While most charging will likely be done at private (at home or private office parking) locations, public charging stations will play a critical role in a successful plug in vehicle ecosystem. As new innovations are introduced including faster charging stations or even battery swapping, public stations will become increasingly important.  PGR cities are among the first to purchase and install stations.  Below is the beginning of a list on how partner cities strategically deployed their charging stations.

Denver Area
Denver and the local Clean Cities Coalition identified 100 sites as good locations for charging stations as part of a grant proposal.

Selection process:
1) We only considered off-street parking, and only parking lots/structures that are own/controlled by the City—we decided that we wanted to start as simple as possible, so initially we’re focusing sites that were easy to look after and didn’t involve any private partners (not that we would discourage installations on private lots—I think we have two hotels in the area that offer EV parking spaces).   This wasn’t too difficult, as we own a lot of public facilities and parking lots, so we don’t have any shortage of good sites to keep us busy.

2) Some of the sites identified were fleet-only (the main areas where our City vehicles park).  For the public locations, we went through our list of parking lots/structures, and winnowed the list:

3) Major venues with a lot of parking where people park for long periods (and/or offer monthly parking)—cultural complex, Perfoming arts complex, zoo, central/lower downtown public parking, etc.

4) Then we worked with our Library and Parks and Rec Dept and went through the list of libraries and parks/rec centers to select the best potentials based on:

a) Enough parking to reserve a space or two if we decided to make them EV-only at some point (our Libraries and rec centers are pretty popular, so often have full lots—initially we would probably start with “leave this space for EVs unless no other space is available” until there was reasonable demand).

b) Geographically distributed in as many neighborhoods/City council districts as possible.

c) Tried to find sites that had could be conveniently be used by City Fleet vehicles (areas park maintenance might park, or very close do other City gov offices) so that we could get double duty out of them.

d) Site that were near other private attractions—libraries that were situated in popular shopping/dinning districts.

e) Also took into consideration the Library and Rec folks’ general knowledge of where made sense—ruling out areas with vandalism issues, sites with typical customers that would be more-likely early-adopters (like lots of young professionals).

f) availability of power on the existing panels in the parking structures (although we focused on Level I charging stations as they are the least expensive and still provide access and visibility)

g) the electricity price schedule for each facility—out utility has a flat $/kWh charge for lower-consuming sites, but at larger sites it is combo of  a small $/kWh charge plus a high $/peak-kW ( We want to be mind full that we don’t end up bumping a facility into the next rate structure or otherwise don’t adequately plan for potential increases in utility cost from a jump in demand charges from level 2 charging.  Obviously the strategy for managing cost would vary depending on the type of unit installed and the model of service provided to users and if there is flexibility in recovering costs if needed. )

The biggest piece of the effort was just talking to and getting buy in from all the different folks that manage these sites—not just several different departments, but most of the cultural facilities, airports, and the library operate basically as independent entities.  It is nice to have all the sites aware and “on board” so we are ready to move ahead as we are able without having to introduce everyone to the concept.

Blue is fleet only, red is public