An EV owner tooling
around Duneland suddenly realizes his battery is dying. He logs in to the
ChargePoint network--there’s
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 Chesterton’s--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.”