As the chief executive of EVgo Inc., Badar Khan said that he bridges two interests – cars and energy.

Khan, who became head of the West Los Angeles-based electric vehicle charging company in November, said that he became interested in cars while growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when the DeLorean was being made there in the early 1980s.

The interest in energy started with his involvement in 2009 with a then-startup called Direct Energy that grew into a multi-billion revenue company.

“It went from no revenue and no customers to a high growth company that grew 15-fold to $15 billion in revenue and 6,000 employees,” Khan said. “I was the CEO of the company for a good part of that journey.”

From 2017 to 2022, Khan worked for National Grid, one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the world. Most recently, he served as chief executive of the company’s U.S. operations, overseeing the delivery of energy and clean energy products to more than 20 million people across Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.

Khan sat down with the Business Journal to discuss his time at EVgo, the company’s business model and what it will take for mass adoption of electric vehicles.

How has business been going?

Our business is going great. Revenue has grown by 12% in three years. We’ve gone from just over $20 million in revenue in 2021 to mid-point of our guidance is $255 million; that is a 12-fold increase. Despite whatever negative sentiment you might see, our business is going great.

What is EVgo’s business model?

We deploy fast charging stations across the country. We own and operate fast charging stations. We locate them in high-traffic urban and suburban areas, where people are close to where they live and work and able to go on with their lives, as opposed to mostly highway focused charging and also versus companies that sell equipment to site hosts; the site hosts might be grocery stores or retail stores, banks.

We own and operate them, so we actually pay rent to put our stalls in the parking lots of these locations. And we focus on fast charging. Fast charging – we deploy 350 kilowatt chargers. If you think about that with the right vehicle and the right battery you can get 100 miles in five to seven minutes, versus slow charging, what they call OL2, which might take six to eight hours to charge a battery electric vehicle. So, we don’t do OL2, we do fast charging, we own the equipment as opposed to selling the equipment, so we are selling kilowatt hours or energy through the network, and we locate them in urban and suburban high traffic locations versus highway charging.

How many chargers do you have deployed?

We have about 3,400 DC fast chargers across the country at 1,000 sites. We added about 800 to 850 last year. This year we’ll be adding the same number, between 800 and 900.

How do you pick where you will place your chargers?

We’ve been investing in that for a very long time. We have a very sophisticated model where we ingest a huge amount of data. We look at EV adoption, battery electric vehicle sales, forecast sales, density of multifamily housing for people who don’t have private driveways that buy an electric vehicle that are able to charge at our locations because we are public charging. We look at retail amenities, we look at the price of energy because we are buying energy from the utilities and then selling it through our network. We look at the cost of installing the stations, we look at state and local grants that might be available. We are looking at forecast growth of electric vehicle sales that tells us where to place our stalls in a particular area. We then take the over 50 strategic relationships that we have with site hosts, those are regional or national chains – grocery stores, retail stores, banks, et cetera – and we work with them to identify within a particular ZIP code or a particular cluster where to actually place the site.

How many stalls per site are you now building?

Typically, what we are doing today is sites with six or more stalls, parking stalls where you can park your car and charge. That is higher than it used to be. We’ve got stalls in over 35 states – red states and blue states. Our fastest growing states are Texas and Florida.

California is obviously the bulk. Roughly a third of all of our charging stations, – roughly 1,500 – are in California. And California has a long history of promoting electric vehicles and supporting policies around decarbonizing the emissions out of transportation. L.A. is, again, about a third out of California. We have about 570 DC fast charging chargers in the L.A. area. L.A. is a big market; California is a big market.

How do you prevent cars lining up to use your stations?

We work very hard to get to the place where we are encouraging customers to use our stations at all hours of the day, and not just at the peak times of the day, so that we are both growing utilization (and) we are doing it in a way that avoids queueing. Roughly half of the kilowatt hours in the network are customers on the subscription programs or rideshare, Uber and Lyft drivers. Rideshare is about a quarter of our volume in the network. And these rideshare drivers are typically charging at rates which are more attractive for them to charge at off peak time, so it prevents the queueing that you might otherwise see at other locations. We have made it a major priority to ensure that experience is a good experience for customers.

How long does it take to build a charging station?

The construction isn’t that long. There is a lot of permitting before you put one in the ground. We often spend a lot of time waiting on the utility. I used to run a utility company, so I understand how that works. In the past we would have longer wait times in terms of connecting, getting the stations open and connected to the grid. These days we work much farther in advance. We are working two or more years in advance. And to your question where is the best place to put a charger, we work with different utilities in those areas, and we say we are thinking of putting in a charger are there grid capacity constraints, are there better places to connect to the network to minimize the congestion for the utility in terms of distributing energy. Every now and then we will find situations where we are still having to wait for the utility. That is usually what the situation is.

A major criticism of the charging industry seems to be down time. You seem, though, to be focused on keeping things running.

For sure. It is a major priority for the company. When we think about the experience – so when you show up, are you waiting, are you queueing – we are doing a ton of work to prevent that in terms of encouraging people to charge at off peak times of the day. More stalls per site is a major thing. So, we have 3,400 stalls at 1,000 sites, so that is 3.4 (stalls per site on average). Most of what we are building today is six or more stalls per site. When we talk about that reliability, we measure what we call one and done. This is the percentage of attempts of when you show up and you are not waiting, you charge the vehicle, and it charges on the first time you attempt it without waiting a long time. That is an important measure.

It captures the asset uptime, and it captures the whole customer experience. Unlike a gas station, this isn’t just a gasoline pump into your car. There is a lot of software between the vehicle and the charger and sometimes with the app that must communicate with each other. That must be smooth to get good one and done time. Our asset up time is in the high 90s but the one and done which incorporates some of the software experience and the handshakes is a little lower but we think is one of the best in the industry.

What is the payment process like?

We offer what we call Order Charge Plus. So, when you plug in the car you just walk away. The charger automatically detects the car and the driver and the payment method without you having to take your credit card out or the app out or whatever it might be. People rave about that. It’s seamless and it is a great experience. It is a major priority for us to increase the Order Charge experience.

What will it take for more adoption of electric vehicles?

We have gone from 1.5 million battery electric vehicles four years ago to 4 million today. That’s a lot of early adopters. The mass market adoption will come with cheaper vehicles. Cheaper vehicles will not only encourage adoption over all, but actually encourages people who are less affluent, who may not have a private driveway, and that is where public charging (comes into play), which is why what we do plays a hugely important role.

Do you have any megasites? For example, Tesla has 40 chargers on the top of the parking garage at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

We tend not to do that. We tend to put our sites in locations that are convenient to you running an errand. At a Target parking lot, a grocery store. You park the car, you charge and you leave for 20 minutes, 40 minutes. It’s more convenient. That’s what we tend to do, tend to focus on. And it is working for us.

How do you know it’s working?

Throughput is what we call kilowatt hours dispensed by the network. Our throughput this past quarter versus last year grew four times faster than the rate of growth in battery electric vehicles on the road.

We think we are doing something well. We think we are doing something that customers want. People are charging at public charging locations more. And we think because of our focus on the customer experience we believe more people are charging at our locations than other locations otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing that rate of growth.