ChargePoint, Inc. announced on June 11th, 2013, the completion of its ChargePoint America Program with more than 4600 shipments and installations of its home, public and commercial charging ports for electric vehicles (EVs). In May 2010, ChargePoint was awarded a $15 million dollar matching grant funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Transportation Electrification Initiative administered by the Department of Energy. Additionally, the California Energy Commission allocated $3.4 million in funding for the installation of residential and public electric vehicle charging infrastructure within California.
In all, 4,600 charging ports were installed in single-family homes, multi-family housing, commercial and public locations to support more than 2,000 program vehicles. Ten regions in the United States received EV charging stations: Austin/San Antonio, Texas; Boston; Los Angeles; New York; Orlando/Tampa; Sacramento, Calif.; San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area; Redmond/Bellevue, Wash.; Washington DC/Baltimore; and Southern Michigan (including Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit).
The ChargePoint program provides data to the Department of Energy (DOE), through Idaho National Laboratory. The data, in turn, are publicly reported to help researchers, municipal planners, and other stakeholders learn more about where EVs are charged, when and how much energy is used. The data will continue to be sent to the DOE through December 2013. Data collection from the ChargePoint America stations is accomplished via a wireless network connection to the ChargePoint network.
Nationwide, ChargePoint America can point to several successes including:
• Leveraging private and state investment in installation resulted in a cost to the Department of Energy of only $3,300 per installed charging station. Typical costs for installed Level 2 EV charging stations in the private sector are more than $5,800.
• All EV charging station installations were performed under the rules of the Davis-Bacon Act, which ensures prevailing wages were paid to the electrical contractors and technicians involved.
• More than 120 EV charging ports in 47 multifamily housing locations were installed.