[ad_1]
Text size
Fast chargers should be available in grocery stores, retail outlets, entertainment centers, and other high traffic locations. Drivers can easily charge their vehicles at an EVgo station while shopping.
Courtesy of GM
The famous line from the classic baseball movie Field of Dreams is: If you built it, they will come. In the case of the electric vehicle industry, the line should go: they’re coming in so you better build it.
Automakers new and old plan to launch dozens of fully electric vehicles in the coming years, capitalizing on the incredible success of
You’re here
(symbol: TSLA). This will mean increased demand for public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles from drivers who want to charge while away from home.
For EV adoption to continue to grow at a rapid rate, charging infrastructure will also need to keep pace with vehicle sales. Seeing more outlets in town could convince buyers on the fence to switch from internal combustion to battery power with less sacrifice.
EVgo is a company that can help solve the chicken-egg dilemma. The California-based startup merges with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, called
Climate change Crisis Real impact I Acquisition
(CLII) or CRIS. Announced on Friday, the deal will go public with EVgo, giving investors a chance to come take the tour. It will also provide EVgo with approximately $ 575 million in new capital to help accelerate the construction of its nationwide fast-charging network. The company says it currently has more than 800 chargers in 34 states and 220,000 customers.
The difference between slow and fast charging stations – which can also be call level 2 and 3 charging – comes down to how much electricity the charger can safely pump into the EV’s batteries. This rate depends on the car’s material, but also on the EV charging infrastructure.
Non-EV stock investors may have heard of EVgo by Friday.
General Motors
(GM) partnered with the company last summer, announcing plans to add more than 2,700 fast-charging stations over the next five years. GM wants to sell a lot more electric vehicles in the coming years, and putting in place the infrastructure for the new battery-powered cars will help, according to the reflection.
EVgo chargers work for cars of all manufacturers and are located in parking lots of grocery stores, outside office buildings and on city streets. The company targets both daily commuters and commercial operators. EVgo has partnerships with
Uber Technologies
(UBER) and
Elevator
(LYFT) for their carpooling drivers to charge their electric vehicles.
“The electric vehicle market is expected to grow 100-fold by 2040,” said Cathy Zoi, CEO of EVgo. Barron’s. “The charging needs of these vehicles, and in particular fast charging, will therefore increase dramatically … More different types of people will buy electric vehicles without home charging, more commercial fleets will have electric vehicles and cars themselves are getting bigger and heavier, so they need more juice.
There are other electric vehicle charging companies, including
Flashing charging
(BLNK) and
Beam Global
(BEEM). Blink’s market cap is approximately $ 1.9 billion. Beam is smaller with a market value of around $ 450 million.
Both are smaller than EVgo at the moment. Zoi did not speak to any competitor directly, but expressed confidence in the technology and service capabilities of his company, which include call centers to handle customer issues, charging station control software , as well as advanced hardware designed to minimize the time required to charge an EV.
The CRIS-EVgo deal values the combined stock at around $ 2.6 billion. The proceeds include the $ 230 million PSPC climate change trust, plus a $ 400 million private investment in public stocks, or PIPE. PIPE’s funders include a list of major institutional investors: funds managed by Pimco,
Black rock,
Wellington Management, Neuberger Berman and Van Eck. They all come in at $ 10 a share, up from $ 13.34 at the close of CRIS action on Thursday.
CRIS, which went public on September 30, and several other pre-emerging PSPCs related to renewables, climate change and electric vehicles are trading well above their trusted values in recent months.
QuantumScape
(QS),
Hyliion
(HYLN), and
Nikola
(NKLA) all saw their stock prices surge after their PSPC mergers in 2020, and investors initially wanted the next deal.
The existing shareholders of EVgo – which include the management and investment company LS Power – will own around 74% of the merged entity. Pending shareholder approval, the CRIS share will be converted into shares in EVgo and will change its symbol to “EVGO”.
(
Canoo,
an EV manufacturer that merged with another PSPC now has a ticker symbol “GOEV”.)
“It’s almost a certainty for me that this addressable market is coming to fruition,” says David Crane, CEO of CRIS who served as CEO of NRG Energy (NRG) from 2003 to 2015. “It’s not as if this sector needed a huge breakthrough which may or may not happen. “
Automakers have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to their EV programs, and governments have pledged to kick the industry out of carbon-emitting vehicles that use both the carrot and the stick. The Biden administration has talked about installing half a million charging stations in the United States, and consumers enjoy driving electric vehicles.
Investors are also convinced that electric vehicles represent the future of personal transportation. Several stocks of EVs Barron’s leads have increased by around 500% on average over the past year. Tesla is now the most valuable automaker in the world by far. And electric vehicle makers, on the whole, are worth roughly the same amount as all traditional automakers, despite delivering a fraction of the vehicles.
Write to Al Root at [email protected] and Nicholas Jasinski at [email protected]
[ad_2]
Source link