cgaydos
Well-known member
Today I stopped by the Aurora Municipal Center (Colorado) to use their Level 2 charger as shown on PlugShare. What I found was a setup - installed earlier this year - so ideal I wanted to share it with others.
In the garage (shaded!) were 4 spots with 2 dual Chargepoint EVSE stations each. Price was 11 cents/kWh plus $1/hour after the first 4 hours, to discourage people from just plugging in and leaving the car in the spot all day. To help keep them from being ICEd the spots are labeled either handicapped or EV - and there are plenty of other handicapped spots nearby. It probably also helps that the garage is shared by the police department.
I like first that there are 4 spots. I've been using public charging a lot lately and single-spot public EVSEs risk both being occupied or non-operational (PlugShare is a help here for those stations that share "in use" information). The Chargepoint network and support system seems more reliable than the others I've seen. The price is designed to recover the costs of electricity but there is a very clear incentive to get cars moved out of those spots after they've charged.
However, although the location is somewhat convenient to shopping and near parks and trails they apparently don't get many people using them outside of city employees. A policeman came up to me and asked if I was a city employee and initially became very concerned when I said I wasn't. But then he asked if I was paying for the electricity and when I told him I was we then had a very pleasant conversation where he asked about EVs and EVSEs and I showed him how it worked. He told me that last year there were complaints about EVs using garage outlets and stealing electricity (where have we heard that before?) but since he saw I was paying it was no problem.
Personally, I think that one of the keys to getting EVs into the mainstream (in addition to 150-mile real-life range in all weather conditions) is an extensive reliable public charging network, and while QCs are ideal it also would be great to have a proliferation of this kind of L2 setup.
In the garage (shaded!) were 4 spots with 2 dual Chargepoint EVSE stations each. Price was 11 cents/kWh plus $1/hour after the first 4 hours, to discourage people from just plugging in and leaving the car in the spot all day. To help keep them from being ICEd the spots are labeled either handicapped or EV - and there are plenty of other handicapped spots nearby. It probably also helps that the garage is shared by the police department.
I like first that there are 4 spots. I've been using public charging a lot lately and single-spot public EVSEs risk both being occupied or non-operational (PlugShare is a help here for those stations that share "in use" information). The Chargepoint network and support system seems more reliable than the others I've seen. The price is designed to recover the costs of electricity but there is a very clear incentive to get cars moved out of those spots after they've charged.
However, although the location is somewhat convenient to shopping and near parks and trails they apparently don't get many people using them outside of city employees. A policeman came up to me and asked if I was a city employee and initially became very concerned when I said I wasn't. But then he asked if I was paying for the electricity and when I told him I was we then had a very pleasant conversation where he asked about EVs and EVSEs and I showed him how it worked. He told me that last year there were complaints about EVs using garage outlets and stealing electricity (where have we heard that before?) but since he saw I was paying it was no problem.
Personally, I think that one of the keys to getting EVs into the mainstream (in addition to 150-mile real-life range in all weather conditions) is an extensive reliable public charging network, and while QCs are ideal it also would be great to have a proliferation of this kind of L2 setup.
Nobody is going to object to a handicapped driver using an 'able-bodied' charge lane. The requirement is in place because the vast majority of both businesses and/or able-bodied citizens have had a problem in the past providing space for the handicapped.
