What happened
Blink Charging (BLNK +6.57%) stock charged 10.5% higher as of 11:20 a.m. EDT Thursday after the electric car charging company announced that New York-based Four Brothers Pizza Inn has given it a contract to install 42 charging ports (21 chargers, featuring two ports each) across 10 Four Brothers restaurants in the state.
So what
Blink noted that the contract was "made possible through the Charge Ready program from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and Make Ready incentive offered by New York utilities," similar to support the company has won recently from states such as Vermont and Ohio.
Image source: Getty Images.
In an effort to support the deployment of EV charging stations, NYSERDA gives retailers $4,000 rebates per charging port they install. Combined with incentives that New York utilities provide under the Make Ready incentive, this means that Blink and Four Brothers will both incur "little to no cost" for setting up these stations.
Now what
Translation: Free money for Blink. The company incurs little or no upfront costs to set up this infrastructure, but can immediately begin profiting from the sale of electricity to electric car owners through the ports.
This is obviously good news for Blink, and investors are hoping that the example set by Four Brothers will attract even more customers to ink contracts with Blink. As business models go, this one really can't be beat -- so long as New York's taxpayers and rate-payers are willing to keep footing the bill for Blink's expansion.
