Cora Castle is doing big things, one EV charger at a time

“In 2011 I was struggling with gender really badly,” she told Technical.ly over Brew HaHa! iced coffees. “I remember to this day, I was down at the beach. I was walking by one of those t-shirt shops, and I remember seeing a t-shirt that said, ‘She needed a hero, so that’s what she became.’ That was when I realized that nobody was coming to save me.”

Living her truth, it seemed, came with a tradeoff.

“A lot of transgender people, we transition under the assumption that we’re probably going to have to live small lives,” she said. “It feels vaguely impossible to think of ourselves doing big things. I thought I made that trade.”

Then, in 2016, Castle watched the Democratic National Convention, and saw Sarah McBride speak — the first openly transgender person speak at a major political party convention. At the time, the now-Delaware State Sen. McBride worked for the Human Rights Campaign. In her speech, she talked about the struggle for equality for transgender Americans, and her own fears that her dreams and her identity were mutually exclusive.

“Seeing Sarah on the stage absolutely changed my life,” Castle said. “The following day, I decided I was going to change the world. I was trying to find the biggest problem I could find, and I was going to do my absolute best to solve that problem using every skill that I did and did not have, because, entrepreneurially speaking, I have very few skills.”

What Castle didn’t realize at that moment was that McBride lived right down the street from her in Wilmington, or that she would eventually work for McBride’s state senator campaign. It didn’t cross her mind that McBride would one day sponsor a bill she would write in her quest to change the world.

The charging problem

“I decided to tackle climate change,” said Castle, a 2023 RealLIST Connectors honoree who has a electrical engineering degree from the University of Delaware. “I went right into the numbers and I realized that transportation was the biggest contributor to climate change. I realized that half of the people who live in the United States simply can’t conveniently own an electric vehicle because they parked their cars on the street at night.”

Cora Castle (Courtesy photo)

It wasn’t a hypothetical thing for Castle. She had purchased an electronic vehicle as a city dweller without a garage or driveway. Charging the vehicle meant making weekly trips to a public charger, and waiting two and a half hours. Possible, yet inconvenient for young professionals and empty nesters like herself — but a real barrier for families with young kids and others with little free time.

As EV use increases, that’s a problem. In 2022, EVs passed an industry tipping point of 5% of total new car shares, after which sales have taken off as the price of EVs have begun to decrease. Some municipalities, like Bethany Beach, have added charging stations to their public infrastructure, but there are few convenient charging options for people who rely on street parking and don’t want to take their car somewhere and wait.

“We looked into a lot of root causes, and what we found is that there’s basically a dual problem that created this downward spiral of inopportunity, which was municipalities were not giving building permits for curbside residential EV chargers, and because municipalities weren’t giving out permits, the market wasn’t responding with the product,” Castle said. “So because there’s no product that’s suitable in that situation, there’s nobody trying to install that product to push municipalities. We realized that there had to be one person that had to solve the policy problem and the product problem at the same time.”

So that’s what Castle decided to do. Along with business partner and COO Andrew Studzinski, OmniPotential Energy Partners was incorporated in 2019.

Red tape reality

Designing the product — a self-contained, curbside, residential EV charger called Curbstar — was the relatively easy part. Changing policy was more complicated, but they did it. In the summer of 2022, McBride-sponsored legislation passed that required Delaware municipalities of over 30,000 (currently that’s Wilmington, Dover and Newark) to have a process for people to apply for a permit for a curbside EV charger.

“In order for us to pass this legislation you needed a supermajority because it was amending city charters,” Castle said. “It’s incredibly difficult to get a supermajority now in Delaware. In my case, we were fortunate because Democrats have the supermajority in the Senate. They do not, however, have a supermajority in the House. So we had some work to do. We had some scares. We had to talk to some folks and do some politics.”

(McBride didn’t immediately respond to Technical.ly’s request for comment about the legislation. We’ll update this story if we hear back.)

The policies, according to the legislation, needed to be adopted by July 1, 2023, but it doesn’t say it has to go into effect on that date, a confusing detail. There are no real consequences for not being compliant as there would be for something like a building code infraction, but thanks to the legislation, municipalities can be sued if they don’t offer permits.

At this point, because the Curbstar units are still in pre-production, it’s not known exactly how municipalities will comply. Wilmington City Council adopted a policy that involves engaging a working group comprised of municipal council members and city residents to prevent coverage gaps.

The last big hurdle for the Curbstar is a safety certification, which, like legislation, can be time consuming and stressful to complete. In this case it’s a third-party certification, which the team was told early on was a “nice to have” — but then at a scheduled inspection, they heard it was a necessity.

“It’s turning out that it’s a larger cash outlay than we had anticipated,” Castle said. She’s been using a Curbstar, installed on her porch with an extension cord, for a year, paying for charges through the app like any customer would.

Up until now, OmniPotential Energy Partners has been self funded, but they’re now looking for an investor interested in an equity partnership.

The bumps in the road haven’t fazed Castle.

“I’m determined,” she said. “My big function is to not quit. So long as I don’t quit, I’m confident that we’ll find success.”

Just as vital, Castle has learned that, as an environmentalist, social justice activist and entrepreneur, she can do big things.