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Greener Food Trucks, Thanks To A New Plug-In Charging System

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Sure, the food truck boom has its upside. But did you ever think about the environmental effect of those vehicles running generators all day? Add to that the emissions from EMS and other public service conveyances, long-haul trucks, and RVS, to name a few examples of idling vehicles, and you have a heap of dirty engines spewing out pollution.

As it happens, Michael Dubrovsky has thought a lot about the problem. In fact, Dubrovsky got to pondering about it four years ago while he was in college at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where he studied organic chemistry and engineering.

What he came up with was the following idea: install pedestals throughout cities that could deliver grid-powered electricity to food trucks and other vehicles, connected using standard cables. The customers, in other words, would be on the move.  One might use the system for an hour, another for five.

(Food Truck (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While he was still in school, Dubrovsky started a company named Simply Grid to set up these systems, working with municipalities. With headquarters now in Brooklyn, he's targeting a number of potential markets, starting with food trucks. According to COO Jeffrey Hoffman, most run their operations with expensive generators that comprise a significant portion of their budgets. "It's like sitting on top of a motorcycle that's running its engine all day," he says. "It's terribly polluting."

Other potential users are fire and other municipal departments.  According to Hoffman, cities have hundreds of emergency vehicles that sit idling 10 to 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, "So when they get a call, off they can go," he says.  Another target: refrigerated delivery trucks that sit idling about four hours a day, chalking up fuel costs of about $1.2 billion a year. Long-duration idling of truck and locomotive engines consumes over 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel and emits 11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 200,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen, and 5,000 tons of particulate matter into the air each year, according to the company web site.

Here's how the system works. Take food trucks. Simply Grid installs pedestals on sidewalks and in lots that vehicles plug into to get power. Then through a wireless connection, built-in metering controllers connect to a cloud-based platform, which manages billing and so on. Food truck vendors activate the system through their mobile phones, connecting to the electric grid with cables they already have in place for use with the conventional generators they've thus far relied on. As many as three or four food trucks, which pay an hourly fee, connect to one pedestal.

The results: Cheaper energy for vendors--as much as 50% in savings-- and a sharp reduction in carbon emissions.

Dubrovsky founded the company in 2010, but didn't really get going until after he graduated in 2012. Through CoFoundersLab, an online platform allowing startup founders with, say, technical skills, to find colleagues with complementary business expertise, Dubrovsky met Hoffman, a lawyer who also had worked in executive positions at several tech startups. Including a grant from Dubrovsky's school, an angel investment, and various competitions, they've raised about $160,000.

The company currently is piloting a program located in New York City's Union Square with the Mayor's Office, the Department of Transportation and Con Edison and has similar programs in Austin and Atlanta.

Ultimately, Dubrovsky and Hoffman hope to see not only electric vehicles use the pedestals as charging stations, but also the 13,000 RV parks and 8,000 marinas in the U.S.

Simply Grid, by the way, was one of the startups that took part in a pitch competition called Battle of the Boros held this month at MakeImpactNYC, a conference for New York City social enterprises, for which I was a judge.  I hope to write about some of the other contestants soon.