11:36 p.m.
Friday evening, a choice parking spot in front of Blackbird Bakery was decorated with blue and green balloons. A small crowd of people had gathered around two parked cars and something that looks vaguely like a Seattle parking pay box.
However, the box is not a pay box but a pedestal charging station for electric cars. The people had gathered to learn about it and about the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf parked in front of the Bakery. Answering their questions were Ben Hoover, a representative of Blink, which is the manufacturer of the charging station; Scott Isenman, an electric car owner and fan; and Tony D’Onofrio, the Sustainability Director for Town and Country Markets.
T & C will soon have its own Blink charging station in its parking lot, and the new Grow Avenue development will soon feature a solar-powered Eaton charging station, bringing the Bainbridge total to three. That doesn’t seem like very many, but electric car owners also have their own charging stations at home, and three public chargers is enough to keep electric cars fueled enough to get around the Island. With 300 stations across the state, including several at the Masi Shell station in Suquamish and two at Central Market in Poulsbo, electric car owners can go even farther.
But how far is that? I asked Isenman how far he can go in his Chevy Volt on a charged battery, and he said it depends on a lot of factors including temperature: Warm temperatures enhance the performance of electric car batteries. Another factor is where the driving happens, as is the case for gasoline-powered cars, such as on a highway or on stop and go streets. He estimated an average of 40 miles for his car on the highway. To get a charged-up battery, he has to hook up his vehicle for ten hours on the charger at home or four on the Blink charger downtown.
The City surprised him by recently installing a sign that forbids parking in the Blackbird spot unless you are charging your car. He said that up to that point he had had to watch the spot until it was free and then try to grab it.
For now the charge is free of charge. But starting next month, people will have to become Blink members and swipe their membership cards on the machine card reader to get a charge for their vehicles. The revenue from the fees is shared with the provider of the electricity, which in the case of the T & C machine, for example, will be T & C.
But the finances behind the charging stations are more complicated. The stations are partly subsidized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Manufacturers of the charging stations get reimbursed by the government for the devices they make. Installers of the machines also get a credit. Some of the savings are being passed on to consumers.
In addition, the Blink stations on Bainbridge are part of The Electrical Vehicle (EV) Project, whose mandate at least until the end of 2013 is to create a charging infrastructure to support electric vehicles by putting charging stations into the hands of drivers and businesses at little to no cost. The managing firm of the EV project, ECOtality, happens to own Blink. Blink has also supplied the charging stations for Century Link and Safeco Fields as well as many other places up and down the West Coast and in numerous other key states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Arizona.
D’Onofrio said about the Blink station at T & C and the charging stations at all five of their stores, “It was inevitable.” He added that the stations are just “another service that Town and Country Markets offers.” Laughing, he said that T & C wanted to install two at the store on Bainbridge, but the store is so maxed out on power already, it didn’t have enough for a second station.
Photos by Sarah Lane.
