Why Moon Five?

Stephan Ng

Aug 29, 2025

Moon Five started as an idea almost a decade ago. My dad had recently died from a sudden heart attack at the age of 62, and my mom had given me his cherished plug-in hybrid car (a 2014 Chevy Volt) since she didn’t need it. I was visiting my partner at the time around Lake Merritt in Oakland, and we had plans to drive down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium the following morning. As a born-and-raised environmentalist, I sought a place to charge, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to make the full trip on a single charge (and would have to use gas as a backup), but could squeeze out a handful of extra miles if I topped up the battery.

When I looked at the map, I saw one charger a mile and a half away at a Whole Foods on the other side of the lake. I could have driven there, walked back to the apartment, walked back to the Whole Foods, and then driven back, since plug-in hybrids charge slowly (I later deemed this the “charging cha-cha”), but the kicker was that the charger’s plug didn’t even fit my car. There were literally zero options.

During a walk that evening, I couldn’t help but voice my frustrations at the situation. My background in physics made it even more frustrating; there was power flowing everywhere around us, but no way to access it. It was in the electrical sockets ten feet away, in the power lines overhead, and in the lights illuminating the streets, but for some reason, it couldn’t make it into my car.

I challenged myself to think of the dumbest possible way to solve the problem. With my trusty emergency “trickle” charger in my trunk, I thought, “What if I knocked on a neighbor’s door, handed them five dollars, and asked if I could charge my car in their driveway?” While it might work in Oakland, people who try this could also just as easily get a door slammed in their face, which is not exactly a solution for the masses.

I then challenged myself to consider a scalable solution. Metering, so that you know how much power you’re dispensing, and a social contract seemed to be the two missing elements that needed to be added: essentially a metered plug with an opt-in system. Little did I know at the time that the problem was more complex, particularly for multi-family homes such as those for renters and condo owners.

Fast forward to 2021. After several years of working in spacecraft mission operations, electrical engineering, and advanced hardware manufacturing operations, I decided to take the plunge and start Moon Five to tackle the inequity in multi-family home charging access.

You might be wondering, "Why do you call your company Moon Five?"

Moon Five is a rough translation of my parents' last names combined. My mom's maiden name is "Luna," and my father's last name was "Ng," which, in their native Spanish and Cantonese, translates roughly to Moon (Luna) Five (Ng). It only seemed fitting that a company looking to do good in the world, fueled by growing up with a backyard filled with bees, fruit trees, and chickens, raised by a father who took glass bottles across San Francisco on a bus in the 80s to drop them off at the recyclers before recycling was available, studied forestry in college and a mother whose love for the ocean and the planet drove her to take me down on the weekends to Monterey to spend over 600 hours in my teens volunteering at the aquarium, be named after those who came before me.

Right to charge