THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Royal Dutch Shell has installed its first electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the United States, at Boston Logan International Airport.
Steve Bean, electric mobility manager for Shell, posted an image of two Shell Recharge branded EV charging stations on his LinkedIn profile page. “Shell Recharge now crosses the Atlantic. First U.S. site at Boston’s Logan Airport,” the post said.
Greenlots, a Los Angeles-based provider of EV charging and energy management software that was acquired by Shell in 2019, installed the 50-kW Veelfil-RT DC fast-charging stations, reported Australian EV news site The Driven. The units are manufactured by Tritium, an Australian firm. Gilbarco Veeder-Root, Greensboro, N.C., made a minority investment in Tritium in 2018 and sells the charging stations in the United States.
Tritium’s president of the Americas, Jeff Wolfe, is a former Shell executive, having worked in the major oil company’s Shell New Energies business. His charge has been to expand Tritium’s U.S. fast-charging network in key states and industry verticals.
Prior to this first U.S. installation, Shell, based in The Hague, Netherlands, had focused expansion of its Shell Recharge EV charging service in Europe, in partnership with Allego, an EV service developer. The service launched in 2017 in the United Kingdom and has since expanded to the Netherlands and Singapore in 2019.
Fellow major oil company BP has been making its own forays into EV charging, investing in FreeWire Technologies, a U.S. developer of fast-charging stations, and Israeli EV battery developer StoreDot in 2018. FreeWire specializes in mobile EV charging units, which BP has been testing in the United Kingdom and Europe. In 2018, BP acquired Chargemaster, the largest U.K. charging station network. It has since renamed the business BP Chargemaster, and in 2019 it opened the first in a nationwide network of EV charging stations planned for BP-branded sites in the United Kingdom.
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