I recently had the opportunity to visit the company behind ChargePoint, Coulomb Technologies (named for the unit of electric charge, a coulomb). The company headquarters are located in Campbell California very near San Jose in Silicon Valley, just south of Stanford University.
Coulomb was started by a team of engineers with experience founding and growing other small software companies and working for Cisco and Nortel Networks. Beyond their high tech experience, one of the founders, Richard Lowenthal, was the mayor of Cupertino (a neighboring Silicon Valley innovation center, once home to Hewlett Packard corporate offices). The point is, everyone on the board is wealthy and extremely well positioned in terms of both experience and connections.
So what makes Coulomb and ChargePoint so interesting? Well, the company was created as part of a personal mission by Mr. Rosenthal to expand positive clean technologies. Much like Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and Solar City, who has acquired a taste for cleantech in his post PayPal days. So what is ChargePoint? The ChargePoint product is basically a next generation parking meeter that can deliver a charge to Electric Vehicles (with both 110 and 220 volt adapters including the new SAE J-1772). Coulomb builds meters and maintains a network that EV owners, business owners (or those who own the curb space where the meter is installed) and the power company can all come together in an electricity marketplace. This software and networked smart grid of charging stations is really what makes this product valuable and unique.
ChargePoint “meters” sell for ~$3,000 and are available to cities, organizations or private business owners. One of the ways you might end up adding a charge point to your property is in response to an online request, submitted by local EV owners. Subscribers who have purchased credits to charger their EV’s on the ChargePoint network can view a real-time “availability map” with icons designating which stations have been installed and are currently in use. We have listed ChargePoint locations on our open source EV charging location map, look for the little green rectangular icons. If drivers feel that additional ChargePoint stations should be added to the network at their place of work or near some other highly visited location they can cast a vote… Over the course of time those votes are tallied by Coulomb who then contacts property owners with data to back up the $3,000 initial investment one would make to install a ChargePoint meter. This is an amazing “crowd sourcing” technique that will help express demand and one of the reasons that Coulomb is a leader in the electric vehicle charging landscape.
There is really just so much to say about this system, it’s hard to get it all in. Here are a few more interesting points to consider:
- The local power grid can use realtime data on EV cars to determine their own actions, or even stop sending power to cars that opt in for the less expensive “green” ChargePoint plan. This is one way that Coulomb is helping to drive the Smart Grid that will be so important as the new energy economy emerges.
- ChargePoint meters are wirelessly connected to each other using Zigbie, an emerging protocol that has also been used for in home smart electricity configurations.
- Coulomb provides a one year warranty for ChargePoint stations and is working on several different versions to support local standards in both Europe and the US.
- The founders of Coulomb are actively involved in both the political landscape, attending events like the Electric Drive Transportation Association summit in Washington DC, and the competitive landscape, meeting with leaders such as Shai Agassi – the founder of Israel based “A Better Place”.
- More information available on the Coulomb press release page here
