In the latest episode, Nick dived into the electrification of heavy transport. A sector critical to decarbonisation but potentially stalled by a hidden bottleneck: the grid itself.
The Next Frontier
While electric cars are becoming more mainstream, the next frontier lies in heavy transport - trucks, buses, ferries, and one day even planes. These sectors account for a massive chunk of global emissions, but electrifying them isn’t just about beating petrol vehicles.
The grid itself is the bottleneck.
Enter Kwetta, a New Zealand-born startup co-founded by Dustin Murdock (CEO), Mike Lazelle (Chief Growth Officer) and Dr. Rob Turner (CTO). Their mission? To crack the code on high-powered EV charging by rethinking how we draw power from the grid.
The Grid Bottleneck: A Multi Billion Problem
“Electricity is the lowest cost form of energy. For heavy transport, it’s a third the cost of diesel,” explains Mike Lazelle, Kwetta’s Chief Growth Officer. “But the hardest part isn’t the vehicles or batteries - it’s getting power out of the grid.”
Traditional chargers require costly upgrades and years of delays to connect to overloaded low-voltage networks. For fleets and charging hubs, this often means million-dollar grid upgrades and 18-month waits. Kwetta’s solution? Connect directly to high-voltage grids and in doing so, do it faster, cheaper, and smarter.
The Kwetta Breakthrough: “Un-Kinking the Grid”
Kwetta’s technology is elegantly disruptive:
- High-Voltage Hookup: Their chargers tap into high-voltage grids, accessing 10x more power than standard connections.
- Grid Healing: Unlike traditional chargers, Kwetta’s systems stabilize and even *improve* grid reliability. As Dr. Rob Turner, Kwetta’s CTO, puts it: “We un-kink the pipes upstream…a term we’ve come up with is being a good grid citizen”
- Simplified Hardware: While competitors need eight components to connect grid-to-car, Kwetta uses just two. “And that simplification is really important,” says Turner.
The results? 70% faster deployments (5 months vs. 18) and 10x more power at constrained sites - saving customers millions in avoided upgrades.
The demand for Kwetta’s tech isn’t being driven by car owners. Many of these can charge at home, benefiting from overnight trickle charging, in many cases from solar on rooftops. Instead, they’re bus fleets, freight companies, and even ferry operators.
“The crux of the problem we’re trying to solve is for buses and heavy transport… and it’s not slowing at all” ” says Lazelle.
One of their most interesting projects: vehicle-to-grid (V2G) for trucks. Imagine a semi-truck being available to power a factory during blackouts. During a cyclone in New Zealand, Kwetta’s team ran their factory using a Tesla’s battery.
“Sure enough, in like an hour we had the Tesla running the entire factory” recalls Turner.
The Kiwi Underdog Taking on Global Giants
The seeds planted in a Canterbury University dorm room in 2003, Kwetta’s founders bonded over a crate of beer and a shared obsession with electrification. “We were just like 18 year old kids and I could see straight away that Rob was really special in terms of his hunger for electrical engineering. Rob was coding power algorithms at 18,” laughs Lazelle. “I chose electrical engineering because of him.”
Mike (left) and Rob (right) at Cantebury University
Now, backed by US$10.5m (~A$17 million) from Blackbird Ventures, Virescent Ventures and other Asia Pac investing heavyweights, Kwetta is expanding into Australia and Europe. Their secret? A Napier, NZ-based manufacturing hub known for world-leading power electronics.
“Companies from Napier developed world leading solutions ahead of some of the other world leaders in just the same fashion”, says Turner. “And it was small Kiwi teams with incredibly deep and long expertise”
The Bigger Vision: Beyond Chargers
Kwetta’s ambitions stretch far beyond the chargers themselves. They’re developing a suite of grid services in leveraging their core offering - letting customers earn revenue by stabilizing local networks. “FCAS, voltage support, Blackstart, islanded network, sort of eight or nine that we're sort of building out, on our roadmap to provide, and we're providing at least two of them at the moment,” says Lazelle.
And for co-founder Rob Turner, this is just the start:
“Our kids will see electrification and… there’ll be fun electric cars, there’ll be trucks and some electric planes and that’ll be normal for them. That’s a pretty neat world we’re going into”.
Neat indeed! Congrats again to the Kwetta team on their capital raise. You can find out more about Kwetta at www.Kwetta.com
Listen Now
Dive deeper into Kwetta’s grid revolution by tuning into our full interview with Mike Lazelle and Dr. Rob Turner.
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