Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: EV charging infrastructure

[R Philip Dowds (rphilipdowds]

In the prior decade, Cornerstone spent big bucks on (1) a roof-mounted 
photovoltaic system connected to a net zero meter, and (2) high-voltage EV 
charging stations in one of our off-street parking lots.  In these cases, a 
combination of federal and state subsidies, offset programs, and voluntary 
reimbursements from specially interested members, meant that zero community 
dollars were needed* to pay for these improvements.  These projects were 
entirely successful as far as we are concerned — but public subsidies come and 
go, and we have no further energy improvement projects pending.

My general impression is that consumers are definitely in favor of combating 
climate change by converting to alternative, non-fossil energy sources … 
provided that it doesn’t cost anything.  Cornerstone has yet to test itself on 
this, so I don’t know where we stand.

———————————
Thanks,
Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

 * “Needed" = PERMANENTLY needed.  We did make temporary *loans* from our 
savings accounts, but these have all been repaid.

> On Jun 30, 2025, at 9:10 PM, Philip Semanchuk <philip [at] semanchuk.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> 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/
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