[ausev] charging stations

[Bill Gooch]

I agree with you, and I brought this up at the recent Pecan Street  
Project public meeting.  The city currently has no plans to pursue  
incentives for developers / private businesses to install outlets or  
other charging facilities.  (In fact, the lack of specific plans at  
present was kind of a discouraging theme of the meeting as a whole  
from my perspective - lots of ideas, but few plans.)

When I spoke with the Austin Energy guy there who represented the  
transportation-related  effort (I forget his name), one point he made  
is that getting charging facilities in businesses is a low priority  
partly because those would primarily be used during the day, when  
power demand is already high.  Their preference is to encourage people  
with EVs or PHEVs to charge at night, when demand is low, which would  
most often occur in the home setting.  A strategy that takes this into  
account, and perhaps also provides some possibility of the storage  
capacity of EVs contributing back to the grid when needed, is probably  
going to be received most positively.

I also commented to him that I thought their over-emphasis on PHEVs  
was misplaced and short-sighted, since hybrids still directly use  
fossil fuel.  I made the point that the infrastructure for battery EVs  
is neither very expensive nor difficult to provide, and it pays for  
itself via a simple pay-as-you-go metering scheme.

Bill

Quoting ausev-request at austinev.org:

> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 16:53:26 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Peace <pc_5 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [ausev] charging stations
> To: ausev at austinev.org
> Message-ID: <316693.484.qm at web52707.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> I think it's a great idea to petition the city for charging  
> stations.  In addition to city-installed outlets, I suggest we also  
> petition for plug-in outlet incentives so that employers won't have  
> to foot the bill of providing outlets for employees.  I recently  
> went through a challenging negotiation process with my employer and  
> finally got an outlet, though it's a half-arsed solution....