SAN FRANCISCO – New curbside chargers for electric vehicles are in place in San Francisco, as part of a program to bring innovators to San Francisco called Yes SF.

Pilot Program

What we know:

On Friday, a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the cutting-edge technology took place at 55 Fillmore Street near Duboce Park.

“I’m really happy to be the first one to use this service,” Mario Landau-Holdsworth, a San Francisco EV owner, said as he plugged in a cable to charge his Chevy Volt.

The two chargers in the pilot program are built by the Brooklyn-based company It’s Electric. The company provides people with their own cable for their EV to plug into a curbside charger. That is an important piece of infrastructure for EV owners who don’t have a garage.

“I was an EV early adopter, but the challenge is if you don’t have a garage, you can’t charge your car at home,” Landau-Holdsworth said.

“I’ve been emailing SFMTA trying to get these installed and finally, after five years, it’s happened,” Adam Gill, another San Francisco EV owner, said as he plugged in his Tesla.

“The goal right now is to see what works in San Francisco and then the long-term goal is to scale by the hundreds,” Tyrone Jue, Director of the San Francisco Environment Department, said.

Grant money

This pilot program is part of Yes SF, a larger citywide public-private partnership which offered 14 innovation grants in 2023. The Yes SF program aims to pave the way for environmental start-up entrepreneurs to bring their green technology solutions to San Francisco.

Tiya Gordon, Co-Founder & COO of It’s Electric received one of the grants.

“They helped us move through all the right doors of all the right offices to speak to the right people. They really held our hand,” Gordon said.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce opened a Yes SF headquarters earlier this year at 220 Montgomery with a workspace and café.

“It’s a partnership between the Chamber of Commerce, Deloitte, Salesforce, Citibank. We work very closely with the city of San Francisco on this,” Emily Abraham, the SF Chamber of Commerce Yes SF Director, said.

Abraham says eleven of the 14 innovators have deployed their products in the city over the past year.

This week, Yes SF announced a second round of awards, with one dozen more innovators sharing in a $1-million fund.

“The hope is that they’ll use price-funding to hire up, open space, expand in San Francisco. And that’s a big point of this location here too,” Abraham said.

Successful model 

The World Economic Forum is also a partner and says Yes SF is so successful, they want to replicate the model in other cities and countries.

“It’s exceeded expectations,” said Jeff Merritt, World Economic Forum Urban Transformation Director. “We’ve now built out a sustainable innovators network so that we can provide a lot of support to entrepreneurs from around the world who want to come to San Francisco to not only set up shop but deploy their sustainability solutions.”

“We announced in January this year in Davos at the World Economic Forum to scale this globally,” Merritt said, noting the plan is to expand the Yes SF model to a Yes Cities program in Bangalore, India and a city on the East Coast within the coming years.