When TRO Energy Solutions began taking shape, electric vehicles were still far from inevitable. Tesla wasn’t yet a household name, and the idea that rental housing could play a role in emergency energy planning wasn’t part of the conversation. Founder Edward DeVries was already thinking several steps ahead.

“In 2016, Tesla wasn’t really a widely recognizable brand name yet,” DeVries said. “And concepts like resilience, redundancy, and reliability weren’t being applied to energy at all.”

DeVries didn’t come to energy from sustainability or consumer technology. His background was in federal IT and defense systems, environments where downtime isn’t an inconvenience; it’s a mission failure. Energy, to him, looked like another critical system that hadn’t been modernized. “Energy was just another system,” he said. “One that hadn’t caught up to how the world actually works.”

Early conversations with stakeholders focused on incremental upgrades, LEDs, efficiency improvements, solar where it made sense. But when EV charging entered the discussion, it was often dismissed. Leaders, he recalled, were polite but hesitant.

That hesitation revealed the real issue. “The problem wasn’t technology,” DeVries said. “It was ownership.”

In military housing, service members rent homes owned through joint ventures between the government and private operators. Renters aren’t going to invest thousands of dollars upgrading infrastructure in homes they don’t own. Housing partners are reluctant to deploy capital ahead of adoption. Hardware companies wanted to sell equipment, not solve that structural gap.

“The service member doesn’t own the house,” DeVries said. “They’re not going to fork over fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars for something they leave behind.”

TRO’s answer was to step into the space no one else wanted to occupy. Instead of selling chargers, the company became the service provider, owning, installing, operating, and maintaining EV charging infrastructure in military housing. Residents subscribe to use it, just like any other amenity.

“If you own your own home, TROES’ Charge Time solution is not a match for your needs,” DeVries said. “But if you’re a renter, especially in military housing, we become the service provider.”

The company’s first real test came after a single conversation. One leader, unconvinced EVs would last but curious about the system behind them, agreed to a pilot. One base. No guarantees.

The pilot worked. More importantly, it proved the model. That first base wasn’t an isolated win. The leader who approved it oversaw dozens of installations nationwide. The initial success spread nationally to 55 installations and then quickly to other privatized military housing partners.

As EV ownership increased, demand followed organically. Bases outside the original portfolio began asking for chargers. Housing partners realized they had no internal solution. TRO already had one. Currently, TROES is providing EV charging services across the country, with only six Army installations not participating in the program.

But EV charging was never the end goal.

That momentum was also recognized closer to home. In early 2025, Start Peninsula selected TRO Energy Solutions as a qualifier winner, highlighting the company’s scalable approach to infrastructure and energy resilience. TRO went on to win the championship round in November 2025, adding regional validation to a model already gaining national traction.

“What starts as a practical amenity quietly becomes something much larger,” DeVries said.

By owning and operating charging infrastructure at scale, TRO is effectively turning military rental housing into a distributed backup energy system. As bidirectional charging and battery storage mature, energy stored in vehicles and homes can be redirected during outages, allowing power to flow from housing to emergency operations centers, command facilities, and other mission-critical buildings.

“You’ve got the battery in the car, a battery on the house, and the ability to push or pull energy wherever you need it,” DeVries explained.

In a hurricane or grid failure, that capability changes what’s possible. Instead of going dark, housing communities can temporarily support critical base operations. “You can still launch ships,” DeVries said. “You can still run flight operations. You can still operate.”

Operationally, TRO scales through local execution. The company partners with independent, certified electricians clustered around each base rather than using national franchises. “We work with mom-and-pop shops,” DeVries said. “It gives us better response times and supports the local economy.”

Today, TRO operates across nearly every major military housing market in the country, from Alaska to Hawaii to Puerto Rico. The company remains lean and largely bootstrapped, with plans to raise capital primarily to accelerate hardware deployment. “Our growth isn’t demand-constrained,” DeVries said. “It’s capital-constrained.”

Despite its scale, the mission of TRO is often misunderstood. “People think we’re just an EV charging company,” he said. “That’s not what we’re building.”

What TRO is building is infrastructure designed around assets that already exist. “The homes were already there,” DeVries said. “The vehicles showed up. The bases existed. Innovation was about connecting those pieces the right way.”

In the next major outage, the difference won’t be who has the newest technology. It will be who planned ahead, using the assets they already had.

Sometimes, when the right people see the future early enough, that’s all it takes.

If you’re paying attention to how real innovation is actually built in Hampton Roads — not hype, not headlines — This Week in 757 delivers the founder stories, traction signals, and moments shaping what comes next. Subscribe to stay in the flow.

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