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."
