San Diego EV charging company completes $1 million deal with the U.K.’s defense ministry (original) (raw)

Beam Global, a San Diego-based company that specializes in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, just completed its first order in Europe — a $1 million deal to help the United Kingdom’s defense ministry reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a pair of its military stations in the Mediterranean.

The British Sovereign Bases on the island of Cyprus will receive 10 of Beam Global’s trademarked Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Chargers, known as EV ARCs for short. The charging stations are transportable, fit into conventional parking spots and run on solar power.

“Environmentally, it helps the military make a contribution to the British government’s net zero targets,” said Brigadier Tom Harper, U.K. Strategic Command Attaché, who toured the Beam Global facility in Miramar on Tuesday. “It improves our resilience, relying less on fossil fuels and, as a result, drives our costs down.”

The EV ARC charges vehicles with an overhead 4.3-kilowatt solar array that generates electricity independent of the grid. On the ground, a 1-inch ballast pad fits into a standard 9-by-8-foot parking space. Charging ports at the top of the pad can charge any EV model.

Though each EV ARC weighs about 10,000 pounds, the structures can be shipped, don’t need special permitting or utility connections and avoid the expense of digging trenches to run power to the unit.

Capable of charging as many as six vehicles simultaneously, the solar-powered mobile stations also generate and store electricity. The EV ARCs can operate even if the electrical grid goes down — an attractive feature, considering concerns in Europe about power outages in the wake of the war in Ukraine by Russia and Vladimir Putin.

“Putin can’t hurt us, he can’t do anything to our infrastructure,” Beam Global CEO Desmond Wheatley said of the EV ARCs heading to Cyprus, where the weather is consistently sunny.

The $1 million package also includes a Beam “mobility trailer” that moves the charging stations from one spot to the other.

The 10 EV ARCs will charge the electric vehicles already in use at the bases in Cyprus but Harper said, “we’re looking at grouping them together and do some experimentation — to use them as mobile generators to run computers, maybe medical monitoring equipment in a field hospital and powering UAVs,” unmanned aerial vehicles such as drones.

A number of cities have bought Beam Global’s portable stations to charge their municipal electric fleets, including San Diego and New York City. The company has also done business with the U.S. military and Department of Homeland Security.

“The U.S. Army is our biggest customer,” Wheatley said. “The Marine Corps is also a big customer.”

The EV ARCs will be delivered to Cyprus from the Beam Global’s new European 250,000 square-foot factory that covers 6 acres in Kraljevo, Serbia. The company purchased the factory last year for $10 million in the hopes of establishing a foothold in the European EV market.

The European Union is keen on transitioning to electric vehicles, proposing to go zero-emissions for all new cars and vans by 2035. The U.K. government has made a commitment that all of its government-owned cars and trucks emit no greenhouse gases by 2027.

Beam Global stock is traded on NASDAQ under the symbol BEEM. Following the announcement of the deal with the U.K. ministry of defense, Beam Global closed Tuesday’s trading day at $7.28 per share, up 4.9 percent from the day before.

Originally Published: March 12, 2024 at 7:35 PM PST