Executive summary:
- I was a management consultant at Deloitte in their Digital Strategy practice where I led digital strategy and transformation projects across multiple countries for energy, financial services, and life science industries.
- I was a founding board member of the Ontario Clean Technology Industry Association and a committee member of Electric Mobility Canada.
- I attended McGill University for my BSc and PhD and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for my MBA.
What is your field of expertise?
Electric vehicle charging and vehicle-to-grid enablement.
Describe your journey to where you are today:
Carter Li
I started SWTCH to solve a personal challenge as an EV owner living in a multi-family building without access to EV charging. I wanted to find ways to improve EV charging accessibility in high-density urban communities to realize the environmental and socio-economic benefits of decarbonizing transportation. My initial idea was to build a two-sided marketplace to share home charging stations for public use. To leverage underutilized home chargers for public use through the sharing economy. Unfortunately, we realized early on that there was a geographic mismatch between the supply and demand of SWTCH’s two-sided marketplace model. Most home chargers that could be shared were in the suburbs in single family homes, whereas EV owners that lacked charging access lived in downtown multi-family buildings. With this new understanding, we pivoted our focus and began adapting our software to improve charging access directly within multi-family and commercial buildings. Fast forward to today, SWTCH has now deployed our innovative EV charging solution in hundreds of multi-family and commercial buildings across North America.
What does your company do, for whom, and how does it fit into the bigger picture of solving global issues with clean tech?
SWTCH was founded in 2016 to address the challenges of deploying EV charging infrastructure in multi-family and commercial buildings by employing innovative energy management technologies and business model innovations to promote the effective integration of EVs into high-density urban communities. Since then, SWTCH has grown from an idea to a product, received global media coverage, and deployed our innovative EV charging technology at over 1,500 EV charging stations across North America. The impact of EVs goes beyond the transportation system itself as there is an enormous opportunity for energy providers to benefit from growing EV adoption through the integration of smart EV charging, vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and energy storage technologies. By developing innovative and cost-effective EV charging, building energy management integration, distributed energy resource (DER) aggregation, demand response (DR), blockchain, and V2G technologies, the SWTCH platform will minimize the costs of EV charging infrastructure in buildings and promote the widespread adoption of EVs by maximizing existing infrastructure through hardware retrofitting and software optimization.
What do you wish you could tell the younger you? What would’ve been incredibly helpful to you ten years ago?
I would tell myself to be patient, listen intently to feedback, and not be afraid to make mistakes. I would also tell myself to not take myself too seriously, to not dwell on past errors, and to appreciate that real growth comes from failing and getting back up.
LinkedIn: Carter Li