The Civic Center stations will be updated for free as part of state grant program.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
Two outdated electric vehicle charging stations in the Civic Center area are slated to be updated for free as part of a state grant program. The Malibu charging stations, located by two parking spaces in front of the Malibu Library, have been without power for several years.
ClipperCreek, a company that manufactures EV chargers, will retrofit the chargers to make them compatible with a new generation of electric vehicles, representative Len Fein said.
Fein said the new chargers are worth $3,000 each and should be installed by late March or early April.
Mark Olson, of Southern California Edison Company, said the city requested that power to the stations be cut off in 2004 due to lack of use. Meanwhile, Southern California Edison had been billing the city a monthly service charge for the charging stations even though they were not being used.
Due to client confidentiality, Olson could not say how much the city was charged for the EV charging station. He did say that service charges by Edison were usually about $22 to $25 per month for comparable EV charging units in homes and businesses.
However, Olson informed th city at its Monday meeting that it would be receiving $16,000 in rebates from the company for designing an energy efficient new city hall.
ClipperCreek received a $2.3 million dollar grant from the California Energy Commission last year for the purpose of retrofitting about half of the 1,200 outdated charging stations located throughout California. Most of these old charging stations, including the ones in Malibu, were installed more than 10 years ago to service early electric vehicle (EV) prototypes. But car manufacturers that were experimenting with electric cars used different types of chargers, making it difficult for some EV owners to find chargers compatible with their vehicles.
That changed last January with the implementation of an industry standard, the J-1772 charger. Now, new EVs such as the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and Ford Fusion BE can all be charged with the J-1772.
Prior to the announcement at Monday night’s City Council meeting that the city would accept the chargers, there had been confusion between city officials and ClipperCreek about whether the chargers would be provided free of charge or not. Local activist Suzanne Maxx wrote a letter in The Malibu Times last week urging the city to contact the company and apply for the complementary chargers. She later told The Times that the city had actually written a formal letter of rejection to ClipperCreek, which, she said, was the reason for the urgency of rallying public support.
Fein at this week’s Malibu council meeting said the company approached the city in May 2010 about taking part in the grant program. But Fein said he had provided a quote for the units to city officials “in the event the grant did not go through, which may have been misperceived as being a cost issue versus a free grant.”
City Manager Jim Thorsen affirmed at Monday’s council meeting that the city would accept the chargers.
“We are moving ahead with this item, there’s no cost to the city and we’re moving forward with obtaining all the infrastructure needed,” Thorsen said.
That will come as welcome news to local EV owners. Malibu resident Eric Swenson owns a high performance EV, the Tesla Roadster. Together with other Tesla owners, Swenson is a member of SoCal Green Speed, “a high speed electric driving club.”
In an email to The Malibu Times, Swenson welcomed the new charging stations: “Having charge points along long corridor roads like PCH help EV drivers do longer trips up and down the coast.”
The charge times for EVs often are more than an hour. Swenson wrote that EV owners who stop to recharge their vehicles would patronize businesses in the Civic Center area.
Earl Cox, another Tesla owner who lives in La Crescenta, agreed. “It would turn Malibu into a destination [for EV owners],” Cox said.
Swenson predicts that the EVs will become more practical for the mass public.
“You can buy now electric sports cars [Tesla, Fisker], economy cars [Nissan, Chevy, Mitsubishi and others] and in the wings are SUVs and sedans [Toyota, Tesla],” he wrote.
Swenson added that the next step is to get charging stations reinstalled at Zuma Beach and Will Rogers State Beach, which were removed years ago.
Fein said he will be in contact with another group, the Electric Auto Association, to procure a special bracket to make one of the charging stations compatible with Toyota RAV4 EVs, which still have a small but dedicated ownership group in California.