Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: EV charging infrastructure

[Philip Semanchuk (philip]

> On Jun 30, 2025, at 2:05 PM, rlkohl [at] earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> Has any community attempted to get grants for EV charging infrastructure?
> 
> With whom and how successful was it?

NC (North Carolina) DOT had a grant program that we applied to. (They were 
distributing money from the Volkswagen settlement.) The grant was not a great 
fit with our needs, and we ended up giving up on it. A few things made it not a 
good match.

First, the grant required a minimum of two charging stations; we reckoned we 
only needed one to start. So far, 1.5 years in, our reckoning has been correct. 
(Nine of our community's 46 households have used the charging station; six have 
been regular users.)

Second, we wanted a smart charger (i.e. one that can connect to the internet, 
report charges, and connect to an authentication system so we know who is 
charging), but we also wanted to manage our own data. This turned out to be a 
really tricky requirement. Almost all smart chargers require a cloud-hosted 
data plan that comes with a monthly fee. (If you know of smart chargers that 
give local access to data without a monthly paid data plan, I’d love to hear 
about them!) We didn’t like the monthly fee, nor the vendor lockin that comes 
with cloud hosting. 

The only smart charger we could find that didn’t want to manage our data for us 
was OpenEVSE (https://www.openevse.com/). We got a 48A charger for $723, 
including tax, S&H, etc. It’s been working fine for us. This station is not UL 
listed, and UL listing was a requirement of the NC DOT grant.

Last but not least, there was a squirrely requirement in the grant requirements 
that the chargers had to be "commercially rated”, without any explanation of 
what that phrase meant. As we conversed with the DOT, we learned that they 
didn’t know what it meant either, but they were willing to enforce it to some 
arbitrary standard. Since we had mostly given up on the grant at that point, we 
didn’t bother arguing. 

Our concern about vendor lockin and cloud hosting was validated sooner than we 
expected. One of the stations we considered was Enel’s Juicebox, and in October 
2024, Enel left the North American market, and their commercial charging 
stations were expected to stop working entirely. You can read about it here: 
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/10/if-you-own-a-juicebox-ev-charger-you-need-to-read-this/

Hope this helps
Philip

Pacifica Cohousing
Carrboro, NC
https://pacificacohousing.com/