Cohousing-L Mailing List: more on EV charging stations from River Song

[Jim Bronson (jimbronsonashland]

Thanks Katie for a great document.  I'll copy here a report about our
situation at River Song as we are 3 months into our build.

I heard at our Construction Interface Team meeting last week that the
transformer for River Song Cohousing Community will allow for nine Type 2
EV charging stations to be installed, either in garages or parking slots or
both.  RSC will need to decide if we install networked or non-networked
chargers.  The difference being in how we manage passing along the costs of
EV charging.  We will save money initially and over time if we install
non-networked chargers, but we will have to come up money to purchase and
install the chargers with some scheme for allocating EV charging costs
through our HOA.

*To get an initial idea of costs for networked charging,* I talked with the
largest network EV charging company (EV Connect - John Guitierrez) and
heard the following:

5 EV stations – good number initially for 28 households

Choose locations to minimize conduit runs

Level 2 stations – 240 v with 40 amp circuit

Equipment Cost is about $1400 to 5,000/ unit and $3-4 thousand per station
to install, EV Connect requires pre-paying 3 years 'rent' for the network,



*Level 2 chargers* give 7.5 KW/hour  produces 22-30 miles of range/hour for
most cars

EV Connect charges about  $250-430/year/port

Software tracks who is charging, how much charge delivered

Users can reserve stations – charging queue

EV Connect tracks data and takes responsibility for repairing stations (RSC
will still have to pass along costs to EV owners)

Can incentivize charging at off-peak utility cost times

We could recover EV Connect costs by adding 10-20% to utility
costs.  $1-2/day



*Initial plan for Installing Level 2 stations*: stub out each station,
small cement pad.

Lead times are 6-16 weeks for units.

There are no sources of support for grants/funding

State, utility, city, federal initiative – (all out of pocket) none active
now

RSC can purchase our EV charging array up front – or pay monthly with no up
front cost as a service,

monthly cost dep. on #/type of connectors

To avoid upfront costs RSC would pay about $100/mo/connector (covers
unit,SW,labor and repair).