Amazon is deploying 3,000 Tata Motors electric trucks in its transportation network in India. The deployment will extend Amazon’s fleet electrification efforts beyond last-mile delivery. The trucks will transport customer shipments between facilities, in cities and along freight corridors.
First, Amazon will deploy light- and medium-duty electric trucks in its middle-mile transportation network. The next phase will extend deployment to major national highways.
Amazon’s carrier partners will own and operate the vehicles. The initial rollout will begin in Delhi during India’s festive season, when freight volumes reach their annual peak. Dedicated charging infrastructure, including hubs being developed with charging infrastructure provider Yahhvi, will support the deployment.
The Tata Ultra E.7 electric truck is designed for urban and regional logistics. It features DC fast charging capability, regenerative braking and built-in safety features.
“We have made significant progress [with our electrification efforts] in India—we have more than 15,000 electric vehicles operating across 500-plus cities,” said Amazon Vice President Abhinav Singh. “To enable this transition, we are also supporting the development of infrastructure and solutions that make EV adoption easier for our carrier partners and drivers.”
“Electric trucking in India is moving beyond the pilot stage and entering a phase of wider adoption,” said Tata Motors Vice President and Head of Trucks Rajesh Kaul. “Working with Amazon India, we are going beyond vehicle deployment to provide charging infrastructure, servicing and operational support.”
Blink Charging is changing its name to Blink Energy, reflecting its expansion into energy management and battery energy storage.
Energy management and battery energy storage are becoming vital parts of the EV charging ecosystem. These technologies help charging site operators avoid utility demand charges and get around limits on available electrical capacity.
Blink operates more than 48,000 networked EV chargers worldwide—a good foundation for offering energy management software and battery storage solutions to both existing customers and new prospects.
EnergyConnect, Blink’s energy management platform, works alongside Blink chargers to balance charging loads in real time, manage peak demand and help sites add chargers within their existing electrical capacity. The platform is currently deployed at 52 Blink-owned DC fast charging sites, including 26 sites using load management to control charging demand. Early utility billing data indicates that energy management is lowering peak demand. At one site, billed peak demand declined 23% within the first month of implementation.
Blink plans to expand EnergyConnect’s availability to its customer base in the US and Europe, and has identified several locations where it plans to deploy battery energy storage.
“EV charging remains at the core of our business, and our charging footprint gives us a strong foundation to address the energy challenges our customers face,” said President and CEO Mike Battaglia. “Customers want to add charging capacity while keeping electricity costs under control. Blink Energy reflects our strategy to bring charging, energy management and battery storage together to meet those needs—and build a broader recurring revenue business in the process.”
SEE Services, a UK provider of integrated facilities management, has chosen Optimo Energy as its Fleet Energy Operating System partner for London Ambulance Service’s electric vehicle charging program.
When an ambulance returns from an emergency, it may be called out again within minutes. As London Ambulance Service (LAS) expands its electric fleet, ensuring that vehicles have the energy they need at all times is critical.
SEE Services is responsible for delivering and maintaining more than 700 charging connectors for LAS. Optimo will provide the intelligent software platform and operational support capabilities to manage the connected charging network.
Optimo’s hardware-agnostic Fleet Energy Operating System will connect charging infrastructure, vehicle telematics, battery state-of-charge information and real-time site energy management within a single operational platform.
By continuously monitoring charging performance and dynamically allocating available power according to vehicle requirements and site electrical constraints, the platform will help LAS manage charging demand and support vehicle readiness. The system will be backed by 24/7 operational monitoring and support.
“An ambulance may return from one emergency and be needed for another before it has finished charging. That is the reality our technology needs to support,” said Daniel Homoki-Farkas, CEO and cofounder of Optimo Energy. “Energy management needs to serve the vehicles and the people who depend on them.”
“Our role goes well beyond installing chargers,” said Lance Curtis, EV Manager at SEE Services. “We’re working closely with LAS to understand its fleet operations and analyze vehicle telematics, ensuring that the charging infrastructure is designed and supported around the demands of an emergency response fleet.”
EV Realty sites its heavy-duty EV charging hubs where the fleet customers are.
Heavy-duty EVs have different charging requirements than passenger EVs. As electric truck guru Rustam Kocher explains in our recent interview, a charging hub purpose-built for heavy-duty EVs differs from a consumer charging hub in several ways. But it’s not just the physical design of the site that differs—the business model is a bit different too.
Passenger car drivers stop off to charge whenever their battery gauges (or their bladders) tell them to, so charging operators focused on this market have to choose likely locations and wait for customers to drive in. Fleet customers are more predictable—their trucks tend to run regular routes, and they need to count on being able to charge exactly when and where they need to. Therefore, companies that serve the heavy-duty market tend to offer charging on more of a subscription basis, and they build charging sites with specific customers in mind.
As any real estate investor will tell you, location, location, location is all-important. That’s why the vast majority of heavy-duty charging hubs are currently located in Southern California, near the giant port complexes of Los Angeles and Long Beach, in the midst of the surrounding sprawl of warehouses and logistics centers. But there’s more to choosing a site for a charging hub than simply picking a strategic location.
EV Realty was launched in 2022 to provide turnkey charging solutions for electric truck fleets. As its name implies, the company sees value in owning strategic locations. Its strategy is to acquire, develop and operate optimally sited, grid-ready properties to support regular freight and logistics customers.
We have the capability to take a site from a piece of dirt all the way through to an operating charging project.
In April 2026, EV Realty opened its first Powered Property in San Bernardino, in an area that’s home to around 17,000 medium- and heavy-duty trucks. The charging hub features 76 high-power charging ports and 9 MW of total power capacity, sufficient to serve over 200 trucks per day. The Kempower charging hardware allows charging at up to 500 kW with CCS and up to 1.2 MW with MCS. Fleet management software from Synop allows customers to make reservations and to receive comprehensive reports on cost, range and efficiency. On-site staff, parking and on-site amenities are available 24/7.
Announced customers include national carrier J.B. Hunt Transport, beverage distributor Gate City Beverage and electric carrier Nevoya.
In September 2026, the company acquired a new site in Ontario, California—an equally strategic location not far from the San Bernardino site. Construction there is to start in 2027.
Henrik Holland, a veteran of the energy and venture capital industries and Board Chairman of Catalyst Mobility (formerly CALSTART), recently joined EV Realty as President. He chatted with Charged about the details of site selection, the importance of interfacing with utilities, and where the charging industry fits into the emerging energy ecosystem.
Henrik Holland, EV Realty President. Image courtesy of EV Realty
Charged: Tell us a bit about your personal background and how you ended up at EV Realty.
Henrik Holland: I’ve been in the energy industry for 23 years. I started my career at Shell in 2003. I always had a passion for the renewable side of the business, and finally in 2013, I got an opportunity to make that step by joining Shell Technology Ventures. I moved from the Netherlands to the US and led clean-tech venture investing for a while. Looked at lots of businesses and made investments in the clean energy space, spanning a range of technologies and business models.
That period of time led to the development of the company’s distributed energy business here in the US.
In 2018, I was asked to develop the go-to-market strategy for the mobility side of the business in the US, because I knew the space and the investors so well. We acquired charging software provider Greenlots in 2019. That was our entryway into the market. I took an operating role at the company. Did that for about a year and a half, and I got to know the space really well by looking at it through an M&A lens, but also through being responsible for energy for the solutions that we were offering our customers on the charging side. We were providing utilities with software, with turnkey projects. I ran the team that worked with Fortune 100, 500 companies on their early charging deployments, from delivery vans to heavy-duty trucks.
I was also responsible for our lab, so I have a lot of experience with interoperability testing. We ran interoperability testing for 20-plus hardware vendors in our lab. We had companies like GM and Ford come in with their vehicles to test how they would work with different types of charging hardware.
I started to see that, as they were doing their first deployments, customers were piecing the projects together. They were buying software and chargers themselves, even though we would execute them as a project. And I started to believe that the industry needed more integrated fleet solutions, and that in the future, you would see fueling infrastructure for electric fleets at warehouses.
I joined Prologis to build out that strategy, which I think we did quite successfully—grew that to a network of about 70 megawatts between the US and Europe. We ended up doing hundreds of projects between light-duty and heavy-duty. Did that at depots behind the fence for onsite fleets plus whoever might be visiting at that location. We also developed charging hubs.
I’ve also learned that a key bottleneck in this transition is the real estate to make it happen, and that efficient, cost-effective and timely site development takes a marriage between two otherwise pretty separate sets of expertise: real estate development and the charging and energy side.
So, I’ve operated across the charging space. I am of the view that the world of stationary distributed energy, onsite storage, generation, energy management in general, is coming together with the mobility world to be able to get vehicles going reliably and at the appropriate level of cost from a fueling perspective.
That’s what got me to EV Realty. I think this is the platform where a lot of those things come together. I’ve also learned that a key bottleneck in this transition is the real estate to make it happen, and that efficient, cost-effective and timely site development takes a marriage between two otherwise pretty separate sets of expertise: real estate development and the charging and energy side. How do we get a site energized? How do we work with utilities? How do we think about the tariffs that the sites are on? How does the way that customers want to use their vehicles interact with that energy system? If you charge at the wrong time, you might be hitting high demand charges. You want to make sure that those types of things don’t happen.
Larger corporations may not be the ones who are spearheading the development of an industry. When you’re doing innovation in a larger corporation, you’re not generally in the core business of that company. It’s easier to innovate if you are working within a company like EV Realty that is built to push the envelope. And I fundamentally believe that EV Realty has the right investor behind it in NGP, which is committed to this journey.
Charged: We talk a lot about the charging stack these days. I’ve talked to companies that provide one part of the stack, or several layers of the stack. Some offer charging as a service, some offer trucks as a service. When one founds an infrastructure company, presumably one has to ask, Which parts of the stack should we focus on? Where do we see the most opportunity? I haven’t talked to many companies that focus on the real estate aspect, although that’s obviously very important.
Holland: I think I can speak to that, because I joined a real estate company in the summer of 2021, around the same time that Patrick Sullivan founded EV Realty. Patrick and I have always been aligned about where we see value in the stack. The foundation of the stack is where these sites actually are—the real estate.
On top of that, you have the hardware. Then you have the energy component, be that utility-provided and/or combined with some form of onsite energy management. On top of that, you have the software that ties it all together. That’s my model of the charging stack. Then of course you have the vehicles that consume the product that’s created with that stack.
Now, where can you actually make money? I think there’s money to be made in all of those levels, and you could take the view as a company that you want to operate across all of them and be vertically integrated. My belief is that a significant, enduring part of the value of that stack is the siting, the location of the real estate, because that’s the thing that can’t change, and it’s in limited supply. What’s more, if you combine that with energy, we’re talking about something that is even more constrained and in limited supply.
So, there’s two angles to this. One: for this transition to happen, the market needs to have access to cost-effective, energized real estate, or there’s not going to be any places to charge these trucks. Two: because this is a limited resource, there is a lot of long-term value to be created by developing those resources and controlling and owning them.
What’s really important is to understand the energy system really well, to know where bottlenecks are and where you will be able to energize within a time period that we would consider acceptable.
Charged: EV Realty has bought some existing sites—truck parking lots or industrial sites in strategic locations—and developed charging hubs there. Is that a better way to go, because you have part of your work done for you already? Or is it better to start from a greenfield site and build from the ground up specifically for electric trucks?
Holland: Every site is different, and we qualify locations on a number of criteria. To a degree, whether it’s a greenfield site, a graded lot, a truck yard or even a five-decade-old warehouse that needs to be demolished and redeveloped, doesn’t matter a whole lot for us. We have the capability to take a site from a piece of dirt all the way through to an operating charging project. What is more important to us is the cost basis of the site. Is it in the right location? And can we get power there within a reasonable period of time and at the appropriate cost?
We have a proprietary site selection platform called Compass, which takes a wide variety of data into account, including utility data. What’s really important is to understand the energy system really well, to know where bottlenecks are and where you will be able to energize within a time period that we would consider acceptable.
Charged: Can you tell us a bit about your customer mix?
Holland: At our San Bernardino site, the customers are heavy-duty fleet customers. We also work with the autonomous vehicle providers across the sector. But we are not being public yet about any particular deals.
Charged: I ask everyone about MCS and V2G. Are these still pilot technologies, or are we seeing some commercial deployments?
Holland: Let me start with MCS. I think that one’s out of the garage, both here in the US and in Europe. In Europe, the conventional OEMs are a little farther along with their MCS truck deployments, but at San Bernardino we built one of the first MCS charging sites in the country. I believe that MCS is going to be an important part of the equation going forward. It provides the type of charging time that customers are looking for. It’s not necessarily going to be what you want to do for all use cases, but it’s important in the heavy-duty sector because you’re dealing with much larger battery volumes. It’s great that the industry is converging around open standards.
On V2G, I think we are moving towards a world with a smarter grid, and that goes for distributed energy resources as a whole. We’re going to see more onsite storage—behind-the-fence, behind-the-meter storage, solar. Utilities are increasingly going to find ways to integrate those resources into the grid and the DSOs. Over time, will vehicle batteries play a role in that as well? I think so, to a degree. Is that where I would start today? Is it a transformative technology that is going to catalyze our industry in the near term? I’m a bit more skeptical about that. But I do think that it’s part of a bigger piece that we’re going to see come together long-term.
You’re already seeing it in segments where it makes sense. School buses, for example, where you have a system sitting stationary for a long period of time with significant battery capacity. For V2G you need to have a lot of scale, a lot of vehicles connected, for that really to have an impact. So I think we’re going to see a lot more V2G deployments when we have a lot more EVs on the road.
If you’re competing with a truck actually doing what it’s intended to do, V2G doesn’t create enough value to do that. You do that with a stationary storage system.
Charged: It seems to me that the only going concerns so far are school bus applications. Maybe for trucks, it’s not as great an application because fleets don’t want their trucks sitting for long periods of time.
Holland: Exactly. V2G is an enabling technology to achieve something, but what? Smarter use of the grid, load reduction, cost reduction—and you’re only going to be able to do that where you have the right operational duty cycle. If you’re competing with a truck actually doing what it’s intended to do, V2G doesn’t create enough value to do that. You do that with a stationary storage system.
Charged: Anything else you’d like to discuss? Any new projects in the pipeline for EV Realty?
Holland: Well, today we announced the acquisition of a new location in Ontario, California. We’re very excited about that addition to our portfolio. One thing to add is that my mandate is to support our growth nationally—the capability we’re talking about here is something we can bring to bear across the country. So far we have been very focused on California, because that’s where our customers wanted us to be. But we have been increasingly seeing opportunities outside of the state as well, so there will be more to follow on that.
As the EV battery production scales, manufacturers face increasing pressure to design battery systems that are easier to service, repair and recover at the end of life. Debonding-on-demand technologies address this challenge by enabling strong, durable bonds that can be safely released using controlled triggers. This approach allows precise disassembly of battery components without damaging materials, unlocking new opportunities for circular battery design and high-value material recovery.
Henkel’s Battery Debonding-on-Demand whitepaper explores how debonding-on-demand adhesive technologies enable circular EV battery designs through precise, trigger-based separation and automation-ready repair, recycling, and end-of-life material recovery.
Key Insights Covered in the Whitepaper:
Next-generation EV battery architectures. EV battery designs are becoming more integrated and complex, increasing the need for bonding solutions that support both durability and controlled disassembly.
Rising need for circular EV batteries. Manufacturers prioritizing repairability, reuse, and highvalue recycling to keep materials in circulation and reduce lifecycle waste.
Debonding on demand for circular EV battery designs. Exploring debonding-on-demand adhesive technologies that enable strong bonding during operation and release safely and cleanly at the end of life or service.
Trigger-based mechanisms for debonding. Thermal and electrical triggers for activating clean separation, allowing precise, predictable disassembly without damaging components.
The city of Seattle plans to fund the installation of up to 200 new curbside charging stations, as part of the Curbside Level 2 EV Charging Program, run jointly by Seattle City Light and the Seattle Department of Transportation.
These chargers will be designed for overnight charging, and are designed for use by EV drivers who don’t have access to private driveways. In Seattle, around half the homes are apartments or condominiums, whose residents often don’t have access to off-street parking.
The project is funded by the voter-approved Seattle Transportation Levy. Funding for chargers installed outside of Seattle in City Light’s service area, including Burien, SeaTac, Shoreline, and Tukwila, will come from the utility’s dedicated transportation electrification budget.
In 2023 and 2024, City Light and SDOT completed a pilot project, installing 58 public Level 2 EV chargers at 31 curbside locations throughout the city to test demand. Those chargers drew high usage numbers and positive feedback from the community.
The Level 2 EV chargers installed under the new program will provide up to 9.6 kW of charging power. Residents who want a charger installed near their home can now apply through the Seattle.gov web site. Applications will remain open through fall 2027. Selection criteria favor locations in neighborhoods with the fewest existing charging options and the greatest need.
Installations are to begin in late 2027, and all 200 chargers are expected to be in service by 2030 at the latest. The curbside chargers will be operated by Seattle City Light, and pricing is currently set at $0.21 per kWh.
Materials manufacturer Proterial and engineering services firm FEV have used simulation to evaluate an EV traction motor concept that combines Proterial’s amorphous alloy core material with its heavy-rare-earth (HRE)-free neodymium sintered magnets.
Amorphous alloy, a metal with no crystalline structure made by rapidly cooling molten alloy, has lower iron loss than the electrical steel sheets commonly used in motor cores. Proterial has developed a continuous lamination and bonding process that makes amorphous alloy ribbon suitable for punching into motor cores.
Proterial’s HRE-free neodymium sintered magnets for EV traction motors contain no heavy rare earths such as terbium and dysprosium, which face resource constraints and procurement risk. Proterial says the magnets combine high remanence flux density with high coercivity.
FEV built a reference model of a 230 kW drive unit, representative of modern passenger-car BEVs, with a silicon steel motor core, then evaluated the effect of amorphous alloy through electromagnetic simulation.
The concept is designed to make best use of the alloy’s lower iron loss at a higher maximum motor speed of 20,000 rpm, compared with 14,900 rpm for the reference. The reduction ratio is raised from 10.8 to 14.4 so that maximum torque and speed during vehicle operation are equivalent to those of the reference drive unit. The motor has 12 poles instead of eight and the same 72 slots and 200 mm stator outer diameter as the reference, and its active length is 77.1% of the reference’s length.
The companies say the simulations indicate the potential for peak power to increase from 230 kW to 300 kW and for motor weight to be reduced by 27%. Simulated motor efficiency rises from 95.5% to 97.9% on the WLTP Class 3 cycle and from 95.3% to 97.4% on the ARTEMIS MW 150 drive cycle.
