EV Charging Everywhere!
Wherever there is a 120v outlet

See the DOE report! Now Everyone is recognizing the advantages of Simple 120v charging at home and at work.

Federal Policy for 120v outlet charging is in place ($3 a week!) and agencies can install more 120v outlets!

This is a NO COST - SELF HELP project! . . . . . . . .

See EVADC's Charger Installation Guidelines.
See Presentation to MD EV Council (download)
See the DOE's Workplace Charging Challenge
Notice the DOE Does Allow EV Charging in their facilities. See details.
See why the GAO prohibition on EV charging in the Capitol Area does not apply

See Powerpoint on EV misconceptions.
See NPR interview by Jessica Gould or hear it (2 mins).
See EV speech at Driving Maryland Green 11 Oct 2012

Download IEEE Paper on L1 Charging. Provides supporting justification for this concept.
Download Comments to Michigan PSC on high speed charging (not L1 related, but a good summary of overall charging).

Other Related Pages:

Talk to the manager of every Garage, Church, Hotel or Bar you visit where you see existing 120v outdoor outlets!
Download a sample letter to your Free, Paid, Condo, or Mall parking garage with existing outlets.

The outlets exist already in most garages and parking lots! All they need are signs to tell us how to pay for the electricity. This is either $2 a day, or $20 to $40 a month depending on range.

Monthly Pass: For employee or Apartment/Condo parking, the authorized EV owner or employee plugs into any convenient 120 VAC outlet in the garage. No special chargers or installation is required. A few such existing exterior 120 volt standard outlets can usually be found on most facilities everywhere (at least equal to the number of EV's that work there for the next few years!). If not, they should cost little to install. See photo at upper right.

Buy A SIGN! (or download an image above)... Climate Stewrds of Greater Annapolis tries to buy signs to have on hand for people that find willing outlets, but we need a sponsor to help defray the costs. When we ask outlet owners to pay $20 for a sign, we have little success. But when we GIVE them a sign, they are alsways happy to put it up!

This Simple Signage on Existing 120v Outlets will accomplish FAR MORE than the $50 Million government rebates being offered for the installation of expensive level-2 quick chargers which are not needed at home (8 hours sleeping) or work (8 hours working) for employees. This 120 volt charging at work can almost double the effective commute range of EV employees. Expensive L2 Quick chargers at work are generally idle 83% of the time! (see analysis below) because cars charge in an hour or so and then sit idle. Managers do not want employees going to the parking lot every hour to play musical chairs with their cars to share a few expensive L2 chargers that can fully replenish an average commuter EV in under an hour! . . . Let them plugin to any 120v outlet the full 8 hours and get the same charge instead.

The Employer/Employee relationship already exists for pay-as-you-go coffee messes, and here the employee's Electric car plugged into a 120v outlet is drawing no more power than a coffee pot. In addition, he/she is even willing to fully pay for the electricity up-front.

The cost for 21 workdays a month of 8 hours of electricity from any standard 120 volt 15 amp circuit to make up for an incoming commute is shown in the figure below right. Nearly 70% of all commuters would use less than 81 cents a day while charging at work. Employees are able to purchase monthly charging passes based on their home-of-record distance to work. Using an electirc rate of 15 cents per KWH then $20/month would cover 70% of all commuters driving under 16 miles to work, and $40/month would cover the serious 32 mile trip to work by a Leaf or other road-warrior commuter as shown in this plot of commute distances and percent drivers. Maybe $5/mo would cover for an electric Motorcycle and $2/Mo for an electric bike. And this simple system cannot be abused!

Power drawn is Self-Limiting. This arrangement cannot be abused since an EV simply cannot draw more than about $1.80 a day from a 120 volt 15 amp outlet during an 8 hour day. Any more current and the 15 amp breaker will trip. If one tries to stay plugged in for say 16 or 24 hours to draw more government/company electricity than he has pre-paid, he runs up against the problem of a full battery! Once his car's battery is fully charged (which for 2/3rds of all EV's is under 4 hours) then no more power can be drawn from the outlet! Assuming the EV owner always charges up at home the night before, then the charge time at work on a 120v outlet is directly proportional to his one-way distance to work as shown in the next graphic to the right.

This is SIMPLE and NO COST. Enough outlets EXIST NOW for the next year or so. Just say YES and let us Payin-to-Plugin. We must get off foreign oil ASAP and show how easy it is to commute in an EV.

For Example, I've been trying for over a decade to get permission to pay-for and plug into the outlet sitting right there within 6 feet of my car parking space at work (see photo at top). But no one in the government can figure out how to take my 50 cents a day and grant that authority. Maybe a simple sign will do it...

Range Anxiety and Public Charging Infrastructure: There is too much hype and media hand wringing over EV range. Over 67% of ALL Americans live in single family detached homes. This means that over 205 MILLION car owners already have an EV charging point at home (any 120v outlet) and all they need is an outlet at work to charge during the 8 hours the car is parked there. And we don't need a $6000 quick charger installation to do it!

L1 Time to Charge: An 8 hour overnight or charge-at-work can replenish a 32 mile trip to or from work in under 8 hours. The expensive L2 Quick charger can do it in 2 hours but is not needed by most commuters during the 8 hours of sleep and the 8 hours of work! Talking Point: Level 1 standard 120v outlets at-work can fully charge over 90% of all commuters! (see L1 chart at right). .

Focus on the Benefits: Instead of focusing on how long it takes to fully fill an EV battery from L1 home charging, we should instead focus on how many miles-per-charge we get during an 8 hour charge at Home and at work. Since any EV will gain about 32 miles of charge during 8 hours on a standard outlet, that can give EV's that charge at work a total daily range of 64 miles - more than a single charge can do in a Volt for example.

If your L1 Outlet trips on your EV: Some home/outdoor GFCI outlets are very old and do not meet the more recent specs that are less sensitive to transients. If your old GFCI outlet trips when you plug in your EV, consider replacing it with a GFCI Designed specifically for EV charging as shown to the right. They are readilly availble on line from from Home Depot.

LEVEL-1 CHARGERS AT WORK: Enabling the use of 120v standard outlet Level-1 chargers at work should be the #1 goal of EV Infrastructure roll-out in the USA. As shown at right, installing level-2's is an 83% waste of resources. However, enabling the use of 120v outlet charging (Level-1) can meet the charging needs of 92% of all USA commuters with EV's and still use less than half the Level-1 charging capacity! As shown here, these 90% of all EV commuters simply plugged into a 120v outlet at work, would leave work fully charged in under 8 hours.

One Million EV's by 2015: If you think 1 Million EV's is a small number, remember, there are over 400 different models of gas cars being sold by 45 manufacturers to meet the broad distribution of public demand for vehicles that match their personal need. Even the #1 selling gasoline vehicle in America (Ford F150 pickup truck) only sells to 4% of Americans! And, by the way, it costs more than the Volt or the Leaf! If only 1% of drivers bought an EV, that would be 3.5 million EV's! Since 67% of ALL drivers already have an L1 charger port at home (120 VAC outlet), this simple proposal to provide L1 outlets at work would INSTANTLY DOUBLE THE RANGE of every EV in the hands of commuters and at NO COST to taxpayers. Even Convenience stores are installing 120v charging outlets.

Double the Range: This is truly a no-cost program that will revolutionize the progress towards electrification of transportation and its concomittant environmental and economic benefits by doubling the range of EV's for commuters and employees. It can also demonstrate to other large Company facilities the benefits of such an approach on their campuses. Charging at home and at work constitutes 70% of the charging pyramid as shown below.

120v OUTLETS AT WORK CAN MEET 97% OF THE NEED! Too many bureaucrats and employers are too focused on the expensive Level-2 and L3 EV quick charging stations (which is only 3% of the charging-at-work need as shown here to the right). They focus on public EV charging infrastructure (only the tip of the triangle above) as a way to combat Range Anxiety which in effect only adds to range anxiety by continuing the gas-tank/gas-station legacy thinking. This emphasis on charging speed is completely misplaced. At every level of the charging pyramid, except the top 0.3%, charging is not a separate go-to process but is just an added 5 seconds on the parking process. The only place where EV charging speed is paramount is along the interstates, where the only reason for being there is to charge and charge fast to get from point-A to point B. Every other level of the charging pyramid (the other 99%) is simply charging conveniently while parked. And when you are parked for 4 hours or more, 120v standard outlet charging will satisfy nearly 97% of the charging-at-work or at least 69% of all charging-away-from-home need. Park at-work, Plug-in at work and double your range! As shown at right, Even the Maryland EV Council agrees that over 97% of all charging-at-work can be met with simple 120v outlets!

L2 Chargers at work are ineffective: The expensive high-cost Level-2 quick chargers at work locations and campuses makes little sense for the employee or employer. Employers are not going to want their people doing musical-chairs in the parking lot every hour and rotating one EV off the charging station, and then rotating another one in its place? No. We need 120v convenience outlets on every lamp post and in many cases they already exist. We simply need the means for EV owners to pre-pay for the electricity with a Monthly Charging Pass so that then they get permission to plug in.

Payin-to-Plugin SUMMARY: The Level-1 120v outlets exist, or can be installed at minimal cost. Lets go for the low hanging fruit with respect to EV charging and enable the existing 120v outlets scattered around first. Writing a letter to every Garage, hotel, apartment, condo, church or Bar owner that has existing 120v outdoor outlets can jump-start EV acceptance overnight at no cost.

You can also download a condensed one-page(f/b) summary handout of this web page (see top of page).

Download a 1 page paper on this tax topic.

Bob Bruninga
IEEE National Committee on Transportation and Aerospace
EV Association of DC
wb4apr at amsat dot org

See also the page on Payin-to-Plugin for easy use of 120v outlets at work.
See also the page on EV and Gas Road and Environmental Use Taxes maintaining Parity
See also my Solar PHEV, a work in progress...