smkettner said:
dznit said:
So... how could a charging station be operated on campus without raising eyebrows?
Have it paid for using a different budget such as part of the Student Union dues or some such.
This is a viable and common solution. There are many activities taking place at state-funded institutions which are not strictly education-oriented and have been traditionally excluded from state funding. Housing and dining services for resident students is probably the largest such activity at most institutions, but parking is often the second biggest. At UCSD, the charging stations are rolled into the Parking and Transportation Services operation, which is a self-supporting auxiliary enterprise on campus. Parking in the UC system is strictly ineligible for any state funding by the UC master plan, so staff, faculty, students and visitors have always had to pay for the privilege of parking on campus. These fees fund the construction and maintenance of parking lots, structures, administration and enforcement costs, and also alternatives to onsite parking (carpools, shuttles, mass transit, etc.) The EV charging initiative is a pittance of the total cost of this operation at this point in time, but may grow in the future to be a separate line item with an additional cost, who knows? Currently, if you pay for a parking permit, you can use the chargers for free. They are participating in the EV project, and have plans for 50 EVs and charging stations as part of the
Smart City San Diego initiative.I don't know what provisions will be made for public use of their charging stations in the future, that is still unclear, but it is certainly part of their stated intention.
I wonder what the electric bill for 20,000 student campus actually runs? I never noticed instructors turning the lights off as they left the class for the day..... unless something has really changed. Certainly better air conditioning controls would save more juice than the fleet of EVs ever use.
Having retired from a career in facilities management at UCSD, this is a subject with which I am very familiar. UC San Diego’s current undergraduate enrollment is 23,143. Current graduate enrollment is 4,274. State funding for education is, in fact, a very limited part of the UCSD budget. As a research institution, it represents less than 12% of the total annual revenues of $2.4 billion, while 23% comes from the federal government for research. There are approximately 26,000 employees supporting both the research and education functions, so the whole campus represents an enterprise on the scale of a small city of over 50,000 people. Obviously, the planned 50 charging stations (of which only a few are currently installed) are a miniscule part of the electricity use.
The utilities budget for the campus is in the neighborhood of $47M annually, which is a huge percentage of the annual budget for operating and maintaining the entire physical plant of some 13,000,000 sq. ft. of classroom, office and lab space. The only reason it is this low is because of a concerted effort that has been made over the last two decades to achieve savings through efficiency and conservation. These efforts include a very efficient co-generation plant (combined heat and power) added in 2001 that supplies 85% of the campus electricity needs and up to 95 percent of its heating and cooling needs through very clean gas turbine generation, combined with thermal energy storage to offset peak demands, saving 3-6 megawatts per day, as well as 1.2 megawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity (soon to be doubled). They have taken advantage of many utility incentives and federal grants to accomplish a lot of this work, with revenue bond funds supplying most of the rest, rather than state education funding. For example, a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is helping install the world’s first microgrid master controller and related optimizer application at UCSD. When fully operational, the Smart Grid will function as a virtual power plant, scheduling energy self-generation, electricity imports and electric and thermal storage while factoring in the demand load and the variable price of electricity to buy or sell.
On the demand side, conservation has been achieved through education of campus users, centralized "smart" control of lighting and HVAC systems, retrofitting of older, less efficient lighting fixtures and appliances, and applying the latest efficiency and sustainability features to new building projects. See
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/11-09Energy.asp and
http://sustainability.ucsd.edu/ for details.
More than you ever wanted to know, probably.
TT
