Cora Castle co-founded OmniPotential Energy Partners, a company that has an unusual angle on charging electric vehicles (EVs). Courtesy of Cora Castle

Cora Castle charged up about OmniPotential’s neighborhood EV chargers

Ken MammarellaBusiness, Headlines, Women Owned Businesses

Cora Castle co-founded OmniPotential Energy Partners, a company that has an unusual angle on charging electric vehicles (EVs). Courtesy of Cora Castle

Cora Castle co-founded OmniPotential Energy Partners, a company with an unusual angle on charging electric vehicles (EVs). Courtesy of Cora Castle

WILMINGTON — Half of Americans could be the market for Cora Castle’s idea for curbside charging of electric vehicles, and her first customer is a Greenville museum.

The Delaware Museum of Nature and Science signed on with OmniPotential Energy Partners in October. Installation is expected in the first quarter of 2025.

“I met Cora at a chamber of commerce meeting about two years ago, said Halsey Spruance, the museum’s executive director.

“She told me about her vision of making EV charging stations available to people who don’t have the convenience of a home garage for charging. I was impressed by the concept and could see how it would open up the market for EV ownership to those living in apartment complexes and city housing. She was still in the development stage then, so we stayed in touch, getting together every few months.

“At the museum, we’re very interested in environmental sustainability, and with the major renovation completed in 2022, we now have a much better physical platform to focus on that and other issues. Installing EV charging stations is a no-brainer, and OmniPotential Energy is fantastic because it’s Delaware-born and looking to break down the barriers to EV ownership.

“Our goal is to provide EV charging to museum visitors, staff members, or anyone, and as a public-facing institution, we can also shine a light on Cora’s vision and the benefits of EVs.”

National Women-Owned Small Business Month

Castle leveraged her 1995 bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware, spent her severance from Barclays, and allocated her 401(k) into co-founding OmniPotential with a mission of designing and building hardware and software to install and run Curbstar chargers in commercial properties and on city streets.

She said the first client is a commercial property because the museum can install the equipment on its own land without going through any other bureaucratic review. However, the residential market is potentially larger.

She said that her vision for establishing neighborhood charging stations is unique nationwide. “There is no commercial product like this,” she said. The key standout: it “has its own dedicated electric utility meter,” according to the company website.

Charging stations today are grouped into three levels. Level 1 chargers could take several days to fully charge a vehicle, she said. Level 2 chargers could take a day (or, overnight) to do the same thing. Level 3 could take an hour.

 

OmniPotential’s product, called Curbstar, is considered Level 2, with a full charge taking about five hours, she said. The units can be used by any vehicle. (The worst-case scenario, she said, calls for a $50 adapter.) Each unit can charge two vehicles simultaneously, on 20-foot cords.

Payments are made from a geotagged smartphone app. She said the cost of using Curbstar would be comparable to what Tesla charges, plus a fee for convenience.

“It will typically cost about $15 to ‘fill up,’ but most EV owners don’t wait until they are low the way that most gasoline car owners do,” she said.  “A typical EV charging event is usually more like $10.”

Castle focuses on the hardware (“It’s tough to be in the hardware business, since I have to bend steel”), and co-founder David Ginzberg focuses on the software. The chargers are made by M. Davis and Sons in Newark.

Safety certification is the biggest hurdle left before going live, which will cost thousands of dollars.

OmniPotential has won $140,000 in entrepreneurship pitch competitions and grants in Delaware. They include:

  • STEM EDGE grant, sponsored by the Delaware Division of Small Business.
  • Swim With the Sharks, a pitch competition sponsored by the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce Emerging Enterprise Center.
  • Startup 302, sponsored by the University of Delaware.
Non-cash awards include:
  • 2023 Induction into the WE Hatch Honor Circle, sponsored by the University of Delaware Horn Program.
  • 2023 17&43 Most Promising Award, sponsored by the University of Delaware.

Since OmniPotential doesn’t yet have outside investors and is still in the pre-revenue stage, Castle is keeping her day job as a senior cloud partner with AAA Club Alliance but says it’s another full-time job building the firm.

Interviews at EV chargers

She interviewed a thousand people using public chargers to understand the potential market. Many were among the half of Americans who don’t have garages or assigned off-street parking and would be drawn to charging so easily so close to their homes.

Castle, who owns a Tesla but not a garage or a driveway, understands the bleak charging situation where she lives: in the Triangle section of Wilmington, just east of the Brandywine Zoo. According to Chargehub.com, only Salesianum School hosts public chargers in the neighborhood.

The current process for installing charging stations involves digging out a trench for wiring from a home or another building, refilling it, and perhaps upgrading the electrical system of older structures. Curbstar skips all that by connecting itself to overhead power lines, which takes just a few days.

OmniPotential began when Castle had an epiphany watching transgender politician Sarah McBride addressing the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “When people transition, there’s kind of a natural assumption that you have to choose between authenticity and living your life meaningfully,” said Castle, who had transitioned in 2011.

“I realized that I had lied to myself about my own capabilities and my responsibilities. I came to the conclusion that I was robbing society of my unique talents. So that evening, I decided I was going to find the largest rock that I could possibly move and do what I could to move it. And climate change seemed like a pretty big rock.”

Plus, “I felt I could make a difference in accelerating the acceptance of electric vehicles,” she said.

Not everyone wants electric vehicles, though. “With over 93% of comments opposed to the Advanced Clean Car II regulations, we know where the public stands,” Delaware Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn, R-Georgetown, said in 2023, when the state was finalizing details of ways to meet pollution standards.

“Consumer demand just isn’t there, and that fact is evident by not only the public comments on the ACCII regulations, but also by recent announcements from major auto manufacturers stating they are cutting back on their production and sales goals of electric vehicles,” he said.

The biggest obstacle Castle has encountered so far has been “municipal hesitancy,” which “ironically, I think fundamentally comes down to politics,” she said. How do institutions adapt to changing technologies and competing pressures to use municipal roads? Castle’s solution was to use her connection to McBride to push state legislation that mandates a “right to charge” on municipalities with at least 30,000 people (now, Wilmington, Newark, and Dover, and soon Middletown).

When Wilmington developed the details of the permitting process that the 2022 law required, it emphasized that charging stations do not allow “an electric vehicle owner to reserve a parking space. Blocking or marking a space for that purpose would result in a fine.”

Although Castle has two full-time jobs, she still makes time for a 5K run every morning, serving on the New Castle County Board of Adjustment and the Sierra Club’s Delaware chapter board, and judging pitch competitions for new entrepreneurs.

“Don’t take no for an answer,” she likes to advise other entrepreneurs. “If you know you’re doing the right thing, rise above the noise.”

“Every skill is important for entrepreneurs. “Every day is about solving problems that we’re not qualified to solve, she said, suggesting that entrepreneurs also “have to learn how to be comfortable with a certain amount of discomfort.” She shares more advice on entrepreneurship with the Delaware Prosperity Partnership.

“I also hope that one day I could be in a room speaking to a bunch of people, and somebody might realize that they could do more than they thought they could,” she said. “That would be the perfect culmination of my career.”

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