It has been a busy few years for us, we’ve had our ups and downs as any start up business will have in a new and rapidly changing industry. We’ve installed just shy of 60 EV Charging Stations since our launch. While we anticipated and hoped for a much more rapid roll out and faster growth, wider adoption of electric vehicles across the general population and specifically greater New England communities that we were serving, that didn’t quite pan out the way we had planned. We had an amazing amount of interest from almost every community, municipality and the businesses that we met with, we installed a handful of public charging stations, but the vast majority of our business came from private installations where we were simply bidding as a contractor rather than a long term service provider.
There is little doubt to our conviction that the future of our transportation network will be and has to be based almost exclusively on electricity, rather than traditional fossil fuels, but it seems that we are still some ways away from creating a charging network as a sustainable business in and of itself. Not to say that the concept was without merit, but the industry and peoples concerns of that industry have evolved.
While this might sound like the set up to bad news, on the contrary, as part of the bigger picture, we find it to be quite encouraging. Costs of actual charging units have fallen, there is a wider selection of units covering all levels of charging capacity, consumers are becoming more familiar with electric vehicle performance, and ultimately much larger more well funded players in the game are developing proprietary networks for their vehicles and giving away electrons. As a private installer it would be impossible for us to compete when auto dealers will happily send and or recommend an electrical contractor to install a charging unit for anyone who buys a car. This is all great news for the industry and for a planet that needs to rapidly wean itself off of fossil fuels.
However, for us, for our partners and our investors, we have collectively made the decision that efforts are best directed elsewhere – education, advisory and consulting, call it what you like, but we are effectively shutting down our operations, sort of. We will remain available for current and existing clients, but our operations and focus will be shifting towards advocacy.
Although we bid a fond farewell to this particular chapter, we are far from leaving our posts. If you wish to get in touch please visit The Noya Fields Family.