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Questions. I have questions.
This article appears today on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website.
Milwaukee accepts $15 million grant to install EV chargers. Here’s where they could be located.
City officials will install more than 50 new electric vehicle charging stations across the Milwaukee region after receiving almost $15 million of federal money for the project.
Accepting that the math is slightly off due to the use of the words “more than 50” and “almost $15 million,” that amounts to $300,000 per charger. Is that really the going rate?
As part of this program, the city will install more than 50 electric vehicle chargers between 2026 and 2030, said Shambarger.
It’s going to take four years?
By September 2024, nearly 12,000 electric vehicles, in addition to electric cycles and autocycles, were registered in the state, according to the Wisconsin DMV. Additionally, more than 15,000 electric trucks were registered, totaling more than 27,000 total registered electric vehicles.
“Nearly” 12,000 electric vehicles?
According to the Department of Energy, there are 4.6 million gasoline-powered vehicles (excluding more than 100,000 hybrids) registered in Wisconsin.
That means electric vehicles make up 0.26%.
Can I hear some more about how the government subsidizes gasoline?
Edit: It occurs to me (but is not explicit in the article) that by “charging stations” they mean “a location with multiple chargers,” which makes the $300k a bit more defensible. If they put 8 chargers per station that’s less than $40k per charger.
Edit the second: “Each site will include space to charge four vehicles, including two fast charging spots.” So double the above amount.
Published in General
Well that sure solves the problem of nowhere to charge. Just drive to Milwaukee!
I looked on Amazon at electric car chargers, and the fast-charge variety were several hundred dollars (https://www.amazon.com/car-charging-station/s?k=car+charging+station&s=price-desc-rank&qid=1734619284&ref=sr_st_price-desc-rank&ds=v1%3A0E7PMpmkIuJ9G1isdlJtL1u2d4bfvGqKTm%2F3HeDy%2B54).
Now, I can see how commercial-grade chargers could cost more, but $40K is still a ton of money . . .
Of course. You need to include the cost of the half acre parking lot for those waiting in line for their charges. Probably some provision for a snack bar or something. And maybe a petroleum – powered service vehicle to keep the cars in line with enough charge to make it to the charger.
And there’s the cost of acquiring the land for all this. Being conveniently located, it will be commercially – zoned land, so it won’t be cheap. And sometimes there will be condemnation, etc. court procedures. Probably in some cases they can just buy closed gas stations.
Did Wisconsin or Milwaukee voters decide the state or the city should pay for the operation of privately owned vehicles
A level 2 home “charger” is basically plugging your car into a US 240V dryer connection or a somewhat greater current version thereof . Not a lot of electronics. The actual charger is in the car and that converts the AC to DC to charge the batteries.
The funding is for DC fast chargers. There is a big electronics cabinet that converts AC to DC so it can pump DC into the car at a much greater power than the car could convert itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_station#SAE
Then there is wiring the site. Consider a 100 Amp small household (not McMansion) breaker box. At it’s theoretical max, that’s ~10kW. A DC fast charger is 400kW or 40 maxed out houses. A 20-stall charging station would thus be 800 houses worth of power in a fraction of an acre. But it’s worse. You will never have an entire subdivision where all the houses are near maxing out their power even in the peak of air conditioning season. So the lines servicing them are normally not nearly rated to carry that load.*
You often would have close to a maxed out charging station. thus the charging station may draw more power than the residences in a medium size town. So hooking it to the grid is non-trivial.
*This is a big problem for home charging. A few people even doing level 2 AC home charging in a given neighborhood can overwhelm the service.
Clearly, home windmills are needed to supplement the service.
I don’t know if this was originally in the article or a later addition, but it now states that each site will have chargers for four automobiles.
As to land acquisition costs, from a quick scan of the list of proposed sites, it’s mostly city/county parks or already existing parking garages.
Milwaukee or the state should pay. Why should taxpayers in the other 49 pay for this?
And prevailing wage rates for installation.
Yes, installing a significant vehicle charging station often requires a lot of new upstream installations for transformers, substations, high voltage transmission lines, etc. That is why some electric power suppliers have refused requests by vehicle fleet operators to install charging stations for potential new electric vehicle fleets.
Reminds me…
IBEW workers.
The copper wire in the chargers will be gone in a couple of days.
Forgot about the land . . . and bathrooms . . .
This is the much larger problem, evidenced even at a small scale (which you hit out of the ballpark). Not just establishing the local service, the infrastructure build out to connect to the grid, but any localized constraints (undergrounding, streets, overheads, etc) that would impact the cost of installation.
Now – with the increase in demand for electricity, where are we installing new gas-fired turbines to support incremental and spot demand? Hopefully deep inside a sanctuary city.
So far most installed commercial chargers for electric vehicles are in corners of the existing parking lots of large shopping centers. With rare exceptions, most of those shopping centers have excess parking capacity to handle both the vehicles charging and the waiting vehicles. And being near shopping and eating opportunities, users of the charging stations have things to do while the car is charging (and access to bathrooms). Which also provides incentive for the shopping center landlord to agree to the installation.
The bigger problem is keeping the chargers operating after they are installed. A recurring theme of user reviews of away-from-home vehicle charging is how many of the chargers do not work. Entities that put in these chargers get credit for installing them, but the contracts apparently do not include incentives to keep them operational.
I have no actual knowledge of these chargers being discussed. Are they privately or government owned and operated? Why would they be created and operated in any way different from gasoline service stations? With all the government monetary grants mentioned, it doesn’t sound as if there is much in the way of private enterprise involvement in any facet of electric vehicle charging stations.
We need legislation that the additional electricity for federally funded charging stations has to come from new nuclear or natural gas facilities in the same state.
Why are charging stations federally funded?
Just recall last winter in Chicago, when electric vehicles were trying to recharge in the snow and dying. That’s because both heat and air conditioning run off the battery, draining it. That’s why the current crop of electric vehicles are good for home chargers or southern California where the weather never gets too hot or cold. Milwaukee doesn’t have that kind of weather.
That is a common problem with grants from private foundations as well as governments. At the university department where I worked, there were private foundations who would be glad to build new buildings for new programs, and there were possibilities for the feds to buy us new, innovative facilities. But these agencies tended to get smart and demand a commitment from the grantee for ongoing support before handing out the money, with the result that the university wouldn’t let us apply for all the grants because it didn’t want to get stuck with ongoing maintenance. Before we could submit a proposal, we had to convince the university as well as the granting agency.
It happens all over. When our pastor was working with the local YMCA to build a new facility, he said a common saying on their board was, “We could get grants to build a glass dome over all of Battle Creek, but we couldn’t get anyone to pay to maintain it.”
It is entirely possible that the Biden/Harris program for these charging stations does not know that lesson, especially if the purpose is to funnel grant money to companies with the correct political behavior.
Addressed in the video clips I posted earlier.
We are talking about publicly available electric vehicle charging stations that any operator of an electric vehicle is supposed to be able to access and use.
Most public charging stations are owned and operated by a commercial provider such as EVGo, Electrify America, or ChargePoint. The user (vehicle driver) either pre-registers with the provider, providing a payment method that the provider accesses when the registered car is plugged in, or provides a credit card at the point of use. The cost to the user is generally based on the amount of electricity used to charge the vehicle battery.
Electrify America is a subsidiary of Volkswagen, established as part of a settlement with the U.S. government of a legal dispute over VW’s vehicle emissions testing procedures. EVGo’s history traces to the California state government, and has some connections to settling issues around the Enron scandal. Because of the very high costs of installation and the uncertain consumer usage, these charger companies rarely make an installation entirely on their own. Some landlords will subsidize installations for their own purposes. But most installations are driven by some government push. The government entity may broker and subsidize a deal between a landowner and the commercial charger operator. Usage of public charging stations is not wide enough to provide assurance of a profitable stream of income to justify most commercial installations. Most owners and lessees of electric vehicles charge their vehicles on their own private chargers at home, so public station usage is erratic. Governments get behind installations as part of the popular-with-government opinion that electric vehicles should be encouraged.
Tesla operates its own network. Tesla chargers are generally incompatible with non-Tesla vehicles (there is a recent change to allow certain vehicles – Ford is the one I know about – to be able to use Tesla chargers). Tesla chargers are reported to be very reliable. Tesla set up its extensive network of chargers, mostly in entirely private deals between Tesla and various landowners (though many of them also required dealing with the local electric utility provider because the power requirements are so high), as a forward-thinking effort to sell its cars by assuring drivers that they would not be left without the ability to charge their cars. However, Tesla recently discontinued its program of building new Tesla charging stations.
A few municipalities might operate their own government-owned and operated charging stations, but I don’t know how those work. Some employers and apartment owners have installed privately operated electric vehicle chargers for the use of their employees or tenants.
Maybe a Governor Pete could get you that glass dome.
I know there have been subsidies for those that have provided fuels for vehicles with internal combustion engines and maybe this sets the tone for this creeping government involvement in what appears to me to be private activities of individuals operating battery-powered transport vehicles. Weird!
Did someone say dome?
Because that’s how you build socialism. Better to spend the money on military equipment for Ukraine than to build socialism at home.