Shell to Acquire Volta

  • Thread starter Thread starter marshall
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insightman said:
Based on this sentence in Reuters' report, it appears Volta (worth a paltry $169 million) must have been teetering on the edge of insolvency:
As part of the deal, Shell USA will also provide loans to Volta to help the company through the closing of the deal.
Click to expand...

From a initial IPO bump (share price of $12.47) it was teetering around $0.70 per share, the 2022 sales were around $57 million with an EPS of -$0.97, with a lot of accumulated losses. So Shell paying about 3 times the 2022 sales. Yes it appears that the company had no choice but to sell.
 
I have some hope that this will be for the best. Volta hasn’t had the best reliability. When Shell bought Greenlots, all those chargers near me got a whole lot more reliable.


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GetOffYourGas said:
I have some hope that this will be for the best. Volta hasn’t had the best reliability. When Shell bought Greenlots, all those chargers near me got a whole lot more reliable.
Click to expand...
In my city Shell started buying up stray DCFC installs not at Shell locations and shutting them down, and the Shell/Greenlots locations are incredibly expensive cost-per-minute charging. So I don't view Shell as a positive.
 
Interesting. I haven’t seen any shut down here. The price / kWh for each has been the same with either Greenlots or Shell. And Sheel has replaced several failing units with more reliable hardware.

Some of the behavior you describe sounds like an aggressive monopoly.


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I was a fairly regular user of Volta chargers when I lived in San Francisco and I found their reliability to be so-so. Since I moved to Hawaii I have only tried using a Shell Recharge plug one time, and it didn't work.
 
I have never been a huge fan of Volta - their entire model seems to be putting the things in shopping malls, but if all you need is to charge, then it is a nuisance to navigate a busy parking lot just to hopefully find an open charger. It works better for people who actually want to shop there.

Supposedly there were some Volta DCFC that were to be installed near me at a local outlet mall. They are in Plugshare marked as "Coming soon", but I now wonder if they will ever appear.
 
If you're mainly dealing with Level 2 chargers, as Volta was when I was using them, it makes sense to place them in locations where people might naturally spend a decent amount of time. I would typically go to Stonestown in San Francisco and shop at Target and Trader Joe's and have brunch at Peet's Coffee, and in the 90 minutes or so that took I'd get a decent amount of free power. Placement of fast chargers will often play out differently.
 
So that explains why I couldn't get any bandwidth out of Volta's so-called support. They were in the
process of effectively going down the tubes...

The downside is that it'll all likely get offshored now.

_H*
 
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