The city won a $15M federal grant to build 600 curbside EV chargers throughout its streets. It’s part of a broader push to build 10,000 curbside chargers in NYC by 2030.
Perhaps the only thing harder than finding a spot to park a car in New York City is finding a spot to charge a car.
Electric vehicle owners in the city could soon get some relief on that second problem, thanks to a $15 million federal grant to build 600 curbside EV chargers — the largest network of its kind in the United States and a step toward the city’s goal of building 10,000 curbside chargers by 2030.
The funding is part of a Biden administration program that has awarded $521 million to public EV-charging projects in 28 other states, plus the District of Columbia and eight Tribes.
In New York City, 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation — and the majority of that pollution comes from passenger cars. Moving away from gas-powered vehicles is not only core to the city’s own goal of converting for-hire vehicles to electric or wheelchair-accessible by the end of the decade — it’s also a necessity to comply with a statewide law banning the sale of new gas-powered cars after 2035.
But to successfully shift away from gas cars, EV chargers must be easy to find.
While EV drivers tend to fuel up their vehicles at home, in New York City most people live in multifamily buildings and few have their own driveways where they can park a car and plug into an at-home charger. That makes public charging stations especially necessary in New York, but good locations to build a dedicated charging hub in a dense city environment are scarce.
Enter: curbside EV chargers, which are accessible from street parking and can get a car’s battery up to 100 percent over several hours. If drivers plug in overnight, their vehicles will be ready to go by morning.
“We need chargers on the street, and this is what’s going to enable the transition to electric vehicles,” said Tiya Gordon, co-founder of Itselectric, a Brooklyn-based company that makes and installs curbside chargers in cities.
New York isn’t the only city pursuing this streetside approach. San Francisco launched a curbside charging pilot in June — part of its broader goal to install 1,500 public chargers by 2030. Boston is in the process of installing curbside chargers and eventually wants every resident to live within a five-minute walk of a charger. Itselectric will begin deploying chargers there this fall and installing more in Detroit, with plans to expand to Los Angeles and Jersey City, New Jersey.
So far, New York has installed 100 curbside chargers, part of a pilot program funded by the utility Con Edison. The program began in 2021, putting chargers next to parking spaces reserved for EVs. Drivers pay $2.50 per hour to charge during the day and $1 per hour overnight. Those chargers have seen better use than expected and are busy topping up EV batteries more than 70 percent of the time.
Post time: Nov-30-2024
