Winter Garden Magazine March 2015 | Page 39

Going Green: Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Need to charge your plug-in electric vehicle or golf cart? The City of Winter Garden has 4 ChargePoint Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Stations -- one on the southeast side of City Hall, 2 in the Boyd Street Parking Lot (across from the Downtown Pavillion), and one at Newton Park on the northwest side of Tanner Hall. The City of Winter Garden received these Coulomb Technologies ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations as a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The $37 million grant objective is to accelerate the development and production of electric vehicles to substantially reduce petroleum consumption, reduce greenhouse gas production and create jobs. The stations, part of the ChargePoint Network and installed in June of 2011, are free until activity increases. The ChargePoint Network makes plug-in electric vehicle use a practical reality for drivers who can now top off their vehicle batteries wherever they park - at home and at convenient public locations such as at work, or at the marketplace. Drivers prefer the network because makes it easy for them to locate available public charging stations along their commute route and to track their vehicle’s charging performance from anywhere there is an Internet connection, even via ChargePoint’s mobile app. Drivers rely on the network to keep them informed of their vehicle’s charging status at all times. By delivering electric fuel for drivers with ChargePoint charging stations, electric utilities, sensitive to the increasing demand on their electric grid, are using the network to collect data to forecast grid enhancements necessary for EV programs and services. The standards based, secure, open architecture allows utilities to scale from one to millions of stations and provides many options for utilities to integrate with their existing business and meter management systems. Each ChargePoint station in town feature NEMA 5-20 and J1772 connectors. ChargePoint facts: World’s Largest and Most Open Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Network • • • • • • More than 20,400 charging spots More than 7,900,000 charges delivered Drivers plug into a ChargePoint station every 7 seconds Drivers have avoided over 7,000,000 gallons of gas and 52,000,000 lbs of CO2 emissions More than 168,000,000 electric miles have been driven on the ChargePoint® Network ChargePoint® stations have dispensed more than 56,000 Megawatt hours (MWh) of electric fuel Reliability: • • • • 24x7 driver support 24x7 centralized station monitoring Remote diagnosis, repair, and upgrade of stations Smartphone support on Android and iPhone march 2015  |  Winter Garden Magazine   |  39