🌐 EV Impossible: Voltera Delivers Charging Sites Electric Fleets Count On

🧩 Archetype: Friction Removal — Make it easier: adoption happens when barriers disappear.

EV vehicles are ready. Battery costs are down. Range is up. Electric-powered semis, vans, and pickups are proven and available. For many fleets, the total cost of ownership already beats diesel.

So what's stopping our nation’s 50,000 commercial fleets from electrifying?

Would you believe it's trees? Not clearing them. Planting them.

In Los Angeles, the Department of Urban Forestry spent months deciding how many trees should be planted at a proposed charging depot. Then more months approving what went in.

That was one of 14 agencies that needed to sign off before the real construction could begin.

In most American cities, you still cannot legally use a property primarily for EV charging. Sixteen years after EVs started hitting the roads, only a handful of cities allow them by right.

You can open a gas station. But a charging depot? Different story.

We’re experiencing 21st-century vehicles slamming into 19th- and 20th-century regulations. Risk-averse utilities tasked with delivering stadium-scale power to two-acre urban parking lots simply don’t have a new playbook or set of codes for the next-gen infrastructure needed to deploy electric fleets at scale.

"We are trying to put a stadium's worth of power into a less than two-acre site in 18 to 24 months," Voltera CEO Brett Hauser told me. "Not easy."

This is the giant hassle in the middle, the part of the clean energy transition few realize is in the way. And it's a profoundly human challenge—you can't software your way out of it.

Brett has spent sixteen years navigating this maze. He did his very best to code a way out—so well that he built and sold two EV software companies. And that’s how he first saw the bottleneck up close.

Brett's Pattern Recognition

In 2018, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) named Brett an Energy Pioneer. A decade earlier, when he told his wife he was leaving the comfortable world of private equity for opportunities in sustainability, she called him many things. Unsurprisingly, "pioneer" wasn't one of them.

His first company, EV Connect, built software that manages EV charging stations. Schneider Electric acquired it.

His second, Greenlots, ran EV charging and grid services software. Shell bought it and rebranded it Shell Recharge.

Along the way, something curious happened.

Over half of Greenlots' revenue started coming from installing chargers—covering power, landlord negotiations, utility coordination, and permitting.

Often, however, customers would commit to charging and then reveal they didn't own their land. That meant a second sales cycle—pitching a landlord whose tenant lease terms didn't match infrastructure payback periods. Projects evaporated.

"If you can own the real estate, you can control your own destiny," Brett told me.

That insight launched Voltera.

Why Fleet Operators Will Never Do This Themselves

If you run a facility or delivery company and decide to electrify, you might assign a logistics lead to figure it out.

That person inevitably discovers:

• The company doesn't own its land

• The local utility has never energized a charging depot before

• Zoning codes don't have a category for this

• Nobody knows how long permits will take or which ones you need

They come back and say, "It's not going to happen. Or, at least, not in my lifetime."

Fleets will never, structurally, buy speculative land, sit in utility meetings for years, or debug zoning codes for a use that doesn't yet exist.

If you're Amazon-scale, you can build that capability. It’s a subject we've previously covered (see our Amazon podcast and newsletter). But most companies can't. They just want chargers in place when they're ready to plug in.

"Don't wait till 30 days before your vehicles are arriving to start thinking about your charging infrastructure," Brett said. "That should be the first thing we think about."

Voltera's Bet: Own the Land, Eat the Hassle

"First and foremost, we're real estate developers," Brett said. "We're not a charging company, we're a real estate company."

Voltera enters markets and buys land long before customers sign contracts—San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Miami, Atlanta. They work with rideshare companies, delivery fleets, and autonomous vehicle operators—all needing the same thing: strategically placed charging at scale.

Then Voltera spends 18–24 months doing the invisible work: zoning approvals, utility coordination, engineering plans, permits from a dozen-plus agencies.

Brett calls Voltera’s playbook the three Cs:

Control. Own the land outright. "We are the landlord," Brett said. No more double sales cycles. No lease mismatches between 10-year infrastructure and 5-year terms.

Coordination. Navigate the maze with precision. Some reviews happen in parallel. Others must go in sequence. "The more you do these things, the more it's all about the nuance," Brett said.

Capital. Deploy millions on land, engineering, zoning, and grid connections—years before revenue.

Voltera's traction since launching in 2022: 10 depots live, 360 charging stalls, 35 megawatts of power, with roughly double that under development.

The business model: site license fees and service agreements for 99.98% uptime. They turn bureaucratic hell into predictable infrastructure you can plug into.

Where the System Works

"Where we are lagging is in the bureaucracy around deployment," Brett said. "That has to keep up with the pace of innovation."

Not every utility is stuck in the old pattern. Some are building new muscle.

In Austin, Texas, Austin Energy, the local utility, created a dedicated electrification team—people whose job is to move these projects through and practice the art of saying yes. It’s working.

The city also revised its zoning code to allow EV charging as a primary property use by right. Now the city and utility work in lockstep with customers to meet rising energy demand.

Los Angeles Olympics 2028: The Forcing Function

In Los Angeles, the race to the EV future has begun. And the upcoming 2028 Olympics are a major reason why.

LA is aiming for a low-carbon emissions Olympic Games. "If I do my math correctly, we're almost at 2026," Brett said. "2028 is right around the corner."

Already, teams are working to compress timelines—what Brett described as "tiger teams" focused on cutting through permitting queues and keeping sites powered when permanent infrastructure can't be ready in time. It's forcing the system to figure out what's required and act.

If LA gets even close, it won't just clean up one event. Success will create a playbook showing other major cities how to rewire their own bureaucracies at speed.

Supercool Takeaway

Voltera owns the EV transition work few will touch—the brutal middle layer between promise and reality. They don’t just take responsibility for it; they turn it into their core product so electrification can advance at scale and speed.

Operator Takeaways

Own the work your customer structurally cannot do. Identify the essential step that's off-limits for your buyer, then build your business model around providing it.

Turn regulatory friction into a repeatable process. The harder it looks from the outside, the more defensible it becomes once you've mastered it.

Design around institutional timelines. Delivering for the customer comes from accepting constraints and building around them.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

EV Impossible: Voltera Delivers Charging Sites Electric Fleets Count On

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 1%

In the U.S., roughly 1% of light commercial vehicles on the road are electric today — about 43,000 out of 8.4 million. That’s both the challenge and opportunity Voltera is addressing.

Quote of the Week:

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🌐 The Climate Adoption Playbook

There has never been a better time to launch a climate company than right now.

It’s understandable to feel demoralized and despondent about the climate in this moment, when it feels like the news cycle is no longer paying attention. When the administration in Washington is almost adversarial in its stance. When it can seem like not much progress is being made.

But as the International Energy Agency reports, global clean energy investment hit $2 trillion in 2024. It will reach $2.2 trillion in 2025. That’s double fossil fuels. That puts global clean energy investment on course to top $10 trillion between now and 2030, twice as much as JPMorgan projects will flow into AI infrastructure.

The clean energy transition is the driving force of the global economy today and for the foreseeable future.

Many companies you read about in this newsletter every week are taking advantage of this underlying opportunity. To do so takes more than coming to market with innovation. It’s about understanding how to get customers to adopt it.

That’s what the Supercool Climate Adoption Playbook is all about. It’s for founders, go-to-market leaders, and large companies who are putting climate solutions into the market and seeking effective results.

It teaches how to clear away friction and remove the barriers that prevent customers from saying yes. It equips you to take advantage of this unprecedented moment to build the low-carbon future.

Check it out. You can find more information at getsuper.cool/playbook.

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Related

Olympic Games as Climate Catalysts

Los Angeles’ ambition to harness the 2028 Games as a catalyst for low-carbon innovation has precedent. Host cities globally have leveraged the Olympics to build climate infrastructure and implement sustainability initiatives that remain in place long after the torch has passed.

Vancouver 2010 — District Energy From Sewers
Ahead of the 2010 Winter Games, Vancouver built the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility. This city-owned district energy system recovers heat from sewage to warm homes and businesses around the former Olympic Village. It has since expanded to serve thousands of residents, cutting emissions annually (see our Supercool episode with Mayor Robertson and Lynn Mueller, founder of the system Vancouver installed).

London 2012 — A Low-Carbon District Baked Into the Rules
London used the Games to create Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and a surrounding neighbourhood governed by a long-term sustainability framework. New buildings must meet strict standards for recycled content and water reuse, every home sits within easy reach of transit, and a share of parking is required to be EV-ready. The result is a permanent district where planning rules continue to push the area toward lower-carbon living.

Paris 2024 — Cleaning The City’s River
Paris tied its Olympic bid to a long-delayed clean-up of the Seine, investing heavily in new sewer connections, stormwater tunnels, and upgraded treatment plants to make the river swimmable again. The Games provided the deadline. The benefit is permanent: a central waterway that now supports recreation, enhances resilience to heat waves, and sets a sharper standard for urban water quality.

PyeongChang 2018 — High-Speed Rail Pulled Forward
For PyeongChang, South Korea accelerated completion of the high-speed rail line linking Seoul to the east coast. The line slashed travel times to under two hours and shifted trips from highways and buses to electric rail. That connection remains one of the most tangible legacies of the Games, supporting lower-carbon regional travel every day.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

Podcast: AEC Tech Journeys with Mayur Mistry (image above): The Startup Replacing Lumber with Carbon-Negative Panels

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Interested in Advertising with Supercool?

Connect with future-forward decision-makers seeking next-gen climate innovations. Reach out to discuss how Supercool’s platform can help. Just hit reply to this email.

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