Category: Planned Sites

On May 5, 2014, Professor Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware presented a proposal to locate electric vehicle charging stations in Rehoboth Beach to the city commissioners. The officials agreed to consider the proposal which intrigued some of the commissioners although some of them balked at the idea. The commissioners asked City Manager Sharon Lynn to investigate possible locations for the charging stations.

Dr. Kempton is leading a program in partnership with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) to place a number of EV charging stations throughout the state at 50 mile intervals. DNREC is providing the funding and UD is implementing it. Kempton’s group has identified strategic geographic locations to place the charging stations based on analysis of the travel capabilities of limited range EVs such as the Nissan Leaf.

Here is the PDF of the entire slide deck from the presentation on May 5, 2014.

The network is being designed to primarily support EV travel within the state with a secondary purpose as a destination charge facility. The goal is to have stations within 50 miles of each other with easy on/off access to highways to enable en-route charging throughout the entire state.

The funding will be provided by an $80,000 state grant and he is asking for help to identify a suitable location within the city of Rehoboth Beach and perhaps some small effort towards installation. These will be 16-kilowatt stations according to several news reports.

Listen to the presentation and comments by the city commissioners on this audio recording, starting at 0:16:00. The objections seemed to be based on the perception that there are very few plug in vehicles. Others thought that public funds should not be used to provide charging facilities and that they should be supplied by private businesses, such as hotels, to attract customers. Mayor Sam Cooper said, “I’m agnostic on electric cars. If you want one, fine, but you got to know what you are buying. You can’t expect to be bailed out by the city of Rehoboth Beach. If there is a demand, it’s ripe for some private entity to do it.”

Some of the city leaders seem to think that nobody travels there in an electric car. I’ve driven there twice from the Washington, DC area and have sent the Mayor, Commissioners and City Manager an email letting them know that I do visit Rehoboth Beach in an electric car and that I support the UD/DNREC proposal to install a couple of high-power (16 kW) Level 2 charging stations in town. Here is contact info for the Rehoboth Beach Mayor, Board of Commissioners and the City Manager.

UPDATE: The charging stations are now installed and operational. August, 2015

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler announced a public-private grant program to build a statewide network of DC Fast Chargers for electric vehicles.

The specific locations for the charging stations are yet to be determined but are expected to stretch from Garrett County to Ocean City to Southern Maryland and beyond. In the coming months, the $1 million grant program will be advertised to private sector businesses and will be administered and monitored by the Maryland Energy Administration. The departments of the Environment and Transportation participated in the development of this innovative program.

“Electric vehicles are the wave of the future and this network will position Maryland as a leader in the use of fast-charge technology,” said Attorney General Gansler. “This initiative will enable current and future EV owners to use their cars more often, foster job growth in Maryland, keep Maryland money in Maryland and help achieve Maryland’s long-term air quality goals by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

A General Motors manufacturing facility in Baltimore County produces the electric drive motors for the Chevrolet Spark EV, currently only for out-of-state sale. The development of these fast-charging stations will help encourage a bigger EV market in Maryland. Fifteen other EV models, such as the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf and the Ford Focus EV, are currently sold in Maryland.

Maryland would be among the first Eastern states to introduce DC Fast Charger stations to facilitate highway travel. The stations, which must be located near major highways, will enable some electric vehicles to reach an 80% charge in less than 30 minutes. Currently, Maryland EV owners charge their cars overnight at home or use a growing network of Level 2 charging stations provided at workplaces, commercial locations or retail businesses, which take several hours to fully charge.

At last count, an estimated 3,000 plug in vehicles were registered in Maryland. While the sale and use of electric cars has increased in recent years, Maryland has set a goal of 60,000 electric vehicles in the state by 2020 — the equivalent of 2.3 percent of all registered passenger vehicles in Maryland.

The money for the project was secured from a settlement with American Electric Power Service Corp., over violations of the Clean Air Act. The legal case was brought by Attorney General Gansler, the Maryland Department of the Environment, multiple other states, the federal government and 13 citizen groups.