Allan Appel Photo
Klee, Hausladen, and Heitman give the Volt a jolt.
Starting today you can not only charge those holiday presents at the boutiques in Westville Village — you can charge your car, too.
On Wednesday afternoon, state Commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection chief Rob Klee, city traffic czar Doug Hausladen, and others in the city’s green brain trust gathered at the Park New Haven Whalley-Blake Parking Lot to inaugurate the city’s newest EV or electric vehicle charging station.
Instead of the customary ribbon cutting, officials had fun marking the occasion with a ceremonial charging of Klee’s state vehicle, a Chevy Volt.
It’s the sixth location citywide, and the 15th public plug. (Each of the stations has more than one plug.)
The Whalley-Blake station, which has two plugs, cost $10,000. It was paid for with a $2,000 grant from the state’s EVConnect fund, and the balance from Park New Haven’s operational budget, said Hausladen, who, in addition to his traffic duties, is acting director of Park New Haven (aka the city’s parking authority).
Klee, Westville Alder Richard Furlow, and Hausladen.
The opportunity to apply for the grant was spotted first by Jessica Feinleib, an active member of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) and the owner of an electric vehicle.
WVRA Executive Director Chris Heitman appeared at Wednesday’s event, where he showed off not only the parking lot’s new two-plugged charging station but also a new paint job and the rotating decoration of the lots boundary wall by local Westville artists.
Installation of the charging station is an opportunity to help attract even more shoppers to Westvile by letting them know if they drive electric vehicles, they can charge up while shopping, Heitman said.
“We are the closest public charging station to Exit 59 on the Merritt [Parkway]. So for travelers coming down, they can feed their car and their belly in Westville [ restaurants and stores] at the same time,” he added.
As prez of the WVRA, Heitman has long provided a human charge to the neighborhood.
Feinleib’s husband, Michael Slattery, attended the event. He said that after Feinlab alerted the city, Park New Haven’s Executive Director David Panagore, now departed from the job, got the ball rolling with the state’s EVConnecticut charger incentive program.
Hausladen, Panagore’s successor, and the city moved ahead with the project. The devices are manufactured by the Enfield-based EVSC company.
They are level-two chargers, meaning they provide more than the level one or household-style device. Level two delivers 220 volts of electricity. That could give Commissioner Klee’s vehicle about 80 percent of its total charge in a few hours.
The devices retract after use. The cable does not touch the ground, so that a person in a wheelchair can use it unimpeded, explained Dan Shanahan, the director of sales and marketing for the company.
And if it ever gets cold again and you need to pour electrons into your vehicle, no problem. The plugs are designed to function well down to, er, minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
In addition to the 15 public plugs in New Haven, Yale University locations and at Southern Connecticut State University have their own.
Click here for a story about the installation of a charging station in the garage beneath the Omni Hotel in 2012.
The city’s six public charging stations are deployed this way: three plugs at the Air Rights Garage, three at the Temple Street Garage, three at Union Station, two at the Sherman/Tyler parking lot, two on the public lot on Orchard street, and now two at the Whalley-Blake lot.
Two charging-station applications are in process for the Crown Street Garage, confirmed Jim Staniewicz, chief engineer for Park New Haven.
“That would mean that we’ve covered all the downtown garages,” Hausladen said.
The First “Range Confident” State
Statewide, Connecticut has 202 charging stations, with 409 plugs. That’s good news for drivers of electric and hybrid vehicles who at times are concerned with “range anxiety” — worries that the juice will run out on the road.
“We have made the state the first range-confident state” in the nation, Klee claimed.
Klee estimated that people own 3,000 to 4,000 electric vehicles in the state. No one knewhow many of those, like Westvilian Carl Edelen’s Tesla (pictured), are New Haven-based.
To raise the number of EV drivers, the state offers consumer incentives — - to the tune of $3,000 in rebates for individual purchases of clean cars —as well as new incentives for state and municipal fleets.
Why is that important?
“Forty percent of annual bad emissions are from gas and diesel-powered cars, the single largest cause of asthma and pollution in the state,” Klee said. “We’re not going to solve the problem on our own, but we can be a model.”
This is great. But, in terms if harmful emissions, what could be worse than a school bus? Aren't we sending mixed messages to the youngest members of our community by shuttling them around in diesel-powered buses that push out dirty, black smoke from the tailpipe while we teach them about ecology in the classroom?