves, utility grids, driver needs and government imperatives. And we'll do each of those in turn and we'll have Eva will start with EV capabilities. Awesome, thank you. So the design of EVs is not unlike internal combustion vehicle design in that there are a number of critical trade-offs. And with EVs, these are primarily the size and weight of the vehicle with the latter greatly being determined by the size of the battery and the capacity of the battery within that vehicle. As a lithium ion batteries have a very specific energy density per weight, roughly about a hundred to 265 watt hours per kilogram. And then the efficiency of the, the resulting efficiency of the vehicle and miles per kilowatt hour, we already talked about a little bit about that. You can see a graph here of some of the, some of the common performance EVs in the market today. And then the resulting range, how far can it go on a single full charge of that battery system? The, our early EVs were small because our battery pricing was high and our ability to put a lot of capacity in a vehicle was limited by economics. But as we are seeing the pricing of batteries decrease, we're seeing larger and larger EVs come to market. And that is also actually helping promulgate the mainstream buyers to look at EVs because as Americans, we prefer to drive SUVs and pickups, then we do sort of smaller and even sedent type passenger vehicles. Battery capacities as a result are increasing commensurately because the bigger cars tend to require more energy in order to deliver the type of range and performance that we expect. And the energy, and that's going to remain relative, sorry, and as a result of that the efficiency is actually going to go down in the next couple of years of electrification because right now until we have additional advancements in battery technology that the amount of energy per weight is relatively fixed. So the problem that we have is as our battery capacities are increasing the size, the charge rates also need to go up because as consumers we don't want to spend a long time to charge them. That higher charge rate requires active temperature conditioning of those batteries, both heating and cooling in very specific instances. And that also increases the weight and thus reduces the overall efficiency. So we're sort of seeing an escalation of a number of these factors. All right, so this rather difficult to see chart actually shows a graph of the charge curves of a number of commercial EVs that you could buy today. Part of the difficulty in DC fast charging is that the battery management system drives the behavior of that charge curve in a great way. One of the things that most of our customers believe is that our chargers are in charge or manage the entire transaction of the charge. But in fact, it is their EV. Using the dance analogy, the EVSE or the charger is not lead, does not lead. The car and most specifically the battery management system within the car leads. And as you can sort of see from the graphs, most EVs can sustain peak charging power up to about 40 to 60% of stay of charge. Even the more peakier ones that are starting to enter the market today that are well above 100kW, that range is even further decreased. And in battery charging terms, this basically represents the part of the battery charging curve that is constant current while the voltage of the battery floats up to its maximum amount. At that point we have constant voltage and we have current that decreases and starts to decrease rather precipitously and asymptotically down to near zero. So the difficult part in DC fast charging is that the further a customer charges their EV, the lower the charge rate that results. And in fact, when we go well past 80% state of charge, we're effectively converting a DC fast charger into something that is not much better than a level two charger. So when this happens, of course, as a purveyor of DC fast charging, we're not getting, sorry, not quite yet. We're not getting great- I was a wild finger, sorry about that. No worries. We're not getting great utilization out of the asset that is deployed. So you can imagine if we deploy a 350kW fast charger and we're down to single digit charge rates that we're not getting great utility out of that fast charger. All right, let's go to the next slide now, Kathy. So how do we determine what charge rates to deploy? So first and foremost, we look at the charging behavior of our customers. And you probably find it interesting to know that today what we see is that about the 50th percentile charging behavior on our network results or is equivalent to customers charging from about 50% state of charge to about 80% state of charge. And this is more or less akin to topping up, right? People are still relatively nervous about the range and don't wanna run out of charge. So what you find is most often them not going much below 50% state of charge and then not necessarily charging much further because they've already learned that they're not getting much benefit out of charging much past 80% state of charge, i.e. they're spending more time and getting less energy into their vehicle. What's really interesting is that when we look at that, when we look at what's the most important is what is the average charge rate over the course of that charging time. The 50th percentile behavior actually represents a higher charge rate than for instance, 95th percentile or 100th percentile for obvious reasons because as you push further out that current decreases and that charge rate decreases precipitously. So that's point one. Point two is we basically look at what vehicles are in market what vehicles are coming into market and in what proportions because with that we basically forecast out a weighted average charge rate for specific areas and that then lets us project what should those charge rates look like going forward and what you see at the bottom is just a simple graph that looks at current and projected 50th percentile and 100th percentile charge behaviors on our network for both CCS and Chathamow standards. And again, what you can see is the 50th percentile one is the one that's peaking faster than the 100th percentile. And so we use this as a means of determining how much charging capacity we need to put at our stations and we'll talk a little bit more about then how do we deploy that charging capacity coming up. All right, so this is an interesting graph that shows the charge curve of a Chevy Bolt. A Chevy Bolt today is equipped with a 60 kilowatt hour battery and can basically take a 50 kilowatt peak charge rate. So the blue line is that charge rate. So you can see that up to about 40% SOC it maintains close to 50 kilowatts on a 50 kilowatt charger. It then takes a step down and you can sort of see as the SOC continues to increase some fairly significant steps downward. So effectively the area in green is the amount of energy that that charger could dispense but cannot dispense because the Chevy Bolt is actually reducing the charge rate and reducing the current it will draw from that EBSC. Such that if we were to charge that Bolt fully from effectively near zero SOC to 100% SOC the amount of energy that remains unallocated over the time that we put 60 kilowatt hours into the Chevy Bolt is an additional 44 kilowatt hours or 73% of the capacity of a second Bolt were we able to share that energy with a second vehicle. And this is really critical because what they show is that in terms of asset utilization and a return on assets invested in a business such as ours we need to try to get the maximum return given the cost that Kathy has already suggested these chargers cost. So part of this is a movement in the industry into what is called power sharing whereby we can take a aggregate amount of DC fast charging capability and share it across a number of different vehicles proportionate to how much those vehicles can take. The best analogy I can come up with being a bit of a techno folk is that is IT and think of charging now as being a number of blades in a server rack and allocating those blades across the computational resources needed. So in addition to trying to determine exactly how much charging capacity we have to put at each site we have a couple of additional problems that we need to work through. I'll start on the right hand side of the slide. So the first of those is the fact that unfortunately we don't have standardization yet on all of the plugs for the various different types of charging. So in the US we currently have the plugs that are circled in red. We have a specific one for AC charging so that's the level one and level two. We then have three distinct plugs for DC fast charging, CCS, Chathamo, and Tesla. And the Tesla plug is universal. It does support both level one and level two. So this is a problem. In addition to that, whereas all of you probably know exactly where the gas refilling port on your internal combustion engine vehicle is if it was produced either in the US or comes from Japan, China, or Europe because the OEMs have pretty much standardized exactly where they put those on the rear quarter panel either passenger or driver side. Unfortunately, those same OEMs as they started developing EVs did not standardize on anything close to that simple. And so these red arrows that you see towards the outline in 2D relief on that parking spot are where we find charging plugs on EVs today. And what you can see is there are spread all around that vehicle. What that exacerbates for us is the fact that not only do we have to support now multiple connectors for all the different vehicle types but the cable links for those connectors have to be able to reach those ports whether that driver has pulled the car front in or reverse in in the way that we've designed that station. And so that adds even further complexity because those cable links get relatively long. Those cables are big, heavy, unwieldy and in the case of very high power, liquid cooled and represent a significant amount of loss when you're pushing 500 amps through a piece of copper. In addition, what else are we bringing into market in terms of helping to automate and simplify charging for our customers? The first are basically a couple of protocols called auto charge and ISO 15118 plug-in charge. And what these effectively do is they allow the EV itself to become the means of identifying and authenticating the transaction on said identified vehicle. So rather than having to have customers swipe a credit card or tap an RFID or NFC or even pull out their mobile phone and initiate a charge via the mobile phone, they simply plug their EV in, the vehicle is recognized, identified, the customer to whom that vehicle belongs. And most importantly, the charge, the transaction mechanism for the financial transaction part is identified and authenticated and then the charge just begins. Unfortunately, again, based on the different standards, different charging standards support different protocols. So for instance, auto charges supported today by the CCS standard as is 15118. The Chathamus standard supports neither of those and currently doesn't have a projected means of providing the same capability. And Tesla has their own proprietary variant that's incompatible with the two aforementioned ones. So again, a little bit of complexity. Then we move to autonomous charging via sort of robotic connection. The idea here is by utilizing robotics and machine vision, plugging in the connector into the vehicle directly. This is mostly being developed for autonomous electric vehicles rather than passenger electric vehicles. However, as those cables get heavier and bigger, certainly this could be a great help even if not fully automated but as a mechanical and potentially even electromechanical assist to enable that to be easier for customers. And lastly, we also are developing wireless charging. This is probably the most attractive from a user experience as long as you align your car reasonably well over the parking stall that supports wireless charging. We are able to wirelessly bring that power into the vehicle. Part of the problem today is that as this is being developed, there are currently more non-compatible wireless charging standards than even all of the mechanical and physical ones that I just went through. And until we are able to align those a little bit better and reduce the number of those in industry, they become even more problematic as in we would have to have multiple different types of spaces for different vehicles supporting the non-compatible standards. There are also a couple of safety concerns that increase the complexity of wireless charging over wired charging. Happy to go into those in the Q&A. Probably don't have time to do so now. So thanks, Evo. So again, that was the first bucket of dynamism that we're facing. We're trying to build infrastructure when the technology is still at its relatively early stages and changing. All right, let's overlay that we're connected to utility power and how the utility grid is changing. So remember the old days when we had a distant power plant that could operate around the clock. We had long transmission lines that carried that power to distribute local distribution systems that were serving industrial, commercial and household customers. Well, that's kind of all sort of interestingly changing and dynamic. We now have, we've got sort of five major buckets of changes here. Renewables are intermittent renewables are now, they exceeded fossil generation in 2019 and they're expected to double by 2030. That changes the way utilities work. Distributed generation has little pockets of generation around the grid are increasing significantly already 34% in the last four or five years. Demand response, the ability to have customers reduce their power by getting price signals. And again, that is actually growing hugely and has added a complexity if you're a utility manager can you rely on that rather than supply side? Battery storage has increased sixfold since 2010 and it's going to continue to increase two way power flows that go with all these things. And then overlay on top of that the extreme weather events where I was just looking at an analysis done by one of the big accounting firms where when surveyed 90% of utility executives believe that their financial risk is increasing because of climate induced events like wildfires that we've seen here in California, hurricanes that we've seen on the East Coast and the Southeast and they expect this to continue. So all of that means that the way utilities are planning and thinking about planning is different. Now when EVGO builds a station with say two to four chargers that are sort of 50 to 100 kilowatts that's not that big a deal to the grid because that's kind of like building another grocery store or in a service territory. When we start building depots as Eva mentioned we were talking about one, two, three megawatts of power that is going to involve significant planning with the electric utility to ensure that everything is good and so that's what we do now. It's actually, we work in partnership with the utilities as we're building our infrastructure. Okay, third bucket of dynamic forces is driver needs. Now again, for any of you guys who are participating in the seminar if you were early adopters of the leaf in my anecdotal experience it was often the second car in a family that was driving around town. So it didn't matter to you that the range was 70 miles, 75 miles. You probably live in a house where you could charge it in your garage. Well, the demographic and the broadening demographic in use cases of EV drivers is significantly impacting how we think about our infrastructure. So for example, apartment dwellers or 20% of US households, 24 million households live in apartments that don't have access necessarily to charging right now. They need to charge away from home. 36% of households in America are renters. And again, I happen to be one of those in Santa Monica where I can't actually, I'm a renter I don't own my apartment so I can't install charging in my garage. So I need a place to charge away from home quickly. And then there's also 30% of American homes that don't have garages or carports. So they can't charge at home even if they do own their own home. So that's the big bucket of sort of for personal car use. Now add the arrival of ride share. There are two million ride share drivers right now and both of the major ride share companies both Uber and Lyft have made significant policy public statements and commitments to electrifying their fleets. Those drivers rather than sort of needing to charge once a week, they drive for a living they need to charge once a day and they need to charge away they need to charge quickly because every moment they're charging they're not actually earning a living. So and again, most of the most ride share drivers based on our research have no access to home charging so they need increasing access to DC fast charging. Put on top of that fleets you've got companies like Amazon you've got cities like Los Angeles that are all making commitments to change those 3.5 million vehicles that are parts of fleets in America over to electrification over to EVs. And then the fourth bucket here is the broadening demographic is the arrival of trucks. Now we're starting with, we've got light duty trucks now we've got medium coming and pilots coming and then we've got heavy duty that are coming after that and those will all need charging infrastructure. And the fourth sort of dynamic force that's affecting how EV go and other charging companies think about how we build out the charging infrastructure that's essential is government policy. So you would have noticed that a couple of weeks ago Gavin Newsom signed an executive order phasing out gasoline vehicles by 2035. Well, at EV go we reckon that brings forward by at least five years what we would have been planning to do in California but because drivers and car companies will start to knowing that that's the target in 2035 they will start to accelerate what the number of EVs that they're gonna be deploying in California. So the demand and the requirement for convenient reliable charging is increasing more quickly than we thought. There's an election coming up as we all know. Well, Joe Biden's plan his climate plan of $2 trillion has a significant amount of talk now about investing in both deploying electric vehicles and incentives to get electrical vehicles on the road as well as infrastructure that goes along with that. And we like to think about as those two items are like peanut butter and jelly, they go together. And then the third and third big thing that's come up is the intersection between internal combustion engines and local air pollution and environmental justice and that communities of color and low income communities are disproportionately impacted health wise from air pollution that comes from ice engines. And so there is an increasing attention as there should be toward making sure that electric cars are available for all. Now, some of that comes with, you see the chart on the right, some of that comes with regulations and targets. Some of it comes with incentives to have some government money that can be complimented by private sector money and leverage it. So EVGO is very, very committed to and involved in working with policymakers to ensure that these objectives of climate of addressing climate change and air pollution resilience are met while we build out what we do. Those are the big forces. Again, this is a little bit of a lightning round. What does this turn into? This turns into a demand in the right hand chart here of needing about another half a million public level two charters by the middle of the decade and another 50,000 or so DC fast chargers by the middle of the decade. So that's a significant amount of investment that's going to be required by companies like EVGO. And so what even when I'll do right now is just finish up before we turn to Q and A on give you a sense of how we as a company are responding to that, to those sorts of challenges as they come together. Eva, why don't you kick us off? Sure. So first and foremost, we've talked quite a bit about how we do the build out the ecosystem for designing our chargers, right? So we've discussed the evolving trends of the EVs. We've discussed the evolving capabilities of the hardware and where and how we cite our infrastructure. So I think the first point that's clear is one of the elements we try to do in citing is as I pointed here, horses for courses. We try to ensure that the dwell time of the customer at the destination is commensurate with the charging behavior of the vehicles. So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us to put a 350 kilowatt DC fast charger at a movie theater. You don't want to have to be called out to have to move your vehicle an hour or half an hour into the show or even perhaps even at a grocery store because you don't necessarily want to have to exit the grocery store before you've made it past the produce section, right? Equally, I think I try to talk about that it makes most sense in deploying these assets by enabling power sharing. So putting a bulk amount of power and then being able to share it across a number of vehicles to allow for those to match the capability of each of those vehicles. If you pull up in a Porsche Taycan and that can take 270 kilowatt charge rate, you can get it. Whereas if you pull up in a Chevy Bolt and that takes a 50 kilowatt charge rate, there's no need to dedicate a 350 kilowatt charger in order to provide the peak capability of that vehicle and even less so as that vehicle moves along its charge curve. But perhaps even more importantly from a software standpoint, what we're really aiming to do is try to create the most seamless customer experience. And that really means enabling customers to know where those chargers are, identify which chargers are most appropriate to their vehicles and to even perhaps the amenities that sit around those so that they can pick the best location to go to to charge their vehicle while also accomplishing something else, not just finding those chargers but then enabling them to dispatch that charge. Again, whether that is via a credit card, the mobile app or through these techniques of using the car as identification authentication and moving that eventually into even further automation and help for those customers. Yeah, and I'll take these last three. So as I mentioned, we're working really closely with utilities to integrate where, again, we love it when utilities can build what we call the make ready behind the meter. And then we take care of everything from the connection to the charger and look after our customers 24 seven. We also work with the utilities to ensure that their rate structures are friendly for EV charging. And in fact, what we found in California is that DC fast charging, actually the load curve was beneficial to when there is lots of solar surplus in California right now. So working with utilities to ensure that the load shapes are beneficial to the overall needs of the electric system is just sort of part of how we do business. Now timing, what we need to do is build ahead of demand. What do we mean by that? The Wayne Gretzky quote, I don't go to where the puck is, I try to skate to where the puck is going to be. In order for EVs to customers to buy EVs, they need to see that there is infrastructure out there. So that requires us to build ahead of demand. Now as a private company, what that means is we need, we rely on financial partnerships with government. As I mentioned, with car companies, you may have seen in the news EV announced a very large partnership where we're going to be tripling the size of our network on the basis of working with General Motors who has, who's going to have over 20 new EVs coming to market by 2023. We have partnerships with our site hosts where we locate our chargers. And then we have partnerships with fleets, with, you know, we're working very closely with Uber right now. All of that helps us have the comfort that indeed we can go ahead and build ahead of demand. So we'll leave it at that's the way. I want to have some time with questions, but I did want to, for anybody who's interested in more information, I'll just leave this on the screen while we chat. We have some really good stuff that we've tried to help educate the market. There's a white paper that I've noted here in this first bullet point. And then that has lots of data and facts in different sections about the costs and the scale up of charging. And as well as briefings and blogs on different topics that are right there on our website. I'll leave that there. And I guess we'll go to questions fielded by John. Okay, super. Thanks, Kathy and Eva. That was a terrific fast. I felt like we were being fast charged. I know, I think I know twice as much about fast charging as I did at the beginning of the seminar. Well, there are a lot of questions over 40 so far. So I won't get to all of them. A lot of them break down into basic categories you're probably used to dealing with. One is kind of the value proposition for your customers and marketing issues regarding, you probably just touched on this this minute. A student had a question about even if it makes sense economically at the price you're charging, people are used to the old way and they don't have an EV yet. So they think you could bomb into your local filling station, spend five minutes and be done with it. They frankly don't understand the full richness of the value proposition you just laid out. So what do you charge and how do you convince consumers to buy EVs and require fast charging in greater numbers? Yeah, well, our typical customer spends about $8 on a charge and they typically, you saw what EVOs show, most of our customers are going from, I don't know, 40 to 80% charge, something like that. So it's not a big, it's not a big amount of money at a shot and again, the speed with which it charges is a function of the kind of car that it is as well as which power level the charge is. So what we're doing is we're trying to create a convenient customer experience so that you're plugging into charge while you're going to do something else. That's why we love grocery stores. That's why we love shopping centers because people will go drive in, find a park, plug in, spend seven bucks charging while they're going to get their eggplant and their chicken for dinner or whatever it is they're doing. So that for us, we're trying to make it a completely seamless, easy charging experience. For some people, their only place to charge will be on the go at an EVGO in the EVGO network. Many people will also have places to charge at work or at home and on level two, which frankly that capital equipment as Evo and I described is much less expensive. We actually need to, we're spending a fair amount of money and our cost structure is a function of we need to actually be able to recover the costs of very sophisticated electrical equipment that needs to be safe and needs to be on at all times. Good. As we move from the demand side of the market back to business policy, I actually felt at various times during the seminar that I was getting a pretty good quick MBA program because you were talking about strategy, marketing, finance and so on. So there were a number of questions regarding what's your payback period on your own investments? How long does the equipment last? Is it upgradeable? Is it hardware or software that's most important? And finally, a surprising number of people hadn't actually thought about this for a while, said what about competitive pressure from battery swap schemes and even an more advanced one, can you work with the battery swap guys to help them charge their battery stock? So I know that's a lot, but we don't have too much time. So anything of that range that you want to hit would be great. I'll start and then toss it over to you Evo. So what we tend, what we do is we assume a seven year life of the equipment. So what we're underwriting to in business and MBA terms, what we're underwriting to is assuming how much utilization do we forget forecast? And we predict that charger is gonna get in that location, at that capacity, will we be able to pay back our costs over that seven year life? Now, what we're finding is probably the equipment might last a bit longer, but we're not sure. And Evo, why don't you talk a little bit about how we future proof what we're installing now? Absolutely. Yeah, so to answer a couple of those questions, including Kathy's, the monolithic chargers that the first generation are comprised of where you basically have a single device and it is 50 kilowatts or 100 or 150 or, tend not to be upgradable on their own. The ones that now bifurcate where the power elements are and the dispenser, so effectively the cabinet like the server rack and then the display, those are upgradable. So in designing of our stations, we do a couple of things. Number one, first and foremost, is perhaps one of the most expensive parts and it's kind of sad to talk about it in this way when we're talking about electrification are the civil works. So if we need to dig up a Whole Foods parking lot, we're not going to install conduit and infrastructure in there that is just going to support the 250 kilowatt chargers that we may have built. We'll actually size it so that we can pull additional cabling through it and both expand the site in terms of number of chargers and in terms of the amount of power. If we're able to leverage the type of infrastructure today that is upgradable, we'll put that in place and then be able to put in additional power capacity as the market grows. So you remember I talked about looking at what is the weighted average based charger rate on vehicles and operation. That's going to continue to gradually move up and to the right as more high powered vehicles come to market so that we have that capacity to upgrade. So then there were a number of, I know Kathy hit on this particularly from the EVGO perspective in the decade, we used to think of that as the short term but now it's a pretty long term given the ambitious targets. So there's a bunch of questions about being prepared to meet the challenges that you of all people know that you face in terms of the ability to scale up and are you partnering with other people? How fast are you going international? We have an immediate kind of mega challenge here in California that we could learn from. What kinds of options and opportunities are you're pursuing? It seems like you have a big juggling act because what makes most sense for you depends on what the companies are doing. New startups, regulations, it's all different in every state and things. Frankly speaking, I'm not sure I would be up to even looking at the number of challenges you're facing simultaneously but I think your spirit is such that there's no behind every problem there's an opportunity to fix it. So let me ask it this way, what do you think of the biggest constraints? Is it not enough lithium, not enough capacity, not enough money, not enough EV drivers? What do you think the biggest constraint and say meeting the net zero carbon constraint by say mid century for the whole world? I think it's organizing ourselves. I mean, we have the technology, we have the raw materials, they are out there. There is enough lithium and you guys at Stanford know better than anybody that the exact battery chemist are gonna continue to change and improve and get enhanced. I mean, that's super exciting. I have no doubt about that. The cars are gonna continue to change shape. We have the imagination and we're working really closely with the car makers so that as the needs of the cars change, we will also with great agility be able to change the charging infrastructure. We now have a critical mass of policy leaders that understands that this is an imperative to get it going. So it used to be that you had to take a gigantic bet on whether electrification was going to happen. But public policy settings are creating a safe haven for private capital. Like, EVGO was purchased last January by a very large private equity fund because they see that this must be done and they are again presuming that there is a decent business model where there are going to be enough EVs out there so that they can earn their money back that we can actually have our revenues that EVGO exceed our costs. Then there will be capital available. So policy settings really do matter, John. And so what Governor Newsom is doing, I'm guessing, you know, it's the sixth largest economy of the world, that's gonna be echoed by others. And again, that will happen. So, you know, again, we're working very, very closely with utilities. There are certain places in America like we have a great partnership with Southern California Edison. There are other places surprisingly where the rate structures are unwittingly inhibiting us investing. Massachusetts, for example, the two big utilities that are operating in Boston, they have really onerous demand charges so that in the early days, it effectively is like we're having to spend a dollar to $2 a kilowatt hour to buy the power that we're dispensing into the car, or even more. It just doesn't make any sense. So rate design, again, but all of these things are handleable. And there's so much goodwill in the overall ecosystem that I'm quite confident and quite optimistic. Yeah, I was gonna make that the last question. You did a great job, but I can't resist because we've got a lot of late questions from mostly students about, do you think there's a future for them in this business? And if so, what advice would you give them? Yeah, I mean, we're hiring. So, like, seriously, when I took the reins at EVGO, we were 50 people, we're now approaching 150 and we need to hire more. This partnership that we signed with General Motors and made public in July is gonna triple the size of our network over the next few years. We need more people to do that. With Uber and Lyft and others announcing that they're electrifying their fleets, there's more to do there. And every aspect of EVGO's business, I mean, all of the engineering and technical things that EVO presides over, the operational things that EVO presides over, the marketing, I mean, as we mentioned, we're trying to create a seamless customer experience and part of that is listening to our customers, part of it is educating people. We need to actually convince every single retail operation in America that an essential part of them doing business is offering a charging amenity in their parking lots. If they have a parking lot without charging in five years, people aren't gonna wanna go there because the expectation is going to be just like when you charge your phone, you need to be able to plug it in anywhere. You should be able to plug in your car anywhere. So, look, yeah. Sorry, audience, sorry, we couldn't do more questions. We're now up to 63. We'll send our speakers the transcript of all the questions so they can get back to you individually. And with that, we need to move on to your post seminar student session. Thank you so much for a very dynamic inspiring talk and being willing to answer so many questions. And we wish you well. I hope the fever in California on EV's spreads to maybe our nation's capital pretty quickly, if you know what I mean. So thanks once again for spending your time giving your busy schedules with us here today. Kathy and Evo, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.