A huge thank you to everyone that came to meet and network with other stakeholders in our community!

In collaboration with East Bay Clean Cities Coalition (Oakland), we hosted a Lunch & Learn in our San Leandro headquarters. This was a great opportunity to discuss opportunities for transitioning to clean energy and enabling technologies to meet transportation, grid-edge power and clean air goals.
We had a lot of great discussions. Fleet managers, city emergency planners, engineers, EV coordinators, utility managers and executive directors of cities, utility and local businesses shared some of their challenges:

• How do we keep street lights and signs on during planned and emergency outages? How can we re-purpose power equipment to ensure these assets are not sitting idle during rest of the time?
• How do we provide safe and reliable backup power to our customers during utility outages?
• How do we meet the growing demand for port equipment with limited utility infrastructure and lengthy permitting processes?
• How do we provide EV charging for multiple-unit dwellings (MUDs) and low-income housing to ensure equitable access for all?
• How do we power food trucks, concessions and entertainment for community events in a sustainable manner that also helps us meet our and our communities’ clean air goals?
• How do we provide charging for EV fleets and satisfy growing mandates for city and sanitation trucks in such a manner that we’re not locked into permanent infrastructure on real estate that we lease?
• How do we provide charging for Ride & Drive events and Ride & Share commuters? Where do we install charging infrastructure? How we properly gauge site demand to ensure full equipment utilization? How easy is it to move EV charging equipment to another location?

“Fleet managers may have EVs or are under pressure to deploy EVs without yet having EV charging infrastructure or a permanent domiciling location identified yet where the vehicles will be housed. Mobi allows for establishing reliable EV charging without having to commit to a permanent and costly stationary EV charging solution. Mobi affords Fleet managers the ability to allow the EV population to grow and then make informed decisions as to where potential permanent EVSE might be best installed. Mobi also allows charging of EVs while fleet managers “grow” the EV demand in order to adequately justify and support installation of permanent EVSE and also ensure there is adequate demand to generate minimum required throughput as mandated in some grant opportunities,” said Richard Battersby, East Bay Clean Cities Coalition.

Attendees enjoyed live demos of the Mobi Gen and the Mobi EV Charger. Mobi Gen quietly and without any emissions powered the food truck that provided our lunch. It is an ideal application for concessions both indoors and out contributing to an enjoyable and positive experience for food operators and patrons alike.

Our Mobi EV Charger provided charging to attendees’ EVs. Relative to conventional stationary charging stations, FreeWire’s Mobi increases charger utilization rates three- to six-fold on average and avoids the need for expensive grid upgrades, enabling customers to scale up electric vehicle (EV) charging quickly and cost-effectively. Several attendees even got the chance to test-drive the Mobi around the parking lot and experience how agile and fun it is to bring power and charging to where it’s needed.

We are very grateful to the East Bay Clean Cities Coalition for helping to sponsor a tasty lunch from T&S X-Treme Bar-B-Que whose food truck was powered with the clean, quiet Mobi Gen, replacing a traditional noisy diesel generator.

As part of a public program to help accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles and equipment, funding is available for Mobi EV Charger and Mobi Gen that will cover up to 60% of the cost of the systems.

Interested to learn more? Schedule a call with a FreeWire representative to start your application today!