Boulder County will soon receive a $4.9 million federal grant to add public electric vehicle charging stations throughout the county that local officials say are critical to encourage more residents to switch to cleaner cars.
The grant money will support the installation of 94 publicly accessible Level 2 chargers, which charge cars at moderate speeds, and 20 Level 3 fast chargers over the next few years. The county says it will prioritize putting them in areas such as low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, rural areas and communities with multifamily units, like apartment buildings and condo complexes, where renters are common and home charging is less so.
The goal is to use the grant money to help more Boulderites “feel more confident to buy an electric car,” according to Lea Yancey, a senior sustainability strategist with Boulder County and the main driver behind the grant application.
The immediate effect will be relatively small: The investment will boost the number of public chargers by about 15%. At the end of 2023, there were 729 public charging ports in Boulder County, and only about 10% of those were fast chargers.
Nationally, the sluggish growth of a public EV charging network has been blamed for slower-than-ideal adoption of electric cars. Known as range anxiety, people are particularly concerned about the possibility of running out of power when traveling longer distances.
Boulder County is well ahead of many other communities, however — it ranked tenth among U.S. counties for EV adoption in 2022, with EVs making up almost a quarter of new car sales. But in the long term, more funding will be necessary. Widespread availability of public chargers is critical for the county’s goal of getting 30% of all cars in the county to be electric by 2030, and 100% by 2050.
Boulder County needs “a lot more private investment, and a lot more state and federal funding to support the EV charging infrastructure to get where we need to be by the end of this decade,” Yancey said.
By 2030, the county wants some 2,400 public charging stations equitably distributed across the county, with a mix of Level 2 and Level 3 fast chargers.
Yancey said county officials will spend the next year doing feasibility studies and working with the county’s eight municipalities and three utility companies operating locally to determine final locations and costs for the Department of Transportation-funded chargers.
“The hope is we can have stations in the ground in that 2026, 2027 timeframe,” Yancey said.
The City of Boulder operates 48 public charging ports across city facilities and open space parking lots. These include Chautauqua, the recreation centers and downtown parking garages. Like the county, Matt Lehrman, an energy strategy coordinator with the city, said this is far from enough to hit the city’s EV targets, which are the same as the county’s.
Throughout 2023, the city, along with Boulder County and other municipalities in the county, collaborated to understand local EV charging needs. This process identified two main needs: more public fast charging, and more home charging for people who don’t have it.
Level 3 chargers can charge batteries to 80% in 30 minutes, but they are expensive. In contrast, Level 2 chargers take several hours to charge and are ideal for overnight or workday charging.
“I think it’s really difficult to buy an EV and drive it right now without home charging,” Lehrman said, identifying it as the “number one gap” with a focus on multifamily units.
He said providing charging for these complexes is not just more cost efficient, but sometimes easier.
“It just gets a little bit more challenging as you have HOAs, and landlords and owners that might not be local that you have to negotiate with,” he said. “So for me, the primary focus is that multifamily market. That will be the number one gap we can fill.”
One way to fill that gap is putting ample charging stations in the parking lots of apartment buildings.
Yet the city is not ignoring residents of single-family homes. It acknowledges that a lack of access to EV charging is widespread. Lehrman said he has rented three single-family homes in Boulder that didn’t have off-street parking and therefore didn’t have access to home charging.
“It’s not just the multifamily market that doesn’t always have access to home charging,” he said. “But it’s a little harder to find the single family homes [without access to charging], so they have to come forward and say they don’t have it.”
To Mr. Lehrman: Please spend some of that money to get the existing chargers repaired and to break the hold of the sluggish, unresponsive company that should be servicing them. One of the outlets at the North Boulder Rec Center has been out of service for months because of a broken part. Apparently, the part is only available from one company, ChargePoint, which has a virtual monopoly on non-Tesla stations and can afford to ignore the drivers who depend entirely on public charging. More stations at the rec centers would be great, but getting ChargePoint off dead center and making sure the chargers actually work would be even better. I am 84 years old, and since I sold my house I am at the mercy of ChargePoint for keeping my EV up and running. More broken chargers–with ChargePoint calling the shots–is not the answer.