One Utility's Plan to Build Thousands of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

"Southern California Edison is looking to increase the number of public electric vehicle charging stations in California by 16 percent," reports Steve Scauzillo. The investor-owned utility will "spend $22 million to offset the cost of installing 1,500 public charging stations at workplaces and multi-unit apartment and condominium complexes within its 50,000-square-mile service area."

If the initial project goes well, the utility hopes to expand that effort to add an additional 30,000 charging stations at a total cost of $355 million. Early indications from the workplaces component of that plan are already good. In a separate article, Scauzillo provides a dispatch from an event with potential customers about a week after the news was announced. There, large companies and organizations from a variety of industries indicated their interest in the potential of adding new electric vehicle charging stations.

SCE's electric vehicle charging station plans fit into a larger state plan to "put 1.5-million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025 for an 80 percent reduction in carbon pollution from the transportation sector by 2050," explains Scauzillo.