This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio this weekend. I was taking my son for a bike ride at a playground. It's right across from the Tesla showroom here in Brooklyn, and there was this sandwich board outside the Tesla showroom, and I believe it was handwritten. It said, this is not a place to charge your Tesla. And I thought to myself, interesting, people must be driving their Tesla's here
thinking that they can get some juice. Well, someone who knows something about juice is Mark Hockinson, president of the Technical Solutions Group at A b M Industries, joining us on the phone from California. A b M Industries it's a three billion dollar company. It's one of the largest providers of e V charging stations here in the US. Mark, how are you. I'm great, Tim, how are you doing well? Thanks?
Thanks for joining us. I want to get into the economics of this in a minute, but but first I just want to get an idea from you about how much demand for power has increased from your charging stations. As we've seen gas prices go up and these traditional automakers invest billion, tens of billions of dollars in order to catch up to Tesla. Yeah, that's that's a great question.
And you know, I think the demand for e V has been there the last couple of years, and I think what's exasperating and now obviously our our our high gas prices. Um. You know, we've been a fortunate to be a pretty integral part in developing the EV infrastructure here in North America, having installed around twenty thousand d C fast chargers across North America. And I think, you know what's going to continue to happen is you know,
larger deployments. I think there's gonna be probably even increased demand for electric vehicles, knowing that gas prices are four or five and six dollars a gallon. Uh, And I think some of the challenges we're seeing now really are tied to supply chain, right, you hear everything that's going on, But I think that's a blip in the radar, and that the the electric vehicle is certainly something that's here
to stay. We kind of draw akin to what happened when air condition became more prevalent in the fifties and sixties, and the demand that's going to put on our utility infrastructure for the need for power and uh, I think that's gonna be something that's gonna play itself out here over the next several years pretty quickly. We'll take into the supply chain part of it, because I feel like we talked about supply chains all the time, but I'm not familiar with what you actually need to build an
e V charging station. Can you walk us through the shortcomings on that front? Yeah, so you know, we had a b M here. We don't actually build the e V charging units. We we contract with over forty o e M s across the globe, So our focus tends to be more on the actual infrastructure play from the design of you know, the power solution that's actually needed to get to the charger, and also to ensure that our clients have the proper utility to support whatever their
e V deployment might be to help future proof. What do you mean, the proper more than the laser seeing right now tend to be on the microchip side, So the actual intelligence that you see within these chargers tends to be the things slowing things down. Hey, Mark, what do you mean when you say, the proper utility. Yeah,
so you know what we've found. You know, since EV has been around for a while, right, and I think it was somewhat, um, you know, fashionable to to go ahead and install like one charger at a commercial property, whether it's an office building, a retail, or a parking lot. Um. But as the demand and increase for EV vehicles will grow at a over over the next several years, um, a lot of owners, whether you're a mall or a uh an employer, are going to have to rethink their
infrastructure as it relates to their parking. And it's really important for anyone that's deciding to deploy an e V strategy is to really understand what those demands are going to be over the next several years. Otherwise you can see yourself paying millions of millions more than you really needed to without having the proper design and engineering done
up front. I feel like when I hear EV infrastructure, immediately think of President Biden making a lot of speeches about trying to build out this infrastructure and make the Unitstates a little bit more energy independent. But I'm curious what the relationship is in terms of building out this infrastructure and how much support you and your colleagues are getting from the fiscal government. Yeah, I think you know, a lot of that is going to be funneling through
the Department of Energy and down through the States. Regarding that five billion dollar infrastructure bill that you that you mentioned, Um, you know, we're we're really playing well with you know, analyzing where those dollars are actually being deployed. But you're also seeing a lot of private enterprise going ahead and making these investments. Um, they're significant carbon tax offsets that
can be gained out of deployment of large EV infrastructure. Uh. And it's something that is also the right thing to do for the environment. Um, how does this end up looking ten twenty years from now? And I know that you're not the ones you're working on the infrastructure behind these, but you know, the corollary that I have is gas stations.
Do we see gas stations get replaced by e V charging stations or or is the is such that the way that people drive, they're charging at home, so we won't necessarily see a one to one mix here ultimately, Yeah, and I don't I don't think you know, fossil fuels aren't going to go away anytime soon. Right there. We
learn that this year and heart exactly right. So I think you're gonna see you have companies like Electric Fi America which are actually building and developing dedicated e V stations right where you can have a retail component, you can go in and have a great experience as a consumer.
But you're gonna also see a lot of the larger fueling stations across the country pivot and become more of a hybrid model, right because they're gonna have to meet the demand for the fossil food vehicles that will still be around. But then you're gonna see another thirty million e V vehicles they're gonna be put on the road over the next five years. So um, they're gonna have
to be able to adapt. And I think the biggest question that we've been seeing and hearing a lot from our large clients is really the reliability and resiliency of our electrical infrastructure and our power good. Right, So now we're talking about alternative solutions relative to maintaining that infrastructure so that it's when you go to plug in your vehicle, it's actually providing you a charge. That's where like micro
rids and things are becoming more hot time. Yeah, Mark, you're joining us from California, my home state, where people who live there are familiar with rolling blackouts when it's hot as a result of grid management. So you know more than anyone all about that. Mark Hawkinson, president of the Technical Solutions Group at a b M Industry, is joining us via zoom from California. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week on Bloomberg Radio. This is Bloomberg