A few weeks after the Hollister City Council unanimously pulled
the plug on a proposed electric vehicle charging station
– citing uncertainty over revenue and upkeep costs – the City of
San Juan is on the verge of accepting a five-year contract in the
hope it will encourage tourism in the Mission City.
A few weeks after the Hollister City Council unanimously pulled the plug on a proposed electric vehicle charging station – citing uncertainty over revenue and upkeep costs – the City of San Juan is on the verge of accepting a five-year contract in the hope it will encourage tourism in the Mission City.
The Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, which includes San Benito, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, is using a $25,000 grant from the Monterey Bay Regional Air Pollution Control District to install at least one public charging station in each county. Carmel’s station opened Oct. 5 and others are planned in Salinas and Watsonville.
“It’s a service to the community,” said Roger Grimsley, San Juan’s interim city manager. “The community can advertise this as a vehicle to support tourism, as we’ll have a place where electric vehicles can be charged.”
The city still has to formally accept the proposal with AMBAG, but that is expected to be a formality.
“A couple of weeks ago we reviewed several sites in the city and have zeroed in on an area near Abbe Park,” just west of downtown, Grimsley said. “We have electrical power there. It’ll be a good location.”
San Juan officials plan to meet with the Chamber of Commerce to erect signs directing electric vehicle users to the station. The city will not be charged a $20 monthly fee for the first year of the pilot project, as that is subsidized by the grant. The $240-per-year cost kicks in during the second year of the five-year agreement.
The city will also be charged for the electricity used by the vehicles that hook up to the charging station, which will be equipped with a credit card swiping mechanism so the city can charge what Grimsley said will be a “reasonable fee” to offset the city’s cost.
A charging station uses about the same amount of energy as an electric clothes dryer, said Linda Meckel, an AMBAG planner. A car charging for five hours, for example, would use an estimated $4.32 worth of electricity.
“My estimate is if (the charging station) is being used one time a month for four hours, the annual cost of electricity is about $43,” she said. “If it’s being used 100 times a month, then it’s $4,000. Nobody knows how much it’ll be used.”
Cities will have the ability to recover electrical usage costs by charging users for charging their batteries.
Meckel said the agency is still waiting to formalize the agreement with San Juan, and is expecting a station could be up and running within a month of that.
“Carmel was set up in 24 hours,” she said. “It’s a matter of pouring the concrete and installing it. It’s not an intensive process.”
Hollister’s concerns, she noted, were “how they were going to be paid” and whether the city would have been liable for damage done to the charging station.
Officials also were uncomfortable with a provision that AMBAG could be released from the five-year contract, but the city couldn’t.
“They didn’t want to work with us on an agreement,” Meckel said. “That was kind of frustrating.”
She said that AMBAG is working with the air district to ensure that cities will be paid on time by the vendor that handles the credit card transactions when people charge their vehicles. Despite Hollister’s concern about liability, cities would not be responsible for repairing or replacing charging stations that receive damage, Meckel added.
The charging stations are relatively small, with the one in Carmel four feet high by six to eight inches deep.
“This is very, very new technology and nobody’s quite sure how it’s going to work out,” she said. “There are only a couple hundred to a couple thousand public charging stations in California.”
This pilot project is expanding that number of stations in nine United States’ metropolitan areas, including the Bay Area and the Monterey region. After the five-year agreement expires, participating cities will have the opportunity to renegotiate the terms of their deal.
See more in the Pinnacle on Friday.
