If you give something away, anything, folks will be
motivated to take as much of it as they can.
You can see this at “fairs” (like health fairs and employment fairs) as
people walk about with the bags, pens, calendars, and fliers from the various
commercial booths they have visited.
Such is the case at work. When
employees feel under-compensated or under-appreciated, they look to any perks
on the job to help them cope. In this
case, the perk is up to four hours of free electricity. The funny thing is that it really does not
add up to much value. Most cars will
top-off after just two or three hours, and they typically draw between 3Kw and
6Kw while charging. This amounts to as
much as 24Kwh of electricity, worth about $0.87 to $3.48, with most users
getting about $1.80. The value of the
stuff collected at a fair is worth more than this. If this were added up over five days a week
for 50 weeks, that amounts to about $450 (or much less if you have PG&E’s
favorable electric-car rates). While
this does amount to a meaningful lump of change, it does not amount to any kind
of life-changing money, especially for folks that have spent $25,000 to $40,000
on an electric car.
So, back to my work situation. Because the chargers are free for the first
four hours, people feel motivated to charge up as much as possible. But there is also a parking issue on campus,
so it is very inconvenient to find a vacant parking spot once you do finish
charging. These two conditions have
created a real problem. Folks who
connect their cars to the charging stations have to run back out to their cars
before the four hours elapses and unplug their cars. But they don’t move their cars away because
there is no convenient parking. Today I
noted three cars still parked in front of the charging station while the
charging cable was disconnected from the car (and hanging from the
charger). It is also causing desperate
folks to park in spaces beside the charges that are not for parking. In one case, it was blocking access to trash
facilities, and in another it was parked along the curb where no parking is
permitted, creating a slight traffic flow issue. I have also heard of folks charges being
interrupted by others desperate to get some juice who unplug others to connect
to their own cars.
While adding more charging stations would ease some of the
problems, I believe that the more affordable solution is to stop giving away
the electricity. If there are so many
electric cars that 12 charging hookups won’t meet the need, I would say that
the company incentive to encourage electric car use was a huge success. Instead, I would suggest charging a very
reasonable eight cents per Kwh delivered.
This would dis-incent those who only want something for free but can
otherwise drive to-and-from work comfortably on a single charge, and it would
still reward folks for driving electric by subsidizing (but not eliminating)
their charging costs. (That would be
$1.28 instead of $3.48.) The rate could
increase dramatically after four hours of charging to ensure sufficient access
to the charging stations during the day.
Of course, if it were up to me, I’d have a pool of portable solar panel
roofs that you would just prop up above your car and plug in where ever you
happen to find a sunny parking spot.
Your car would get some badly needed shade and you’d get some free juice
for your battery too. (By my
calculations, you’d get about 13 to 14 miles worth.)
