Most conversations about EV charging stations these days involve fixed facilities. The closest analog is the good old gas station (or service station, if you prefer): a fixed location where the energy supply is stored and a driver goes to that location to receive delivery from the store. This is what people know, from both a consumer and producer perspective. And it's how I've always thought of the issue.

But what if there is another way? How might we find that other way?

You may have noticed that I've been writing about AI quite a bit of late, which comes from me thinking about it quite a bit. While I have mostly been using ChatGPT and, to a lesser extent, Claude, as an assistant, primarily as a pair programming partner, for the past few months, I have started in on an adventure to learn more about how to leverage them to create something.

To that end, I have been conversing with ChatGPT about things such as fine-tuning of models and creating custom GPTs. When I presented it with an example of something I was thinking, it brought up an approach that involved vector embedding. A vector embedding is a numerical representation of text that captures its meaning (not just its keywords), so that sentences that mean similar things (even if phrased differently) will have a similar embedding.

It offered to walk me through an example of how it might work, so I gave it two services to use as the example: EV charging station and Aircraft aerial refueling. This is a common pair I use when talking about analogy in the context of services and products. With that pair, it explained how they would be embedded and offered an example of a vector search. 

The third and fourth options caught my eye. In a previous life, I was responsible for providing tactical fuel services for an Army Signal Battalion, so they brought back some memories. And then....

What if, I thought, I'm using the wrong analogy in my mind to think about EV charging stations. Instead of trying to build out a fixed infrastructure for EV charging, what if someone came up with a solution that was more similar to a tactical fuel point than to a gas station. One where the energy store - an EV charging "tanker" - came to the drivers instead of the other way around. Unlike aerial refueling, the charging tanker would not be able to pull up in front of the car and recharge them on the move. But, for example, the charging tanker could set up along main routes, say at a rest stop or a large truck stop along an interstate.

I had not started out to come up with an idea for effective EV charging stations for long distance road trips and rural areas. The fact that I did, though, lends some credibility to what I started this conversation with ChatGPT about in the first place.

Cheers,