Electric vehicle charging at my company

[billvon 3,116]

I'm one of two electric vehicle coordinators for my company. A while back we started a project to put in more chargers in our facilities. As of a year ago we only had about 20 level 2 chargers (240 volt fancy chargers) for the entire San Diego facility (10,000 people) and people were often arguing over chargers, having to move their cars after a few hours to get someone else in etc.

The new project uses simple 120 volt outlets rather than the more expensive 240 volt EVSE's. Charge rate is slower, but over an 8 hour day you can get about 40 miles more range from a simple outlet - and that's enough for almost anyone to make it home. And since outlets are cheap, we were able to put more in one place. This first installation has 25 charging spots for EV's. In the picture below you'll see Leafs, Focuses, plug-in Priuses, Volts, BMW's and Teslas charging.

This still isn't enough (the spots have been full every day since it was completed) but this is just the first installation. Within two years we are hoping to have hundreds of charging spots for EV owners to use. And since several of our parking garages have lots of solar PV on the roof, there's a nice equivalence between power generated and power used in the garage.

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/t31.0-8/10904545_10204251851351245_2301168025218890231_o.jpg

[SkyDekker 1,465]

We have started adding EV charging stations in the parking lots of shopping centres to allow customers to charge their vehicle for free while shopping.

So far they have been getting a fair bit of use.