Powering cities at the curb: It’s electric and the future of urban EV charging

The electrification of transportation is accelerating, yet the reality for millions of city dwellers is clear: Most cannot charge where they live. Nearly half of urban households in the United States lack access to a private driveway or garage, leaving some 40 million drivers without an obvious charging solution. At the same time, public debate has tended to focus on high-powered fast chargers that mimic the gas station experience. This model is expensive, risks straining the grid, and often misses the everyday needs of urban drivers.

In this episode of Drivers of Disruption, host Matías Garibaldi sits down with Tiya Gordon, cofounder and COO of it’s electric, and McKinsey Partner Shivika Sahdev to explore how cities can rethink infrastructure from the ground up. Gordon shares the story of how a pandemic-era problem on her Brooklyn block inspired a new approach: Instead of relying on costly, utility-connected installations that can take years to permit, it’s electric designed building-powered chargers that cut capital costs and drastically shorten installation timelines, making curbside charging far more practical for dense neighborhoods. Sahdev provides a broader view of the economics and policy landscape, highlighting why overnight Level 2 charging is essential to balance energy demand and ensure grid stability. Together, they discuss how this combination of grassroots innovation and system-level strategy could unlock a practical, scalable path for urban electrification.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Matías Garibaldi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Drivers of Disruption, a show covering the latest advancements in the future of mobility, current challenges, and potential solutions moving forward. I’m Matías Garibaldi, and the topic for today is how do city drivers recharge when their driveway is the curb. With me are two guests.

Tiya Gordon is a cofounder and COO of it’s electric, a Brooklyn-based start-up that’s laser-focused on city charging infrastructure, offering building-powered curbside chargers. It’s electric was also a participant in McKinsey’s 2024 InNYC, where McKinsey works with emerging start-ups. So excited to hear how they’re doing.

Shivika Sahdev, a McKinsey partner and leader of our EV [electric-vehicle] charging sector, is focused on helping clients build strategies around where and how to engage in electric mobility and the broader EV charging ecosystem.

Welcome, Shivika. Welcome, Tiya.

Today we’re going to ask, what does it really take to scale reliable overnight charging for urban residents? So let’s jump in.

To set the stage: City drivers are embracing EVs faster than their suburban neighbors, yet nearly half of urban households lack access to private off-street parking spots where they could actually install a charger; that’s roughly 40 million drivers in the US. Public charging is also one of the leading hurdles keeping US drivers from going electric. Access to public charging is one of the biggest reasons rideshare drivers hesitate to adopt electric vehicles. What’s interesting is that public debate usually focuses on high-powered DC fast chargers—meaning the long-distance trips and making sure you have the gas station model where you can quickly charge your vehicle—but it often overlooks overnight Level 2 charging close to home as equally crucial, the assumption being that you have a garage and can charge there. But if you do have overnight charging, you can basically charge your entire vehicle overnight with much smaller, lower-powered charging options. Today, the United States hosts roughly 200,000 public charging ports, and even if we assume funding is still in play, a lot of that is focused on highway corridors versus neighborhoods. This leaves municipalities to innovate at the curb on their own, and that’s where we bring this conversation today.

We’re starting to see innovation in multiple cities. New York City installed 100 curbside posts last year. Boston has awarded a competitive tender to deploy first-in-kind building-powered chargers. LA is retrofitting streetlight poles to host Level 2 charging. So early pilots are underway.

Shivika, let’s zoom out. How complete is today’s US EV charging landscape across highway DC, workplace, retail, and multifamily segments? Where does overnight curbside charging in dense cities still lag? What are some pain points that it creates for our drivers?

Shivika Sahdev: I think maybe just starting at the very core driver. Why do we need charging infrastructure? Of course, the underpinning of the sector is electrification of transportation. I think for our focus today, we’re talking largely about the passenger car side—folks in cities, folks like you and me, who drive our own individual vehicles. When we think of that, we think of that segment in two dimensions.

1. There are the locations that, unlike a combustion engine where you go to a gas station, you can charge in multiple places. We break that out into a home, so a single-family home where you may have a garage attached or a dedicated parking spot, a workplace, a category that we broadly call retail, which would include parking lots of a grocery store, mall, or movie theater, things like that. Then there’s on-the-go fast charging, which we’ve talked about, which could be on a highway corridor, but can also very well be created in a city context. Of course, curbside is part of that ecosystem of locations on the public side. But just to give you guys a sense of the framing of where we see this, today in the US, you’re looking at a ballpark of five to six million EVs on the road, and there are about 200,000 chargers in public to support that park of vehicles. So in current estimates, even adjusted for, say, a more conservative outlook on the pace of electrification in passenger cars, we expect that number to be a little bit more than double. Accounting for recent changes in regulation, McKinsey estimate, at least as of July or August of 2025, is somewhere between 15 and 20 million EVs across a few scenarios by 2030.

   The headline there is: To support the vehicle set that will get added, we think we’ll need about 500,000 chargers in the public sphere. That’s more than double, going from 200,000 to 500,000 in the span of five years. Those 500,000 chargers need to be built across all the spaces that I mentioned, excluding home and workplace. I’m focusing more on this public domain, which doesn’t cover the individual who has a home and a garage where they have been able to install a charger.

   One headline is: We are quite excited because we see this as a growth market, even if adoption is slowing down for regulatory reasons and others. We still need to double the install base of this infrastructure, even just to see this baseline amount to EV adoption.

2. Outside of location, the other dimension of charging is “the slow versus fast.” Historically, there’s been a lot of focus on faster charging. It needs to be like a gas station experience and so this focuses on trying to overbuild this much more expensive infrastructure that actually doesn’t take advantage of the fact that, unlike gasoline, electrons are available in many, many parts of the country in many, many different locations. Our view is that the 500,000 really needs to look very carefully at both the AC and DC, the AC being the slower Level 2 versus the DC, which is the faster. Today, of the 200,000+, you see a mix about 75/25, but we do see it skewing a bit more to the faster, although our view is that the answer has to be a holistic one for that transition to take place. I’ll say one last thing here: So where does curbside fit in?

The headline is the following:

First, not everyone lives in a single-family home, and particularly in dense cities. You talked about New York City, Boston, San Francisco. These have dense areas where the individual is not living in a single-family home. They cannot charge at home.

Second, you look at where you park. You may have a single-family home, but it may not have an attached garage or dedicated lot. I need a different place to charge if that’s my living situation.

Third, a very big factor, which we think is driving curbside adoption too, is equity. So, often, you may be a single-family homeowner, but you may also be a renter or of an income band where it may not be trivial for you to spend somewhere between $3,000 to $5,000: that is what it would still cost you to install a Level 2 charger in your home. Where are you going to charge?

Finally, it’s also about how people drive. If it’s you or me driving 30 to 40 miles a day, which is sort of the average in the US today, sure, I can meet my needs with an overnight slow charge potentially at home if I have the advantage of that. But if I am, for instance, an Uber driver who’s driving easily double that on average, I do need other locations and places that I can charge my vehicle.

That’s the headline: It’s a growth market for us today still very much so, and one where we think, in public, there is equal room for expansion of the infrastructure across slow and fast, and curbside is a big part of that future answer.

Matías Garibaldi: Thanks, Shivika. It sounds like there’s many different use cases and the solution is to have multiple different options for the different types of people that can potentially drive different vehicles or live in different situations.

Tiya, question for you. You’ve talked about how it’s electric started on your own Brooklyn block and Shivika mentioned several pain points that people have in high dense urban cities. What was the original problem you were trying to solve? You also participated in McKinsey’s inNYC back in 2024. Did your vision or approach evolve over the last few years?

Tiya Gordon: During the pandemic, my parents had certain comorbidities, and they live out of the state. So I was immediately worried given the fact that they are seniors that live alone and they were dealing with a pandemic and I’m their only child. How would I be able to reach them if there was a crisis? Like a lot of New Yorkers, for the very first time in my life, I had to look at getting a car. This was never something that had occurred to me, so I was researching buying a car and I knew enough to know that I didn’t want a gas car. I knew that I wanted an electric car. I knew the reasons why I would want an electric car. This is coming from my perspective of being a conscious consumer and environmentalist. I knew I couldn’t afford an EV at that time, but maybe I can find a used EV and that would be a great thing for me. I can buy it cheaply and then I can sell it down the road. The first thing that I did is write this list down on my piece of paper on my table in my apartment and I wrote “new” question mark, “used” question mark, “EV” circle, circle, circle. Then I went and searched for “where can I charge an EV in Brooklyn?” In 2020, the answer was basically three garages that had private charging that I had to pay $800 a month to park in. My mind was blown. I thought “how are we supposed to scale this new form of transportation if it’s going to cost me basically a third of what I pay for living these days to even park the car?” It doesn’t even count for the energy use of charging. This is while New York City was still getting their first public curbside charging pilot off the ground. It made no sense. I’m dedicating my life to curbside EV charging… it wasn’t like there was that moment, but it did weigh on me and it irked me. It irked someone who is now my cofounder of it’s electric and we just kind of like whittled away at this idea during the pandemic.

We looked at cities like London that had already figured out where cities can put public charging. The way that they were able to do that was basically retrofitting existing infrastructure that’s known as accessory feed infrastructure, such as their lampposts. They’re able to do that really easily because the power feed to these lampposts in London and in Paris and Amsterdam is 220 or 240 volt. Here in New York, it’s 90 or 110V so we can’t easily make those retrofits. You still must get into this space of getting in the queue of the utility for an upgrade. My cofounder, his background is in urban architecture and oversight of specialty engineering. My background is in design and technology for public space. It makes sense now that we did this, but at the time it was just us kind of putting puzzle pieces together. And the first big puzzle piece was, what’s basically the biggest barrier that cities face? It’s basically permitting for utility connections.

Anything that requires an inner, basically every other charging company when they connect a charger in a city, they connect it to the utility. That’s basically an 18 to 24 month permitting process and it costs a lot of money. So how can you sneak around that? Is there a way to put charges in the ground and not do a utility connection? And so one day during the pandemic, we were taking a walk because that’s all you could basically do during the pandemic was take a walk because there’s nowhere to go and nothing to go into. And we saw a lot of solar on roofs happening in New York City because of local laws. And my cofounder said to me, wouldn’t it be amazing if that power that is coming from solar on the roof could travel through that building and then also power a car that’s parked in front of it. That’s when I said what is now our tagline, which is: cars powered by buildings. The idea kind of took resonance. We came up with this idea, what if we rethink the idea of infrastructure as not electrical infrastructure, not lampposts, not streetlights, not transformers, but what if we think about the buildings as the infrastructure.

Matías Garibaldi: Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. You brought up a couple of interesting topics that I want to explore with both of you.

Shivika, you first. We laid out the landscape and heard how it’s electric is tackling curbside, and you mentioned slow versus fast and public versus private. Not all charging is created equal, especially when it comes to how it’s funded and how the economics play out in the real world. How does the funding and economics differ between fast charging and curbside Level 2 in cities? With the EV forecasts softening, are we now looking at underutilized assets for one or the other? How should strategies evolve to account for that?

Shivika Sahdev: I will say it was one of the very first things and it continues to be one of the top-of-mind topics. What are the two or three self-sustaining business models that we will see in EV charging across slow and fast? And the headline answer that I’d love to share is so far there is no singular silver bullet answer. There is no “here is the recipe for a successful business model” which I think has led to lots of variation, innovation, and experimentation on different types of business models. The big reason for this is at the core, when you do a comparison between fast versus slow, the capital requirements to install fast charging stations are still considerably high. Now, they have come down, you could argue, almost in half from when it started five years ago but the hardware itself, of the charging unit, is fairly expensive. You’re still looking at starting prices in the 20s, 30s, 40s of thousands of dollars going up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the technology, the provider, the speed, what other types of functionality it may have. You are looking at install costs, depending on the scale of the station, the degree of energy infrastructure required, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars so when you’re looking at this sort of average charging station on a fast charging site, you are looking at an investment (even for just a three to five charger station) getting close to that million dollar number. You’re starting there, which is not a trivial amount of capital when you start thinking of how much is needed.

One big advantage that the AC Level 2 has is that number is significantly smaller. It doesn’t cost as much. The hardware itself can be significantly 2 to 5 to sometimes 10x cheaper. The installation burden can be lower but, across both, this utility and grid connection continues to be a big part of the timing problem. Even with 5 million EVs on the road, there is still a significant portion of charging that takes place in the home. So how many kilowatt hours are really left for us to charge in public? And is that sufficient demand to drive profitability in this infrastructure if it was utilization dependent? What we have seen is that while many players are experimenting with the owner-operator model, which is completely dependent on utilization (so you sell electrons to a driver just like you might sell gasoline and you get paid), other folks have looked at revenue shares with site hosts, have looked at revenue shares with OEMs or subscriptions with OEMs to innovate on that, but that’s very demand-driven as one model.

There are others though. There are people innovating with things like charging or infrastructure as a service where the host may think of ancillary reasons for having a charger and is happy to pay for the charger upfront and then pay for some service fees ongoing; that’s a business model. You see lots of people looking at things like advertising or OEM partnerships and evolving more and more on the energy side what can you do with that energy flow, and is there value you can provide back to the utility and is there a way to monetize so that solutions are provided to the grid; different things you can do in the home versus on a curbside.

But I would love to hear, Tiya, when you answer this, how you’re thinking when you suddenly have a street block with multiple numbers of batteries plugged in to a grid. That could have potentially really meaningful advantages for the local utility to be able to use that flow of electricity, which we think will also factor into the business model.

There’s no silver bullet answer. Many stations are continuing to be profitable on a site-by-site basis. Network-wide, we have seen in the last four years, utilization in the United States has gone up considerably and is now in the high double digits (in the 20s), which we think is getting us close to what is breakeven for a lot of the infrastructure. We get asked this a lot. Will we have underutilized infrastructure if you double the infrastructure and EV adoption slows? Our view currently, when we do run some of the math, is the answer is no and that is also because the break-evens have to be designed around realistic caps of what a charger can provide before which you start to see queuing. Basically, you can’t have a charger that’s utilized 100 percent of the time if you do time-based utilization, because you just have to be able to, at some point, people are not going to charge at 3 a.m. or 2 a.m., so there’s reasons like that.

This is one area where the sector is still emerging in finding truly self-sustaining business models, and funding both on the federal, state, and municipal level have played a big role, and we anticipate will continue to play a role in the continued expansion of the infrastructure.

Matías Garibaldi: Thank you, Shivika. Passing it to you, Tiya. You are on the ground, living this every day and you’re focused specifically on curbside Level 2. Why do you feel like that’s the right fit for urban use? And if you could go into in more detail, you were mentioning the behind the meter model, the revenue sharing with property owners. We would love to understand how you’re thinking of the economics and the business model for its electric.

Tiya Gordon: Definitely. So I agree with everyone who says that we need all of the above, right? We can’t just say it’s all Level 2. We need both fast charging and Level 2. I want to put a note in here that I’d like for the industry to stop calling Level 2 “slow” and to start calling it “standard” just because I think it has a bad rap when you call it slow charging.

But going to your question around Level 2 versus fast charging or standard versus fast charging, I firmly believe that in cities, to back up what the US Department of Energy put out in their report in 2024, it said that we need 1.2 million more Level 2 chargers in this country, and we need around 600,000 more fast chargers. But the reality of it is that for a four-stall, fast-charging station, the amount of energy that’s required for that four-stall station is the same amount of energy that a 300 unit apartment building would require in a month. So we actually can’t scale fast charging at the speed we need to ensure EV adoption because we’re going to basically burden the grid too great of an ordeal. So I’m going to definitely get back to Shivika’s point around batteries and how that can be a benefit.

If we are looking to put in solutions where people are not using high-voltage megawatt power fast charging during daytime on a Saturday in July, but instead are charging their vehicles conveniently where they’re already street parked at night overnight when demand is at its lowest, it creates the very clear conviction and argument for me that we need to really invest in Level 2 infrastructure. I’m not alone in this perspective. We know 100 percent that New York City also believes this. They want to build the largest Level 2 curbside network in the country. They’ve received funding from NEVI [National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure] for this. But they’ve already come to this conclusion that it is having ubiquitous curbside L2 as a way to create that balance for charging. I really do say that it’s electric is team Level 2 and what’s funny is that, when the 100 charger pilot came into New York City, those chargers were all utility connected costing around $230,000 per installation to take on and that’s at Level 2, not at fast charging.

You want to look at things from these different angles, right? How much energy do we need to support this installation? How much is it going to cost us to do this installation? And then you run that against actual utilization for that payback for that break even that Shivika pointed out. So that’s why we wanted to learn from the first generation of curbside charging and see how we could do it better. And for us doing it better meant bringing that capex way down because it’s a burden to have to tell a city that they’re going to have to outlay $15 to $20 million and not see payback on that for 10 to 15 years. It’s a hard investment for a city to make, especially when cities have to really make hard choices around where they’re putting capital improvements or where they’re putting budget. You have to look at what’s going to actually work in terms of sustainability around grid and how if we have 1 million street parked cars and let’s say 20 percent of them are plugged in at any given time. If that’s pulling 7.5 kilowatts versus megawatts, these are decisions we have to make. There needs to be smart people at the table building the infrastructure that is for what we can do now and not what would be some ideal Blade Runner future of everyone being able to fast charge all at the same time in parallel. These are all the things that it’s electric thinks about, which is again, why we wanted to take off the issue of just designing a charger that is super low capex. By avoiding the utility connection, we’re also then reducing the installation costs. By having it be Level 2, we’re avoiding issues around grid and actually having the capacity to power these cars. And then, most importantly, convenience. How do we make it easy for people to charge their cars?

There’s a lot of challenge in the work that I do, but the greatest joy that I have is when we go live in a new neighborhood and our operations manager, Becky, sends out an email to drivers that have been on the waitlist in that neighborhood saying that we’re here now and we’re ready, and we get the pings of all of the emails coming in to request our detachable cable. We’re also the only detachable cable solution in the US. We send everyone their cables for free and they start charging. The relief is palpable. I feel it. They no longer have to go to the market on the weekend to charge. They can just charge on their block where their cars are already parked. And to Shivika’s point, just one more thing is you can also add in batteries storing energy and then push energy back into the grid. We’re actually working on this; we have grant funding to build the world’s first bi-directional curbside charger as well.

Shivika Sahdev: This brings up this factor of the interconnection with the grid. People don’t realize that the price of electricity is not singular over the course of a day and is not singular over the course of a year. So every electron you buy from the grid, it actually costs something different to be put into the vehicle when you do it on a very hot day when everyone’s air conditioners are on and it’s 2 p.m. peak afternoon time versus say at 4 a.m. on a winter morning when it’s significantly lower. This also lends a lot into the fundamentals of the economics of these business models. There is just a structural advantage in the operating cost of taking electricity from the grid during off peak hours at a slower power because you are not then subject to the high-demand charges when you put a lot of pressure on the grid to transfer electricity very quickly.

Matías Garibaldi: Tiya, I want to touch on something you brought up earlier. You were discussing the different solutions across Europe and some of the differences within the US, mostly the voltage of the grid. Obviously, the US brings its own mix of challenges. One of the things that’s very exciting about it’s electric is that you announced the goal of expanding to seven U S cities by 2025. As you work towards that, I would love to understand the two sides of that: What are some of the biggest hurdles that you’re facing and how are you overcoming those? What are some things that give you confidence that this model will and can scale successfully?

Tiya Gordon: It’s electric is live on the curb in three big cities in the US. We were first in Boston, and then from there we went to San Francisco, and then from there Detroit, DC, and Alameda is next. More cities to be announced after that. The biggest hurdle that we had faced previously were cities basically trying to find the solution that could allow them to scale given all the barriers that we laid out.

The newest hurdle in cities is how do they do this with a lack of federal funding. A lot of cities had won federal funding that is now tied up in the courts. The $2.5 billion that was reserved for what’s known as community charging for rural and urban areas. Now cities are basically on their own. I am not happy about that because I feel like we do need a unification, we need a larger plan on how we replicate charging so that it’s not distinct in every different city or state that you go to. However, what it is allowing us to do is to really soar at this moment as it’s electric is a solution that doesn’t rely on that federal funding because our model has always been that we’re free to cities and we’re free to buildings, because our low capex is such that we can get that payback very quickly. What we do is we ask cities basically to waive permitting fees for us so that we can just get in the ground as quickly as possible. That’s been a really nice symbiotic relationship that has allowed us, literally from the minute we’ve gotten approval from either the city or from the board (whoever owns that jurisdiction), to have gotten chargers in the ground in two days from that moment that we’ve gotten that permission and that permit.

Matías Garibaldi: Wow, it’s exciting. Well, I want to thank both our guests. We had a wonderful time covering this topic. And we look forward to hearing more about it’s electric in the news as you’re scaling up.

Tiya Gordon: Thank you, and thanks so much to McKinsey. Looking forward to obviously seeing more good news coming out of the reports as well.

Matías Garibaldi: Thank you.