New CEC solicitation for DC fast chargers along N-S highways

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user 340

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Some good news: The California Energy Commission has finally released their solicitation for proposals for installing DC fast chargers along I5, Hwy 99, and Hwy 99. $10M total funding is offered. The solicitation says that this will "complete California’s north-south portion of an Electric Charging Highway Corridor (ECHC). California’s DC fast charging stations will complete the connection to the West Coast Electric Highway1 at the Oregon border and allow electric vehicles to travel through California south to Baja California." That said, the 101 region being considered is only between San Jose and Buellton.

Proposals are due November 19 with awards to be announced in Jan 2016. That means that the awarded stations will likely start becoming operational in early 2018 if the process happens at the some rate as the CEC's 2013 solicitation.

There is some interesting info in the main proposal document, including a description of the selected regions and the current and planned DCFCs in those locations. Here is a link to the solicitation docs:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/contracts/GFO-15-601/
 
This is a good thing, but it's soooo late. Also, these routes (I-5 and CA-99) are already partially covered by existing grants. I'm eagerly awaiting these installations that have already been funded. However, this may be the only hope for DCFC on the 101 corridor between San Jose and San Luis Obispo.
 
Yes, it is too bad that the CEC took so long to get this solicitation out, and there will certainly be a delay between the award announcements and operational stations. Hopefully both the state and the bidders have learned how to speed this up some from their previous efforts. Let's hope that some of these become operational in 2017 and that eVgo and maybe other parties continue rolling out DCFCs along highways as well.

I was impressed by the $10M on offer - that should be enough to fund dozens of installations. What got them to provide an adequate amount? I'm not sure, but the solicitation notes that CA (along with WA, OR, and BC) signed on to the “Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy” which includes a commitment to transition the West Coast to clean modes of transportation. One action is to expand the use of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), aiming for 10 percent of new vehicle purchases in public and private fleets to be ZEVs by 2016.

Perhaps Sacramento has caught onto the fact that there will be very few FCVs in 2016, so hopefully this has increased near-term support for BEV infrastructure.
 
tgreene said:
Perhaps Sacramento has caught onto the fact that there will be very few FCVs in 2016, so hopefully this has increased near-term support for BEV infrastructure.
Yeah, that and the terrible experience being had by FCEV lessees in the LA basin these days. Not being able to drive your car because you can't refuel it due to stations being offline - that's bad.

I just opened the "Application Manual" doc and found that the already funded stations that are not yet complete are all single CHAdeMO stations. I would have thought that they would be dual-standard stations. At least it is good that this solicitation is implicitly requiring consideration of those already planned stations.

One other interesting point is that the two northern segments - Red Bluff to OR border and Sacramento to Red Bluff - have a combined allocation of $3.77M out of the $10M.
 
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