Charging wars

[Richard230]

According to an article published in my newspaper yesterday written by Dana Hull of mercurynews.com, Silicon Valley workers who own EV's are fighting with each other over work place charging stations.  In particular the German software company SAP had installed 16 EV charging stations at their Palo Alto campus in 2010.  At that time only a few of their workers owned electric vehicles.  Now there are 61 EV owners and they are all fighting over the 16 charging stations.  These disagreements include pointed emails to owners who's cars have completed charging asking them to move so someone else can charge there.  Other workers are pulling the plug on cars that seem to have already recharged.  Actions like this have been given the name "charge rage".

SAP is now drafting charging guidelines for its EV-driving employees.  SAP's Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf,  says that "If you want to attract the best people and top talent, EV charging is a must-have.  It's a recruitment tool".  ChargePoint believes that there should be at least one charging station for every two EV owning employees.  CEO Pat Romano is quoted as saying that "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead. Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars.  If you are gong to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."

The article goes on to mention that Yahoo has more than 100 EV owners and they fight over the limited number of chargers regularly.  A former Yahoo worker said that he pulled the plug on a Chevy Volt so that he could plug in this BMW Active E - leading to a very upset Volt owner who blasted him with email messages.

Infoblox has 260 employees at its HQ in Santa Clara, of which 27 have plug-in cars, but the company only has 6 charging stations.  To deal with this problem they have created an "EV user" distribution list, as well as a shared calendar for managing charging slots.  Using the company's Outlook system, you can only book a 2-hour window for using a company charging station. "But Rule No. 1 is: No one touches anyone else's car without permission", according to Infoblox's VP of marketing, David Gee (and the owner of a Tesla Model S).  No mater what your employee classification is in the company, everyone has the same rights to use a charging station.  Mr. Gee says: "It's a highly egalitarian community.  Public shaming is the best motivator."

[Shinysideup]

Thanks for posting this, Richard.

I guess we may have to develop a "netiquette" of taking your turn at the charger. We could call it a "turniquette".

I've unplugged a few vehicles to get access to their cords, but only when it was clear that the charger had completed its task (the readout told me so.). The other day at the South San Francisco municipal parking lot was one instance, where I was able to insert the Empulse in the space between a Volt and a Leaf to gain access to the charge cord of the Leaf that had all three lights in it's dash-shelf lit (nice feature!) and was drawing but a tiny amount of current.

I've also had my bike unplugged by a Tesla owner when I couldn't get back to it in time after the SMS message from the charger told me it was complete. I didn't have any problem with that.

When private companies have X EV's and X-n chargers, then some sort of scheduling rules and/or shared calendaring seems inevitable. Or fist fights. Oh wait, these are high-tech companies, so they would be virtual battles carried out on smart phones, I guess.

I'm glad that 99.9% of my charging sessions are in my garage, where only twice in the last year I've gotten distracted upon my arrival home after work to the point I've forgotten to plug in. Then, upon awakening in the morning, there's nobody to yell at but me, and that dumkopf don't listen!

[Richard230]

The SSF Engineering office (the door of which is locked all the time), which I visit occasionally, is located in one of the street-facing shops (the one with one-way glass and a city logo on the door) located on the ground floor of the Miller Avenue garage, so I am familiar with the Leafs that seem to be parked in front of the charging stations all day long.  I seem to recall that use of the two charging stations (and maybe even the parking stalls) are free to electric vehicles, which is why those spaces seemed to be occupied all day long. 

[Shinysideup]

Yep, all free. There's even a handicap stall with a Chargepoint station in it, next to the elevator/stairway. A really nice guard let me use it one day if I parked the bike on the sidewalk and not in the parking place, saying he's never seen a handicap placard vehicle there using the charger, which indeed was coated in dust.