Southern California Edison aims to help site hosts install 38,000 EV chargers

July 20, 2021 by admin 39 Comments

Southern California Edison has opened its Charge Ready program to businesses, government agencies and other nonresidential customers. The initiative has a budget of $436 million and a goal of adding some 38,000 new EV chargers throughout SCE’s service area over the next five years.

Under the Charge Ready program, SCE installs and maintains the supporting EV charging infrastructure, while site hosts typically own, operate and maintain qualified charging stations.

“As SCE is preparing its electric grid to serve the increase in transportation electrification, more charging equipment is needed to give EV drivers and fleet operators the peace of mind that they will be able to charge whenever they want,” said Carter Prescott, SCE Director of eMobility and Building Electrification. “Today, we are asking our customers to join with us to ensure that an effective framework is in place for a clean air future for our communities.”

The large-scale program is modeled after a much smaller pilot that ended in May, in which SCE partnered with businesses, local governments and other organizations to add more than 2,700 charge ports at nearly 150 sites.

The first site to participate in the pilot was the city of Lynwood, where six chargers were installed to charge the city’s fleet of EVs, and eight more were installed in the civic center public parking lot.

SCE also helped the city of Long Beach install 102 ports at five sites, including the city’s fleet services yard and several public attractions. “The best part of participating in Charge Ready is being able to provide a benefit to both our public and our fleet,” said April Walker, the city’s Project Management Officer. She added that Long Beach would not have been able to deploy the large number of chargers without Charge Ready’s assistance.

Charge Ready helped to install 200 ports at Fairplex, the site that hosts the Los Angeles County Fair and 400 other events throughout the year. “Being an early adopter, we are now actually able to help others who are contemplating expanding their infrastructure through Charge Ready, and we appreciate that partnership with SCE,” said Fairplex interim CEO Walter Marquez.

SCE will continue to focus on providing charging infrastructure at workplaces, public parking lots, schools, hospitals and destination centers, as well as condominium and apartment complexes.

In the interest of making EV charging available to all Californians, Charge Ready sets a target to locate 50% of the chargers in state-designated disadvantaged communities, and those that suffer most from the negative effects of air pollution.

In addition to Charge Ready for passenger EVs, SCE has launched a program for trucks, buses and off-road industrial equipment called Charge Ready Transport, which aims to add charging to support at least 8,490 medium- and heavy-duty EVs over a five-year period. The $356-million program is also modeled after the Charge Ready pilot.

Source: Edison International