I was inspired by a PM to elaborate a little on the views that I expressed above and why I presented them the way that I did:
One of the reasons that I make many of my posts here is not only to pass along new news but also to promote discussion on the forum. In particular, it is my view that electric charging stations
logically should be installed at existing gas service stations - instead at random locations where EV owners are not expecting to find a charging station, are unlikely to find a station unoccupied, or need to be driving on to private property where they may not be welcome if they are not a customer of the local business. It just makes real sense to install the charging facilities at gas stations as most of the stations that I have seen have plenty of extra paved space to locate a charging station or two where vehicles could stay for a while without impacting the operation of other customers at the station.
Unfortunately, the limited exposure that I have had at gas stations has been that their employees and managers are scared of the EV trend because they believe that will cut into their gasoline sales and eventually put them out of business. Apparently, Big Oil is doing nothing to change this view - which I don't think is correct. A minor change to their business model to accommodate electric vehicles could replace any lost income, and perhaps even increase it. But right now the various parties have their heels dug-in. Change will be hard.
My other issue is with our utility company, PG&E, being in charge of this project. I have dealt with them off and on over the past 40 years. I used to work at a local city's engineering department and one of the things that I did was to manage the city's end of installing existing overhead utility wires underground. While doing that I discovered that PG&E had no respect for their customers, or even our city, for that matter. They just did whatever they wanted, were able to spend our money set aside in a dedicated account to perform this work without any oversight or accounting, and were allowed to interpret state law by the state PUC in any matter that they wished, even if their interpretation was exactly contrary to the written law.
When they blew up an entire neighborhood in the city next to me a few years ago by spending gas pipeline inspection funds on management salaries, bonuses and payoffs to the PUC commissioners, instead of inspecting gas pipelines, their attitude to the public and their ratepayers finally started coming to light. So I don't have a good feeling when this utility is granted a huge sum to install 7,500 electric charging stations with apparently little oversight into how they spend the money, design the chargers, or pick locations for their installation.
Sorry about being kind of negative toward what seems like a good idea to expand the EV technology, but I just have this uneasy feeling about letting a pubic utility company do the work. They just don't have my confidence.
