PLUGGING AWAY How to Boost Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

My Nissan Leaf Forum

Help Support My Nissan Leaf Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

GRA

Well-known member
Joined
Sep 19, 2011
Messages
14,018
Location
East side of San Francisco Bay
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Plugging-Away-June-2017.pdf

From the summary:
California will need widespread consumer adoption of electric vehicles in order to achieve
the state’s environmental and energy goals. Governor Brown set a goal of reaching 1.5
million zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) on California’s roadways by 2025, and as of June
2017, Californians were driving almost 300,000 electric vehicles.

Achieving the state’s electric vehicle goals will require a significant boost to charging
infrastructure. This need is particularly acute for residents who do not live in single-family
detached homes
, where more than 80 percent of current electric vehicle owners reside.
Overall, approximately 40 percent of Californians live in multi-unit dwellings (with even
higher percentages in the state’s urban areas*), such as apartments, townhouses, and
condominiums, with impeded or no access to charging.


Ultimately, some analysts estimate that the state will need private and public sources to
provide 125,000 to 220,000 publicly accessible charging ports by 2020, well beyond the
roughly 12,000 available in the state today. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of other
charging stations will be necessary at multi-unit dwellings.

This infrastructure deployment is unlikely to occur without policy action. Charging
stations and installation and maintenance typically entail high costs, with often uncertain
revenues from various potential sources, which deters investment. For example, a recent
California Energy Commission charging program found that a dual standard fast charger,
coupled with a single “Level 2” (240 volt) charger and additional stub, averaged $135,000
in equipment costs. Even the total costs of installing “make-ready” infrastructure, which
covers all the electrical wiring needed to support a customer-purchased charger, for
Level 2 charging (including customer rebates for the charging stations) were at $13,734
per port and $219,424 per site with 16 ports on average, as Southern California Edison
recently found.

Charging site owners can also incur significant expenses from commercial electricity
rates that were not always designed with electric vehicle charging in mind. Commercial
charging generally involves payment by time of use. These rates therefore reward
electric vehicle owners or site hosts who charge during hours when the cost of energy is
lowest but punish those who are unable to moderate demand successfully. In addition,
some large commercial and industrial rates have “demand charges” that entail additional
costs on the maximum load drawn by a customer during the billing period. Many electric
vehicle charging sites that have high but infrequent demand and inconsistent low-energy
utilization (particularly for fast charging) face high exposure to demand charges as a
result, sometimes severely undercutting the economics of infrastructure deployment and
operation.

To address these costs and spur the needed investment in electric vehicle charging
infrastructure, UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law convened experts from the
private and public sectors for two separate discussions in June 2016 at UCLA Law and
November 2016 at Berkeley Law (all participants are listed in the appendix). The first
convening focused on general barriers and solutions to increasing charging deployment,
while the second covered the specific topic of reforming commercial electricity rates to
boost the infrastructure. This report is informed by both discussions, offering a vision for
deployment and commercial electricity rate reform and identifying the top barriers and
solutions to electric vehicle charging in California. . . .
*From the body of the report:
Approximately 40 percent of Californians live in multi-unit dwellings (MUDs), with impeded
or no access to charging. The percentages are higher in the state’s urban areas, with
56 percent in Los Angeles and 67 percent in San Francisco.
 
Back
Top