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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.
Discussion (28)
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Well that sure solves the problem of nowhere to charge. Just drive to Milwaukee!
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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 . . .
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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.
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Did Wisconsin or Milwaukee voters decide the state or the city should pay for the operation of privately owned vehicles
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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.
en.wikipedia.org
Open link
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.
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