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White House, 35 States To Boost Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The White House said on Thursday it will establish 48 national electric-vehicle (EV) charging networks on nearly 25,000 miles of highways in 35 U.S. states. The Obama administration said 28 states, utilities and vehicle manufactures, including General Motors, BMW and Nissan Motor, and EV charging firms have agreed to work together to jump-start the additional charging stations. The corridors were required to be established by December under a 2015 highway law. The White House said 24 state and local governments have agreed to buy hundreds of additional electric vehicles for government fleets and add new EV charging stations. California will buy at least 150 zero-emission vehicles and provide EV charging at a minimum of 5 percent of state-owned parking spaces by 2020. The city of Atlanta will add 300 charging stations at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport by the end of 2017. Los Angeles agreed to nearly triple the city's current plug-in electric fleet to 555 vehicles from about 200 by the end of 2017. Of those, 200 will be for the police department. The city is also adding another 500 stations by 2017. One hurdle to the mass adoption of EVs has been the difficulty in finding places to recharge vehicles. In July, the White House said it was expanding a federal loan guarantee program to include companies building EV charging stations. The U.S. Energy Department said in July that charging facilities are now an eligible technology for the program that can provide up to $4.5 billion in loan guarantees.
Plain ol' sockets won't do the job because it doesn't provide the data necessary to bill the driver to electricity used, manage the hundreds of plugs, etc.
Also, while it seems like common sense to place charging stations at workplaces and shopping areas, it doesn't make sense form an administrative or engineering standpoint. When stations go in at your job site, your job site becomes the administrator of those stations. They effectively become refueling stations and they become responsible for the smooth running of their workers refueling. This is much more complex than most people realize. Additionally, when you place massive amounts of chargers (level 2 chargers for that matter) in areas where people are likely to park during the day, you're encouraging additional peak-time load which usually means more pollution per kWh. It's also more expensive to INSTALL the EVSEs because you have to trench and run electrical cables into open lots, install new transformers, etc.
If you want to promote EV use, the solution is NOT more chargers in public spaces, but more battery capacity at an affordable price (like the Chevy Bolt) and more charging at home. And this is the truest obstacle of the push for EVs.
The cheapest energy is off-peak energy. If you charge at home between 9pm and 6am, you're paying a couple dollars at most to fill up your car's battery pack. This is what everyone wants. But not everyone has a garage. Not everyone owns a home so that they can install an EVSE with which to charge an EV.
If EVs are to succeed:
1. EVERYONE has to be able to charge at home.
2. The cars can't cost more than a Prius. (The federal rebate needs to be reworked to be useful to those of moderate/low income.)
3. The cars must have at least a 200 mile range. (All of us working in sustainability are looking forward to the Chevy Bolt.)
4. We have to find a way to make battery manufacturing, recycling, and disposal environmentally safe.
That's a lot to ask for. Which is why I genuinely think that we're over-investing in battery EVs when we should be building more solar/wind powered hydrolyzers and focusing on hydrogen fuel cell vehicle adoption (Toyota Mirai, Hyundai Tuscon, etc.).