EVgo Inc at JPMorgan Energy, Power, & Renewables Conference Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Great. I'm going to jump right to it. So a couple of months or several weeks ago, Tesla and Ford made an announcement last recently, GM made the announcement that they're going to use the NACS Connector and be opened up to the Tesla network. There's a lot of, I don't know, I'd call confusion in the market, but let's just say, what does this mean for the EV chargers, -- what does it mean for EVgo? How much of a threat is it? I mean, should investors make of it?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes. I guess the questions I've been getting recently is like what does this mean for your existing partnership with General Motors?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Okay. And then I guess another concern would be, obviously, Tesla's main business is selling cars, I guess. But they have made presumably a lower cost of capital. So the fear is that they're going to gain market share at the expense of others. Why would that be the case? Why wouldn't it be the case? I mean, I don't know, a growing market, but how would you -- how do you think about market share?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes. Well, I mean I think the corollary in really simple terms, is if you have a gas car, you drive down the road, you'll see multiple gas stations, not one brand. So I don't know, anyway. So coming to your business, so you actually have different line items. Your core charging, you also -- you have your eXtend program. Kind of just thinking about near term and in the back half of the year, where are you seeing like the best growth opportunities for the different subsegments of your business?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes. No. Well, yes. I guess let's talk about NEVI, and maybe we can back up and talk about broader policy support and how that impacts your business. But yes, maybe it explains what NEVI is and then how... Jonathan Levy We all have an acronym problem sometimes myself, very much included. So NEVI is the acronym for the $5 billion formula funding under the bipartisan infrastructure bill. So it's been almost 3 years since that became law and not a single dollar has gone to any companies yet. All the funds from the first 2 appropriations of it have gone to the state DOTs and all the state DOT's plans have been approved, but only 7 to our knowledge, RFPs have been finalized from space. None of them have made any awards yet. So to give you a little example, right, Indiana has actually published a fairly helpful calendar as far as transparency is concerned, but they haven't issued their RFP yet. That will come out in July. They're not anticipating making conditional awards until late in Q4 and not actually having the final contracts until some point in 2024. So it's one of the things where Cathy on one of our earnings calls earlier this year, said policy is a huge tailwind, REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. JUNE 21, 2023 / 7:20PM, EVGO.OQ - EVgo Inc at JPMorgan Energy, Power, & Renewables Conference but it feels like a tail breeze right now because it's not coming that quickly. And we're still on that same boat. Now it's clearly very important. If you take NEVI and the tax credits 30s with the new transferability provisions that came under the Inflation Reduction Act, those are huge opportunities to offset our CapEx, but there's still some clarification from the IRS. There's still a lot of work that needs to be finalized to make it all reality and help push forward.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes. Actually, that's an interesting thing. So we've heard actually in different parts of this conference is about permitting. So what -- I mean, you're in DC. So permitting actually is a big challenge broadly, but -- and that has been an impact to some of your build-outs last year. How was that today for the permitting side. Jonathan Levy Look Cathy and I, we're having this discussion to you yesterday, permitting, most people think permitting and especially right now in the DC conversation, it's big permitting, offshore wind, pipeline, things like that. We're talking about distributed energy projects. And we think about it in terms of our permitting is local counties or building departments saying, yes, you can build in this parking lot. It matters a lot as we go to bigger footprint, especially these charging stations we're building on land that we secure for the sole purpose. But really what matters even more to us is utility approval time lines. And unfortunately, those aren't getting a whole lot quicker. The transformer supply chain issues are still there and then sometimes is getting them to show up and do the final inspection on the utility side, that can be the limiting factor. So we need those partners to continue to up their game so that, that's not holding things up.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : That's right. Okay. So your core business and you guys are generally more in urban or suburban areas like high utilization zones, which, to be honest, like if you think about some competitors charging stations tend to be off a highway in the middle of nowhere. But in any case, how do you -- how is this like a competitive advantage? Like what data do you have? How do you analyze it? And I guess, when you think about the needs for public charging, how does it inform where you're going to be placing all the next tranches of hundreds of systems.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes, makes sense. So I want to stop and see if there's any questions before moving on. And again, we use the microphone. All right. Let's come back to partnerships. I think this is something that maybe people understand. So you've got partnerships across OEMs, Rideshare, maybe there's potential for fleet like how should we think about the -- how that looks today and what -- how it looks in the future in terms of -- across the partnership spectrum?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Maybe to that point, so I think one of the things that people ask about is like the reliability of the network and where the perception is that Tesla is ahead of everybody else. So I mean what is your thoughts on reliability? What are you doing on your own reliability? But I guess, how should investors think about that as we move ahead.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : To the extent that the range of the batteries keep improving dramatically, to what extent that affects your business model?

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : 45. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. JUNE 21, 2023 / 7:20PM, EVGO.OQ - EVgo Inc at JPMorgan Energy, Power, & Renewables Conference

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Just to go back to the reliability question and I know that the kind of communication between car and charger is a big part of this. We talked about the different types of error codes. I'm wondering, as we think about the competing standards, to what extent does the CCS standard or the NACS once it gets actually standardized, -- to what extent should we expect error codes or communication protocols to be part of the standard -- and to what extent can that help with reliability.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Yes. So you kind of live earlier, and there's a lot of provisions for maybe site host to receive federal funding. I just want to speak to that because I think the question oftentimes, I get a last year, you were here, you were talking about a charging station being like $150,000, maybe that's coming down who knows. But what are your options? And what kind of benefits do you get from some of these programs that can offset some of these costs is a capital-intensive business.

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : We're pretty much out of time. But just any closing thoughts, things that maybe you misunderstood about the story, what's key thoughts and investment thesis moving ahead? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. JUNE 21, 2023 / 7:20PM, EVGO.OQ - EVgo Inc at JPMorgan Energy, Power, & Renewables Conference

Question: William Chapman Peterson - JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division - Analyst : Great. Well, thanks for the insights here, and we look forward to following the promise.