Electric vehicle sales are beginning to rise as consumers seek to save on gas and create a smaller carbon footprint. It follows that electricity is in demand, but supporting additional electrical use can lead to overloading the power grid.
Simply, there isn’t enough power available to upgrade the national grid, and getting there will cost billions of dollars.
Stevan Bratic, founder of Bratic Enterprises in Brighton, and co-founder and managing partner of the new EV Charging POD, aims to help solve the power grid issue by offering a full-service solution for off-grid EV-charging.
“This is an opportunity for me to start another company and support the EV-charging industry,” Bratic says. “We have access and knowledge of where to find the equipment, where to assemble it, and how to put it together. To have the human experience to do that, it really makes a huge difference.”
After asking utilities like DTE Energy and Consumers Energy about their plans to address the infrastructure issues presented by the EV industry and receiving unsatisfactory answers, Bratic decided to take things into his own hands and created the EV Charging POD.
The off-grid power solution provides commercial and industrial businesses with revenue-generating EV-charging capability. The units run on natural gas, battery packs, solar energy, or propane, allowing for use in rural areas. They also can provide backup power, pushing electricity back to the grid or surrounding facilities.
The pods provide for all levels of charging — from level 1, which takes about eight hours for a 0 to 100 percent charge, up to level 3, which takes about 45 minutes. Basic containers from an EV Charging POD provide 35 kilowatts for a trickle charge, while the biggest container can handle 10 megawatts of electricity for 30 fast charges.
“The goal is to be 100 percent off the grid,” Bratic says. As a full-service solution, the EV Charging POD can offer the necessary equipment, chargers, installation, maintenance, and management, and can even service payment processes. What’s more, with projected growth, the company plans to hire more people.
In the automotive industry, there will be savings due to lower costs of off-grid charging, but Bratic calculated and compared his systems to DTE’s publicly available emissions data and found that until 2030, his containers will have lower grid carbon emissions.
Similarly, surrounding facilities will not only benefit from the revenue-producing charging pods, but will also see an increase in consumers who come specifically to charge their EV. “This way we can work on getting closer to achieving that net zero goal that everybody’s focusing on,” Bratic says.
