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Startup Stories: Pairing batteries with EV chargers for resiliency

Startup Stories: Pairing batteries with EV chargers for resiliency
(Credit: Electric Fish)

At DISTRIBUTECH International, the leading annual transmission and distribution event, startups can participate in the Initiate program to find promising leads, make industry connections, and get recognized for their hard work. POWERGRID International caught up with a recent participant to discuss life since the event.

Electric Fish, the winner of the 2023 Initiate startup competition at DISTRIBUTECH International, builds and deploys intelligent grid edge infrastructure to accelerate EV adoption where grid constraints make it otherwise difficult, and helps prepare communities for outages.

Vince Wong, co-founder and CEO of Electric Fish, joined John Engel, the editor-in-chief of POWERGRID International and DISTRIBUTECH International to discuss the Electric Fish’s experience with the Initiate program, and how the company has grown since winning the startup competition.

“Our ultimate goal is to take a very different and more resilient approach to EV charging infrastructure,” Wong said. “We built battery integrated fast EV chargers that also double as microgrids that can provide meaningful backup power and energy for sites in the grid, locally. Whereas systems are deployed, [we are] primarily focusing on fleet and government applications at the moment.”

Watch the full interview on YouTube

Although Electric Fish is mostly focused on fleet and government applications, it has seen interest from other areas, including public charging, Wong said. The company’s solution allows either just the chargers or the entire site to stay powered during the event of an outage. Additionally, Electric Fish has participated in demand response with Con-Ed during summer peak events, showcasing the product’s ability to contribute back to the grid.

“This is an area where having a flexible energy asset like ours, which actually can be very easily deployed and redeployed because of its containerized form factor, makes it really compelling for folks like utilities who might want it in one location most of the year during hurricane season or wildfire season, [then] redeploy to another area to help service things like disaster response and recovery of systems,” Wong said.

Initiate is the major hub for start-ups to showcase their technologies to electric utilities at DISTRIBUTECH International – startups can pitch their solution to a panel of industry experts, exhibit their company, and connect with other innovators from around the world. As Electric Fish has gone through several iterations of who its ideal customer is, it is still looking at utilities as a key customer segment, and DISTRIBUTECH International is a great place to make some of those connections.

“We still are very interested in and actually selling into utilities directly,” Wong said. “But we want to approach that as a phase two, just given all the very urgent demand that we’re seeing from other customers in other segments.”

“What DISTRIBUTECH really helped us achieve was validate this notion of what happens when this is deployed at scale,” Wong said. “The idea that so resonated with utility participants and spectators at DISTRIBUTECH was this notion of, when we actually have a critical mass in a utility service territory, we actually all of a sudden have a virtual power plant. But when you actually have tens, hundreds of these units in one utility region, they can actually be interlinked digitally and the idea that these are also flexible gives new life to what a VPP is capable of.”

At DISTRIBUTECH, Electric Fish made a connection with an unnamed customer that has led to contract negotiations that have not yet been finalized. That customer stopped by Electric Fish’s booth, and everything else fell into place from there.

“That conversation led to a discussion with our technical team, and we’ve since filled out an RFP, and sent them a lot of just performance data of how this could look like at one of their fleet depots,” Wong said. “We’re really cooking here with a lot of these DISTRIBUTECH-originated leads. I would say just within the utility ecosystem, it really helped to propel our presence. Because utilities underpin everything – electrification – people look to the utilities, even if the utilities aren’t buying.”

Originally published in POWERGRID International.