w6vms said:
Random rant...
My last three visits to the Whole Foods in Raleigh with the EVSEs have met ICEd spots. The last time I decided to bring up with the manager about paging the owners of those cars over the PA, but "they don't do that".
This is unfortunately all too common at Whole Foods and your experience is the same as the rest of us. They simply don't want to do anything about it. And I'm beginning to think that the people that ICE it know that. It seemed like at first it was an occasional issue, but now I think drivers see that those spots are not enforced so they figure whatever.
I'm finally getting around to creating a "report card" that I'd like to release on a quarterly basis that I would like to use to motivate parties to install charging stations and those that have them to better enforce them. Obviously I'd keep it as positive as possible, but hopefully get the message across.
I'm thinking of having several different categories:
Retail (e.g. North Hills)
Municipal (e.g. City of Raleigh, Town of Apex)
Grocery (e.g. Whole Foods)
Workplace (e.g. Cisco, Qualcomm)
University (e.g. NC State)
Residential (not sure there are any in this category yet, but an example would be an apartment complex that has charging stations)
Dealerships (e.g. Nissan, Chevy, Ford)
Restaurants (e.g. McDonalds)
Hotels (e.g. Umstead)
Sporting Venues (DBAP--I'll give them partial credit for the ATC stations--they are all owned by Capital Broadcasting after all)
Marks would be given across the following:
Number of stations
Charging level (120V, L2, DC FC, SuperCharger)
Uptime (have the stations been down/broken?)
Availability (how often are the stations fully in use vs. a spot available)
Signage (how effective is the signage and markings in preventing ICEing)
Enforcement (are the spots effectively enforced?)
Growth (are new stations being added to meet increasing demand)
Cost
Obviously I would need a lot of help with this. My thought would be to enlist volunteers to help me review charging stations in a particular geographical area. Workplace charging is even more difficult because some of the workplaces are physically inaccessible, but even aside from that you don't get a good sense for some of the marking categories without actually working there and experiencing things like availability and enforcement.
So if anyone would like to help with this, let me know. My goal would be to have something by the end of June that I could publish as far and wide as possible. I'll try to get some of my contacts in the NC PEV Task Force & Advanced Energy to help get additional publicity. The idea would be that if we can highlight the leaders and make it obvious to the "slackers" that we are making the grades available to the ever growing EV community that they had better think about not being left behind by ignoring this growing segment of potential customers / employees.
A parallel effort is to put together a basic 1-2 pager on why a property owner/manager would want to consider installing charging stations, including costs, an ROI argument, LEED credits, etc. Advanced Energy has a start on this I believe. I see a lot of construction sites and would like to catch the developers in time for them to at least prepare for future infrastructure before they lay down pavement, but this would be a good thing to distribute to existing establishments (along with the report card so they can see what their competition is doing) as well. Again, if anyone would like to help out with this, it would be most appreciated.
I am in the process of creating a new site (RTP-specific) that can be used as a repository and home for all this. This should be ready to go shortly.
Things have come a long way in the past 2.5 years, and certainly there is a good pace (especially with new DC FC stations now coming online), but demand is increasing as well so I feel that we have to still be proactive in this. The RTP area is just outside of one of the top markets in the country (which would attractive even more good attention) so I want to see what it would take to get us right up there!