With more electric vehicles rolling on Ann Arbor’s streets, more EV drivers are making use of the public charging stations downtown and on the U-M campus. DDA energy programs director Dave Konkle says the chargers at the Forest Ave. garage are so popular that drivers there have developed a system to let one another know when one is free. “A year from now, if we don’t do anything, you will just call it your lucky day if you actually get to plug in at one of our twenty-one chargers in downtown Ann Arbor,” Konkle predicts.
“We know the demand’s there, so we’re just kind of struggling with that,” says city environmental coordinator Matt Naud. “In a lot of ways you would think, well, the person who’s selling electricity maybe would have the most incentive to [install chargers]. But that hasn’t been the case from the utility uniformly.”
Federal grants paid for eighteen of the DDA’s twenty-one chargers as well as seven of the ten chargers on campus. But they’re not producing a lot of revenue for DTE–and none at all for the city. The stations can deliver only about forty cents’ worth of electricity per hour, or a total of $13,000 since the DDA chargers were installed in 2008–so little that neither the university or the city bothers to charge EV owners. The current stations could be fitted with card readers to collect usage fees, but DDA executive director Susan Pollay says the return wouldn’t justify the expense: “It really doesn’t make sense to spend a whole lot of money to charge people to get back, really, pennies, small change, in the course of the day.” (EV owners do pay for parking, currently $1.40/hour in city surface lots and $1.20 in structures.)
Pollay says a bid packet for renovations at the DDA’s Fourth and William parking garage includes expanded electrical capacity capable of supporting five more chargers. But so far, no funding has been secured to pay for the chargers themselves. Charles Griffith, director of climate and energy programs at the Ecology Center, says he and a group of other local stakeholders in former mayor John Hieftje’s Drive Electric Ann Arbor Partnership (DEA2P) are “exploring all the options” to make that happen. Griffith holds up Kansas City Power and Light’s recently announced initiative to install 1,000 EV charging stations throughout the Kansas City area as an ideal model for a utility funding EV infrastructure. Griffith says DTE Energy participated in a “robust discussion” of the subject at a recent DEA2P meeting, but for now the utility has “only done limited funding” of EV infrastructure.
For now, almost all the energy that flows through Ann Arbor’s EV charging stations is generated by burning fossil fuels, mainly coal. A 2012 study of that “long tailpipe” by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that an electric Nissan Leaf in southeast Michigan has a carbon footprint equivalent to a gasoline-fueled car averaging thirty-eight mpg. But Griffith and Naud expect that to improve as renewable energy sources take hold in the future.
The DDA and U-M’s Zipcar programs have similarly seen robust use, but with less financial challenge. GetDowntown program director Nancy Shore says the DDA originally agreed to pay Zipcar a “revenue guarantee” if rentals didn’t meet a monthly quota. The program caught on quickly enough that the DDA stopped paying the guarantee within a year–although it still provides Zipcar (which is now owned by Avis) with fifteen free parking spots downtown.
Not so at U-M. Grant Winston, the university’s associate director of customer service in parking and transportation services, says the U-M paid Zipcar a revenue guarantee for six months–but now charges the company $40 a month for each of the twenty-six spots it occupies across campus.
