This EV charging startup was growing quickly. Then came Trump

[ResidentialBusiness]

A year ago, a small California-based EV charging startup was quickly expanding to other states. The company, called GreenWealth Energy, had multimillion-dollar projects planned in places like Colorado and Texas. Then came the election, and everything changed.

Donald Trump attacked EVs throughout his campaign, despite the fact that electric cars can save consumers money and automakers have invested more than $300 billion in EV and battery manufacturing in the United States. Now the new administration is already making it a priority to fight anything EV-related. In January, when the president issued an executive order that paused spending from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, he specifically called out the funding that Congress allocated to build a national network of EV chargers.

Ariel Fan [Photo: GreenWealth Energy]

The majority of the $7.5 billion for charging stations has already been committed to states and cities. Legally, it’s theirs; the president doesn’t have the authority to take away the money. But because states and local governments have long planning processes, most of the new charging stations still haven’t been built. The federal programs work through reimbursement, so states don’t have the money in hand—and with funds now frozen, the uncertainty about the future means that some projects are on indefinite hold, including those that the startup was planning outside of California.

“Basically, we can assume those projects are dead in the water, or being scaled down so significantly that we wouldn’t be able to participate,” says GreenWealth founder and CEO Ariel Fan.

For the company, that means adapting quickly. The team is leaning into its work in California, where the state is still planning for all new car sales to be zero-emission vehicles within a decade. (The Trump administration is suing to revoke California’s right to set strict air pollution goals, though experts expect that the state will prevail.) The state has some separate funding sources for EV chargers, including through an offset program that gets money from oil companies. Utilities also offer rebates and are investing in chargers for their own fleets; in one project, GreenWealth is planning to help build 1,500 charging stations for SoCalGas’s fleet of electric vehicles. In another new project, the startup will operate and maintain chargers for the city fleet of EVs in Santa Monica.

“We’ve actually seen an uptick in the last couple of months because California [is] doubling down on their policy,” says Fan. “There’s no indication that this is going to change as a result of what’s happening federally. With all of our signed contracts in California, we aren’t directly impacted by any of the federal rollbacks of funds.”

[Photo: GreenWealth Energy]

The need for more chargers is clear in California, where around 25% of new car sales last year were zero-emission vehicles. (Colorado, which also has strong incentives, has a similar rate of EV sales.) California Governor Gavin Newsom has said that the state will provide tax credits if the Trump administration gets rid of the federal program, helping boost EV sales more. The state’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Program requires manufacturers to ramp up the percentage of clean car sales each year. To meet demand as more people drive electric, nearly 10 times as many charging stations will be needed in the state by 2030. Public chargers are especially in demand at apartment buildings, one of the places where GreenWealth focuses its work.

Still, Fan says it feels like the company is on “California island,” as she watches governments pause projects in other states. As the startup’s short-term pipeline of projects has changed, she’s had to lay off some of her staff of 20, reduce pay and hours for others, and delay hiring for some planned positions. To compound the challenges, the company’s headquarters in Pasadena is a mile from where the Eaton Fire burned; some team members lost their homes, and work slowed to a standstill in January. The disaster is temporarily affecting new projects. Multifamily building owners are focusing on housing for displaced people rather than EV infrastructure. Permitting is delayed. New charger projects may not ramp up again for three to six months. (At that point, the company will hire more staff.) Fan has also had to work harder to secure financing at a time when lenders are spooked by the uncertainty in the market.

It helps, Fan says, that the startup is scrappy and quick to adapt. She launched the business in 2017 as a 25-year-old, focused first on connecting building owners with incentives to improve efficiency with LED lighting, and then on providing sustainability consulting. She later saw an opportunity in EV charging, and pivoted in 2019, working through dozens of leads for new charging station projects each month. She believes that the company is resilient.

“Our industry needs hope right now, and people really feel that it’s life or death for their companies,” she says. “One thing that I would want to convey with this story is that we’ve been nimble enough to survive.”

It’s not clear yet how the shift in federal policy will affect the growth of EV chargers as a whole. So far, at least five states have paused their participation in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program (one part of the federal funding) according to Paren, a company that tracks EV charging infrastructure. Others are likely to announce similar pauses.

“It’s really nerve-racking if you’re at a state DOT and you have bills to pay, and you might not get paid for 90 days,” says Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren. “So a lot of states are pausing their programs.”

But some larger companies may still move forward with projects that had been approved by states and were underway. Lawsuits could unlock the funding that was already committed to states. “The chance that they will be able to claw back this money is very, very small,” says Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis. “And we will see chargers built on the ground in the next two years that are still part of the federal money.”

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