Looking Back and Looking Forward
Arcady Sosinov is the CEO of FreeWire Technologies.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's different, distinct and important about FreeWire's technology and business model?
Arcady Sosinov: The energy storage and power boost technology that FreeWire Technologies has developed over the last five years is really to mitigate the cost and grid impact of deploying electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Electrification is happening across the board, from transportation to industrial equipment to aviation. The electric vehicles we see and hear about every day, from companies such as Tesla, GM and Nissan, are a big part of that, but the amount of infrastructure and power available at the grid edge makes it technically complex, expensive, and time-consuming to deploy and subsequently scale up. Especially because the grid wasn't designed to do that in the past.
We started to look at the growth of electric vehicles, and a lot of it began with corporate campuses. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we began working with large campuses such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Walmart. These companies were installing Level 2 charging stations all over their campuses, but where you have such a high concentration of electric vehicles on one site for a certain amount of prime time each day, they began to experience high electricity costs coupled with high demand charges. That was on top of the ever-increasing construction and infrastructure costs of deploying the stations themselves.