SAN JOSE, Calif. — Joe Siudzinski travels around town just fine in his six electric vehicles. He can get by with a 15-minute charge on a round trip from his home to the San Francisco airport, or a breakfast break and a longer top-off on a drive to Monterey, about 50 miles south.
But he’s found a bug in the network: people. They park gasoline cars at charging stations, unplug vehicles to refill their own batteries and otherwise foul up the system.
Siudzinski, a retired engineering director, tries to debug an already strained network. He slips a red note under the windshield wipers of offenders — gas powered cars, or fully charged or disconnected EVs — with a reminder: “You are parked in an Electric Vehicle Charging Station. How would you react if your fuel tank was empty and someone was blocking your access to the only open fueling station in the area?”
Said Siudzinski: “A charging station is not an automatic parking privilege.”
As EVs have grown in popularity, businesses and governments in California are scrambling to meet the power demands of green vehicle owners and support a state goal to have 1.5 million zero-emission cars on the state’s roads by 2025. In some spots, demand for charging stations has outstripped supply.
That demand has sparked competition at stations and among businesses looking for a position in a growing market. And no one seems to think there’s a good solution in sight.
The state Public Utilities Commission in September rejected a controversial proposal by utility PG&E to build 25,000 charging stations across the region, mostly at workplaces and at densely populated apartment and condominium complexes. The $654 million price tag would have been passed along to residential customers through a monthly fee of about 70 cents.
The commission found the utility failed to ease concerns about its potential to dominate competition and chill innovation in the market. The utility recently resubmitted a scaled down plan to build up to 7,500 stations over three years.
Aaron Johnson, PG&E vice president of customer energy solutions, said nearly one-quarter of all EVs sold in the United States are in the utility’s coverage area. About 160,000 EVs are registered in California. The company estimates the region has about 6,000 public stations and needs about 100,000 to meet future demand.
A widespread charging network needs to be built, he said.
Pasquale Romano, CEO of ChargePoint, an electric charging station network, said PG&E cannot meet the needs of Bay Area drivers as they extend past the utility’s coverage area. Romano said a robust infrastructure should be built with better public and private partnerships and also include balanced government incentives.
ChargePoint counts nearly 25,000 commercial chargers in its international network. The company sells stations and collects monthly fees from owners hooked up to the network. “It’s not a gas station model,” Romano said. “It never will be.”
Electric fill-ups cannot be as quick as gasoline — taking anywhere from 20 minutes to a day or longer — but Romano believes increased battery range and more familiarity with the technology will ease consumer concerns about running out of power.
Jerry Pohorsky, a zero-emission car owner since 1999, said so-called range anxiety can be overcome. Pohorsky gets about 75 miles from a charge in his 2002 electric Toyota RAV4, but he once made a 200 mile trip from his home to visit his mother. “Just to prove I could,” he said.
Luxury automaker Tesla has taken another approach. The company is building a proprietary, worldwide network of charging stations that provide free hookups for Tesla owners. The vehicles claim a range of about 250 miles, several times greater than a typical EV.
The network’s goal is to provide Tesla owners high-powered chargers in locations where drivers want to be — shopping malls, tourist stops and other destinations, said spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson. The company has almost 250 Tesla Supercharger stations in North America and nearly 550 around the world.
The fast chargers have proved so popular that the company emailed Tesla owners in August to remind them the fast-charging stations were designed for long distance travelers, not daily commuters.
In some ways, the construction of a network is a chicken-and-egg problem. The existence of more charging stations encourages more people to buy electric vehicles, according to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation, and that means even more charging stations are needed.
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