The grid-first bet on electric trucking
Somewhere in the Inland Empire - 60 million square feet of warehouses stacked between Interstate 10 and the rail yards that drain the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - a 76-stall charging hub is under construction. Nine-point-nine megawatts of grid capacity. Pull-through stalls wired for megawatt charging. Two hundred Class 8 electric trucks a day, in and out. Patrick Sullivan's first large-scale site, and the clearest physical expression of a thesis he's been building since 2021: the missing link in fleet electrification isn't the truck. It's the property.
Sullivan co-founded EV Realty in September 2021 with Sean Kiernan and Wyatt Toolson, a team that had collectively developed nearly 9 gigawatts of renewable energy. They weren't chasing an early-stage technology bet. They were solving a supply chain problem they understood in their bones: fleet operators need large amounts of grid power, reliably, near their depots. And the real estate to host that power doesn't exist unless someone goes and builds it.
"The electric grid in the U.S. was never designed to be the fuel source for 50 million vehicles."- Patrick Sullivan, Co-Founder and CEO, EV Realty
The model Sullivan settled on drew a straight line from Digital Realty. Data centers created a new infrastructure asset class around compute power - neutral third-party facilities that aggregated demand from multiple tenants, making the economics work for everyone. EV Realty runs the same play on grid power. A Powered Property is not a charging station you drive past on the highway. It's a secure, industrial-grade facility near freight corridors, purpose-built for fleets, with reserved stalls and 24/7 access. Shared infrastructure. Private feel.
The grid-first strategy is what makes the real estate selection different. Sullivan's team built proprietary software to map grid capacity, vehicle density, traffic patterns, and industrial real estate use - looking for sites that already have large amounts of power available or accessible. Finding the land comes second. "We're focused on a grid-first strategy to acquire property that unlocks access to large amounts of power - a critical barrier to electrifying large commercial fleets at scale," Sullivan has said. In a world where interconnection queues for large-scale power projects run years long, getting to the front of the line at the distribution level is an underrated advantage.
Scale comparisons keep Sullivan grounded. Data center developers are hunting hundreds of megawatts per site. EV Realty is hunting tens. "They're looking for hundreds and hundreds of megawatts, and we're looking for tens of megawatts," he noted in 2025. That seemingly smaller ambition is precisely what opens up the real estate market. Infill industrial sites that can't support a hyperscale data center work fine for a 10 MW charging depot. The sites that matter are already near the customers.
Friction is Sullivan's obsession. Not the political kind - the operational kind. "If a truck's not moving, they're not making money," he's said, "and a truck that's sitting still or has to wait for charging or has to go through a clumsy reservation or has to use a credit card - all those things add friction. And for any company in my space, to make the switch, it has to be easy." This is why EV Realty's Powered Properties offer two clean options: a dedicated stall with a fixed monthly fee and up to 400 kW, or an on-route stall with per-kWh pricing and up to 1.2 MW via the Megawatt Charging System. No guesswork. No app maze. No credit card required at the charger.
The economics argument Sullivan makes for short and regional haul fleets is a tidy one. A carrier bidding freight on a lane bids against their marginal operating cost above fuel. If the truck runs on electricity and the fleet has low-cost, predictable access to grid power, that marginal cost drops below diesel. The fleet wins more bids. The arithmetic is simple - but only if the charging infrastructure is reliable and affordable enough to trust with the bid. That's the product Sullivan is actually selling.
"If you can move short and regional haul, point to point, with an EV, you're bidding on a marginal cost that's lower than diesel."- Patrick Sullivan
EV Realty's 2025 was consequential. In March, the company acquired the strategic portfolio of Austin-based GageZero - charging hubs in development across Long Beach, Ontario, Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, Oakland, and Sacramento, plus assets in Illinois and Texas. In August, a partnership with Prologis Mobility added shared fleet charging access across California freight routes. In September, the $75 million growth equity commitment from NGP private equity closed, with the management team contributing alongside. The San Bernardino groundbreaking followed the same day. "The market is experiencing near-term challenges, but the longer-term trend toward fleet electrification is unmistakable," Sullivan said at the announcement.
He is also clear-eyed about the turbulence. Asked about trade policy headwinds in 2025, Sullivan did not pivot to optimism. "Carriers, trucking, transportation companies are at the very front lines of a global trade war. You have no predictability on how you can utilize your assets." Long-term conviction, short-term honesty - that combination tends to build credibility with the fleets he's asking to make decade-long bets on electrification.
The career path that produced this company is worth tracing. Sullivan started in law at Shearman & Sterling before moving into finance - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Legacy Partners Group. He came into clean energy through BrightSource Energy during the solar thermal boom, where he ran financial planning before moving to business development. NRG Energy followed, where he eventually led development as VP. Then Clearway Energy Group, where as VP and Head of Development he helped scale one of the country's largest clean energy platforms. A history degree from Princeton, an MBA from Virginia's Darden School, fifteen years of infrastructure development muscle memory - and then a blank page in 2021.
The blank page produced EV Realty. By 2026, five charging hubs operational or in active development across California, 250+ DC fast chargers deployed, 40+ megawatts of reserved utility power, a team of 22 people, and the Inland Empire's largest dedicated electric truck charging facility under construction. The grid still wasn't designed to fuel 50 million vehicles. Sullivan is designing it anyway - one industrial property at a time.