Duke Energy Proposes $56M Pilot to Promote Electric Vehicle Charging And Provide School Buses
Duke Energy Corp. is ready to move ahead with the second phase of its electric vehicle pilot program in North Carolina. The company is asking regulators to approve a $56 million effort to build on its $25 million pilot approved last year.
Lon Huber, Duke’s vice president for rate design and strategic solutions, says the pilots are designed to help determine how to effectively and fairly promote the adoption of electric vehicles and build the infrastructure needed to support their use.
All of it is designed to support Gov. Roy Cooper’s Clean Energy Plan, which aims to more than triple the number of electric vehicles in the state to 80,000 by 2025.
“We’re covering the whole market and then, on top of that, we’re ensuring that this infrastructure gets to the populations that could most benefit from it — like rural populations, like multifamily dwellings and low-income populations,” he says. “So we’re really trying to cast a wide net to close that (electric vehicle) infrastructure gap out there.”
The proposal includes $13.5 million to underwrite part of the costs of 60 buses for 10 to 15 schools. State or local school officials — paying the equivalent of the purchase price for traditional diesel buses — and Duke Energy Carolinas or Duke Energy Progress would provide the additional money to upgrade those purchases to electric vehicles.
The pilot would also include up to $28.5 million to install and operate as many as 180 fast-charging stations along major highway corridors in the state.
It would spend as much as $6.5 million on installing standard chargers for public use in rural and low-income communities and up to $6.5 million more on publicly accessible chargers at apartments and other multifamily projects in low- to moderate-income counties.
The new round of initiatives was developed in collaborative discussions with interested groups, as ordered by the N.C. Utilities Commission when it approved some of Duke’s EV proposals last year.
Duke had sought permission for $76 million on a number of programs. But the commission scaled those back significantly to $25 million in the first round.
It instructed Duke and the commission’s Public Staff, the state’s utility customer advocate, to convene a stakeholder group of interest parties — including energy advocates, local government groups and charging industry manufacturers, among others — to review plans and recommend effective program spending to promote adoption of electric vehicles.
The stakeholder group was asked to review the pilot plan for charges for customer-operated Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. That program is based on a successful set of charges for outdoor lighting customers. It is designed to have low upfront costs for customers and is flexible enough to accommodate various charging equipment systems.
The costs of installing and the chargers and the maintenance of the equipment are built into the monthly charge, including the energy costs.“We’re really trying to replace cost anxiety and range anxiety (about the need to recharge) with affordability, confidence and convenience,” Huber says.
The stakeholder will continue to meet and advise Duke, Huber says, as it proposes additional pilots and takes information from the current pilots to fashion permanent programs.
Duke also recently proposed dynamic time of use rates to allow customers to recharge vehicles at a lower cost at low use times. Customers will also have the ability to sell electricity back to the grid when it is not needed for their vehicles and recharge them later for use.
The company asked the commission last week to approve a permanent program for provide credits to multi-family project, non-residential customers and homebuilders to install the infrastructure needed to install charging stations at a later time.
There would be a monthly credit for the multi-family and non-residential customers. Homebuilders would receive a one-time credit of $150 toward the installation of the necessary infrastructure.
The commission decision last year slowed the pilots and other electric vehicle programs for Duke somewhat because of the need to establish the stakeholder groups and review proposals. Huber hopes Duke can move more quickly now on future pilots and programs.
“We want to try to move quickly on those with stakeholders and get even more options out there,” he says. “I could see filing something, assuming there’s a consensus there with Public staff and stakeholders, in the next three months or so.”
Source: bizjournals
