At the February 4 Pagosa Springs Town Council meeting, ChargePoint representative Rebecca Paruch enjoyed a generally positive reaction from the Council members when she proposed the Centennial Park parking lot as the best location for a “Tier Two” fast-charging station — for charging EVs (electric vehicles — to be located right beside LPEA’s not-so-fast EV charging station, installed last spring. ChargePoint manufactures commercial charging stations, and is no doubt pleased with the decision by the Colorado state government to spend $10 million helping to install top-of-the-line EV facilities all across the state.
I was left with the impression that the Town government has every intention of helping fund installing a $300,000 charging station within the next couple of months. Ms. Paruch was also proposing that the Town would operate and maintain the charging station following its installation. The final decision has not been made… but the general direction was positive.
A couple of days ago, the gas gauge on my Toyota van was getting close to the “E” so I made a trip uptown to the City Market gas station to take advantage of the 20-cents-per-gallon discount I’d managed to accrue on my “Value Card.” There are a couple of gas stations downtown — four miles closer to my home — but they don’t offer a “Value Card” discount on gas purchases, and besides, I needed a couple of food items. We were running low on bananas, as I recall. (I can always justify the four-mile trip to City Market when I need to fill up my gas tank.)
As usual, there were plenty of pumps open. The City Market gas station can accommodate about 10 vehicles at a time, and a fill-up takes — what? Five minutes max? I didn’t even notice my bank account dropping by $40 as I slipped my debt card into the slot and punched in my PIN. A pretty painless process.
Okay, so maybe I did generate a little bit of air pollution, driving uptown and back. But the air is always so clean up here in the mountains, I’m sure no one noticed.
And yes, maybe the oil companies did cause some environmental damage extracting and refining the gasoline I pumped into my tank.
And maybe I didn’t really need those bananas. But…
I stopped by Centennial Park yesterday afternoon to snap a photo of the existing La Plata Electric Association charging station — also manufactured by ChargePoint — I was pleasantly surprised to see a Chevrolet Bolt electric car making use of the facility. 
The photo shoot turned into an even more pleasant occasion, when the owner of the Chevy Bolt walked up the slope from the park path, and revealed himself to be an old acquaintance of mine: Udgar Parsons, long-time environmental activist and the founder of one of Pagosa’s more successful businesses — Growing Spaces.
Mr. Parson bought his Chevy Bolt — his first electric car — two years ago for $38,215. I know the exact price because Mr. Parsons showed me the original window sticker, which he keeps in his glove compartment for occasions like this one. The sticker suggests that a Chevy Bolt will save the average owner $4,000 in fuel costs over the first five years. Because the LPEA station is still offering free charging (until May?) Mr. Parsons might be actually doing better than the average owner, in terms of saved fuel costs.
Our short conversation, standing at the charging station, was quite enlightening, and I’m hoping Mr. Parsons will contribute some additional information as this editorial series moves into Part Three, tomorrow.
But one thing needs to be shared right away. Yesterday in Part One, I stated that — based on what I heard at the February 4 Council meeting — the current LPEA charging station can charge an electric vehicle in one to two hours, while the proposed ChargePoint “fast charging” stations would cut that charging time to maybe 30 minutes. Apparently, I heard wrong. Mr. Parsons explained that the existing LPEA charging station delivers about 7 kW of power. To fully charge his car at the existing LPEA station takes about 9 hours — not “two hours.”
Chevy Bolt owners can also charge their battery at home, using ordinary 110 volt household electricity. But it takes about 26 hours to fully charge your battery that way. Or so I understand.
However, the average daily use — for the average US electric vehicle owner — involves a commute to work and maybe some shopping. 40 miles round trip? Just plug your car in, when you get home, and you’re topped off for the next morning. You don’t need to stand there for five minutes while the gas tank fills up. Pay your electric bill once a month.
The situation is a bit more challenging if you’re a tourist, and you’re planning to travel 250 miles in your EV… because you will pretty much drain your battery. Does your hotel have a charging station? Can you “fill up” somewhere?
It might appear that the $10 million investment in new “fast charging” stations, by the Colorado Energy Office, is aimed mainly at the state’s tourist industry.
I listened back to my recording of the Town Council discussion with ChargePoint representative Rebecca Paruch, and heard her say that the “power block” proposed for the new “fast charging” station would initially deliver up to 156 kW. Apparently, some electric vehicles can accept no more than 50 kW. When I visited the Chevy Bolt website, it appears that you need a modified charging port in order to use the “fast charging” stations like the one proposed by ChargePoint.
And if the Town actually decides to dive headfirst into the EV charging business… and if they understand that the taxpayers will be subsidizing this charging station for the first eight or nine years… and if the future unfolds the way we expect… well?
I concluded Part One of this editorial series with a sarcastic comment. At least, it was intended to be sarcastic:
Old pickup trucks from the 1960s, still on the road. That’s the real problem.
I was reacting to a (ridiculous) claim cited in a recent Denver Post article. According to reporter Bruce Finley, Colorado Auto Dealers Association president Tim Jackson accurately pointed out that most Coloradans looking to buy a car or truck probably don’t want to fork out the money for an EV (electric vehicle) even if they might qualify for tax rebates — up to $7500 on federal tax returns and up to $5000 on Colorado tax returns, while they last. (The tax rebates are available only to the original purchaser, so a second-hand EV doesn’t qualify. And the credits are set to expire within the next few years.)
But Mr. Jackson also noted, according to the Denver Post, that that modern gas-powered vehicles pollute much less than those made in the 1960s. “The problem is old cars that are still on the road.” In other words, buy a new car, folks.
According to Consumer Reports, the average lifespan of today’s cars is about eight years, or 150,000 miles. This statistic suggests that most cars — getting tangled in traffic jams, and polluting the air, and contributing to the need for vast parking lots in Denver and other Colorado cities — are less than 10 years old…
…and old cars from the 1960s are not, in fact, “the problem”. The “problem” is rather more complicated. And the solution some people are proposing — electric vehicles — is only a partial solution, and might in fact create its own problems, if we’re not careful.