Town To Impose Fee for EV Charging Station Use in Town Hall Lot

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Town officials last week approved a fee of 53 cents per kilowatt hour for the electric vehicle or ‘EV’ charging stations in the Town Hall parking lot.

The figure is expected to cover the cost of electricity for the town at the stations, according to Public Works Senior Engineer Joe Zagarenski.

The Board of Selectmen during their regular meeting also approved what Zagarenski called a “parking fee equivalent” of $1.25 per hour.

“I say ‘equivalent’ because it’s calculated based on a charge rate of 7.2 kilowatts per hour divided by $1.25 an hour,” he said during the Board’s regular meeting, held Nov. 4 at Town Hall and via videoconference.

Zagarenski continued: “So the thought was that people need to charge for at least a couple hours in order to make it efficient and they can go get lunch or something like that. So why would they get free parking? Because when they could pay $1.25 over there, we just didn’t want them to have that as free. So it covers all the costs.”

First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted in favor of allowing the new fee.

According to Zagarenski, the average EV can charge at a rate of about 27.2 kilowatt hours.

“That basically gets you 20 to 30 miles,” he said, adding: “So if you have range anxiety and you want to come to New Canaan to go out to lunch, you get basically 40 to 60 miles when you charge for the two hours.”

Municipal vehicles would continue to use the stations to charge, and there’s an app called ‘Amp Up’—already in use at Karl Chevrolet and the YMCA, Zagarenski said—which allows for “surge pricing.”

“And the surge pricing has a lot more features, so you can—after two hours—instead of having people get ticketed you could just basically make the electricity cost twice as much if that’s something that was desired, just to keep people from parking there all day and clogging up the Town Hall parking spaces,” he said.

The selectmen asked how the EV chargers in Morse Court work (they’re not smart chargers), whether the town gets back the full value of what it puts into the Morse Court chargers in electricity (not sure), whether people who use the EV stations at Morse Court can overstay without charging and keep the spots from someone who needs them (they’d get ticketed), whether the Morse Court EV spots are metered (yes), whether town vehicles that need a charge are ever prevented by a non-town car at Town Hall (not really, they only need to be hooked up for a few hours every two weeks) and whether the new system at Town Hall Lot will have the flexibility to switch to surge pricing after two hours (yes).

Karl said that in his experience the Amp Up app is “amazing.”

“You could literally target different groups—town employees can be free, and then you could have residents have a fee, and then out-of-town residents … you can really target who gets charged what, so it’s a pretty good way of customizing,” he said. “And it really works well and it keeps those spaces moving. That’s the whole point. You’ve got to get people in and out. But the reason those Morse Court chargers went in originally was to try to get people from out of town or shopping in town to come. Anybody in town that has an EV is going to charge it at home. Everybody’s pretty much charged up if they’re doing it.”

The Board talked about what the fee would be for a parked EV that remains in a charging station space for more than two hours. Carlson said she’s considered something like a $10 fee though all selectmen agreed to study what other towns are charging in that situation. Murphy Carroll said that she’s seen a Tesla at a “supercharger” get charged $1 per minute after it’s fully charged.

“That’ll get you out of there,” she said.

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