Electric Vehicle Charging Innovation with Blink Charging’s Jennifer Yokley

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me on Techstrong TV. Today we have a very special guest, Jen Yoakley.

She's the Chief marketing Officer for Blink Charging and Blink has a lot of exciting things going on right now. That's one of the reasons we wanted to speak to Jen. Tell me about what's happening in the news in terms of New York.

I understand you just won a big contract. Absolutely. We are super excited to be named as one of the official EV charging providers for the state of New York.

This is allowing us to work with both the public and their fleets to help them with their electrification. It's great to have a direct role in reducing emissions and providing infrastructure for, for folks everywhere. That's really awesome.

And, and now we're going from New York to another part of the world, Latin America, and this is really recent that Blink Charging is gonna be involved with a company that's funded by Warren Buffett. Can you explain what's happening? Yeah, really exciting to be selected by the official BYD dealership group, group of fame.

It's one of the largest dealership groups in Mexico to provide EV charging solutions. We currently have level two chargers installed there. As part of this agreement, we'll be providing DCFC, which is fast charging to a couple of their locations.

This is going to be the first ever publicly available D CFCs with GBT ports in that region. That is so exciting and I know that when it comes to electric cars, I, everybody I think knows somebody that has one and then we also know some people that are apprehensive about moving forward with it. One of the concerns is always the range that you're gonna drive three hours, five hours and run out of battery power and then you're gonna be in an area where there's no chargers.

Can you talk about what's happening to alleviate those fears? Absolutely. Alleviating that range anxiety, converting it to range confidence, that's what we're here to do.

That's a part of our mission. We wake up every day to support the EV drivers and let them know that we've got their backs. One parking space at a time, one charger at a time.

We are here in the market really to provide those solutions to make sure that drivers can get from point A to point B. And we believe that L two charging, so not D-C-F-C-D-C-F-C has its place, but L two charging is the key to achieving that. True range confidence.

LT Chargers are known for that easy installation in the maintenance. They facilitate that swift charge and they really are going to charge a vehicles where they are. It's ideal for fleets and it's ideal for the public.

That's great. So for those that are unfamiliar with Blink, can you talk about the story of the company? It seems like you've had incredible growth, but not everybody is familiar with the name, so I'd like to hear more about it.

Yep. So Blink is a publicly traded company. We were founded in 2018.

We have a dynamic leadership team with a ton of industry experience. We have experienced tremendous growth as the market continues to grow. And that's why I said earlier we believe that the market is here and the market is now, and we're committed to putting the right charger in the right place at the right time.

And that means understanding our customers and where they're at and what they need and delivering flexible business models to them supported by our proprietary network to keep all of this up and running and giving our users and our hosts that single pane to look at all of their charging stations and enabling our drivers to find their stations and plug up and charge. We are super excited about where we're going. It seems that electric charging is always in the news, especially in states like California and others that are looking to move towards certain deadlines to have complete electric vehicles and and things like that.

Can you talk about the regulations and how that's affecting your ramping up and what you're expecting in the coming years? Look, this is an emerging industry. We are figuring it out as as, as they say, we are building the plane while we're flying and we are addressing the regulations and working at the local level, like working at the state level and working at the federal level to help understand what these regulations are and help to educate the market about what EV is and what it means.

And this, we see every parking space as an opportunity, right? And the legislation that comes in, we're gonna take it one at a time and address it and help us and help the entire industry to get to where we need to go to Electrify. Can you talk a little bit about the technology behind Blank?

It seems like you're doing a lot in a short amount of time and and replicating these charging stations and now you have all of New York State and Latin America. What is the some of the tech that you use to scale at such a a great rate? So the tech is, our secret sauce is our people, our teams of really smart people that have been around the space for a long time and finding ways to flexibly address our customers challenges Blink does in-house manufacturing.

We just announced the establishment of our global headquarters in Bowie, Maryland. Um, and with that we announced manufacturing where we're gonna be able to produce by American compliant L two Chargers up to 50,000 of those a year. So it's all super important as this legislation comes on board and, and the technology is going to support it, the innovation in DCFC, the innovation that's coming in electric vehicles, we're seeing the battery costs come down, we're seeing the performance increase, we're seeing charging times, we're seeing things that we can do vehicle to grid.

We can do a lot of things in this space as it continues to evolve. Uh, a lot of people when they think about electric vehicles and electric electric charging, they think about Tesla and uh, Tesla charging stations and, and then name, uh, is synonymous with it. What, what is Blink doing now to to be as, as well recognized in terms of name recognition as Tesla?

Yep. So our mission is clear. We are proactively supporting the EV market.

We are producing exponentially more chargers at a faster rate than ever before because the market needs 'em. The growth is just unbelievable. According to McKinsey, by 2030, the US is projected to have over 28 million chargers up from just over 4 million today.

There's not a lot of time between now and 2030. So we need to all work together to electrify And that is definitely anticipating a lot more drivers that will be using electric vehicles by then. Um, when you think of the population of, of America as well, so interesting timing, do you think that a lot of these goals will be achieved by 2030?

Where do you see this going in, in the next few years? Yeah, that's what everybody's saying and we can look at the projections. We're expected to see EVs make up 18% of car sales projected to rise to 22% this year and a target of 80% by 2023.

So you can see why the scale of the chargers become so critical. That is fascinating. It's happening at a very fast pace.

That is for sure. Well, Jennifer Yoakley, the chief marketing officer for Blink Charging. Thank you so much for joining me on Techstrong tv, Bonnie.

Thank you and I hope you have a wonderful day. You too. All right, well stay with us on Techstrong tv.

We're going to have more great thought leadership interviews like this one coming up.