Chesterton Tribune

 

 

Electric vehicle owners can now charge their rides Downtown

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By KEVIN NEVERS

EV owners are gonna get a charge out of this.

On Thursday, the Town of Chesterton officially cut the ribbon on its brand-new electric-vehicle charging station, located in the 100 block of Broadway, on the north side of the street, by Thomas Centennial Park.

It’s a two-vehicle charging station, a $7,000 piece of infrastructure which NIPSCO provided free under its IN-Charge Electric Vehicle Program--after the town agreed to pay half the cost of installing it, up to $3,000--and one of 32 such stations at 25 sites in Northern Indiana.

You’ve probably already seen it while driving through the Downtown. It’s the gadget that looks like a space-age gas pump, with a couple of reserved-for-EV-use-only parking spaces right in front of it. Built by ChargePoint, it’s one of 22,000 stations in what the company calls the world’s largest EV-charging network.

It work likes this.

An EV owner tooling around Duneland suddenly realizes his battery is dying. He logs in to the ChargePoint network--theres an app for that--and discovers that the closet charging station is in the 100 block of Broadway in Chesterton. He coasts into town on mere volts and finds, fortunately, that both berths at the charging station are momentarily vacant. He parks in one, swipes his ChargePoint card--which works like an EZ Pass at the pay-to-charge stations (although this one isn’t, yet), and plugs in. Twenty minutes later he’s on his way again, with juice enough to get him home.

That’s the scenario envisioned by Deb Backhus of South Shore Clean Cities, the not-for-profit advocate of clean fuel- and vehicle-technologies chosen to administer IN-Charge. “The idea is to top you off and get you back on your way,” she told the Chesterton Tribune, not to re-charge an empty battery, which depending on the EV model can take six to eight hours..

Thirteen of the station sites currently operating in NIPSCO’s service territory--like the Town of Chestertons--are available to the general public, said Kevin Kirkham, manager of business development for NIPSCO. The rest are mixed. The Community Healthcare System has installed stations at several of its hospitals to serve staff but visitors are welcome to use them too. The station installed by Urschel Laboratories Inc., on the other, is solely for the use of employees.

In addition to the charging station itself--which ChargePoint sells to NIPSCO at a discount--the Town of Chesterton also gets a two-year ChargePoint network software agreement. That will allow the town, when it’s ready, to charge EV owners to charge.

Under the IN-Charge program, EV owners themselves may be eligible for a credit of up to $1,650 toward the installation of an in-home charger and free charging between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. daily.

How many EV owners are there in NIPSCO’s service territory?

That’s a pretty easy question for Backhus to answer, because nearly every one of them has taken advantage of IN-Charge: around 180, the “vast majority” of them in Lake and Porter counties.

Backhus noted that the town will be able to quantify the number of vehicles which actually pull into the charging station for a jolt, because the software package tracks usage data.

“With the activation of this charging station in Chesterton, we will not only continue moving forward with green initiatives but hope also to draw more visitors and shoppers to our historic Downtown as an economic driver,” Town Manager Bernie Doyle said. “It’s about offering alternatives to traditional fuel and being good environmental stewards for our community.”

 

Posted 6/19/2015

 
 
 
 

 

 

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