NYC looks to kick its curbside EV-charging plans into second gear

Perhaps the only thing harder than finding a spot to park a car in New York City is finding a spot to charge a car.

Electric vehicle owners in the city could soon get some relief on that second problem, thanks to a $15 million federal grant to build 600 curbside EV chargers — the largest network of its kind in the United States and a step toward the city’s goal of building 10,000 curbside chargers by 2030.

The funding is part of a Biden administration program that has awarded $521 million to public EV-charging projects in 28 other states, plus the District of Columbia and eight Tribes.

In New York City, 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation — and the majority of that pollution comes from passenger cars. Moving away from gas-powered vehicles is not only core to the city’s own goal of converting for-hire vehicles to electric or wheelchair-accessible by the end of the decade — it’s also a necessity to comply with a statewide law banning the sale of new gas-powered cars after 2035.

But to successfully shift away from gas cars, EV chargers must be easy to find.

While EV drivers tend to fuel up their vehicles at home, in New York City most people live in multifamily buildings and few have their own driveways where they can park a car and plug into an at-home charger. That makes public charging stations especially necessary in New York, but good locations to build a dedicated charging hub in a dense city environment are scarce.

Enter: curbside EV chargers, which are accessible from street parking and can get a car’s battery up to 100 percent over several hours. If drivers plug in overnight, their vehicles will be ready to go by morning.

“We need chargers on the street, and this is what’s going to enable the transition to electric vehicles,” said Tiya Gordon, co-founder of Itselectric, a Brooklyn-based company that makes and installs curbside chargers in cities.

New York isn’t the only city pursuing this streetside approach. San Francisco launched a curbside charging pilot in June — part of its broader goal to install 1,500 public chargers by 2030. Boston is in the process of installing curbside chargers and eventually wants every resident to live within a five-minute walk of a charger. Itselectric will begin deploying chargers there this fall and installing more in Detroit, with plans to expand to Los Angeles and Jersey City, New Jersey.

So far, New York has installed 100 curbside chargers, part of a pilot program funded by the utility Con Edison. The program began in 2021, putting chargers next to parking spaces reserved for EVs. Drivers pay $2.50 per hour to charge during the day and $1 per hour overnight. Those chargers have seen better use than expected and are busy topping up EV batteries more than 70 percent of the time.

The 600 new chargers will also reserve parking spots for EVs and use the same pricing model as the initial pilot, according to the New York City Department of Transportation.

The city is still determining which EV chargers to use. In its Con Ed pilot, it chose the company FLO. But installing those chargers required digging underground to connect to a main power line, then patching up the street or parking lot — a process that’s not only expensive but time-consuming to get the right permits for.

The bill for FLO’s construction was $13.4 million — almost as much as the city’s new $15 million grant — to deploy just 60 chargers over six years. That per-charger rate would make it costly to install 600 EV chargers, let alone the 10,000 the city wants to eventually build. But there are less expensive approaches.

Voltpost, which installed two chargers in New York City as part of another pilot project, converts lampposts to EV chargers. Its model cuts costs significantly because it doesn’t require digging, said founder Jeff Prosserman, though it does entail upgrading the electrical capacity of streetlights from 120 to 240 volts. That can be done with a single wire bundle that connects to the lamp, Prosserman said, at a cost that’s less than the conventional charger model.

Prosserman declined to share specific per-charger costs, but said his company would be able to deploy 600 chargers within the $15 million budget and can retrofit a lamppost in one to two hours.

Another method for getting EV chargers close to consumers is connecting them to buildings — the model Itselectric uses. That also avoids the need to dig by tapping into energy already being sent to buildings. Each Itselectric charger costs under $10,000 to install, according to Gordon, who said the company could deploy more than twice the amount of chargers within the city’s $15 million budget.

“The power is already there at the exact right level, because Level 2 charger is the same as an electric dryer or electric oven that you would put into that building,” Gordon said, referring to the standard charging level that curbside chargers use. ​“That allows us to deploy chargers literally anywhere there’s a building and a curb.”

Neither Itselectric nor Voltpost is formally involved in the New York City project at this stage, though both say they intend to apply to DOT once it issues a request for proposals. A timeline for construction will be announced later this year, DOT said.

Once built, the hope is that the new curbside chargers will nudge more of New York City’s car owners to choose electric vehicles. While New York has more robust public transit options than most U.S. cities, offering residents a much climate-friendlier way to get around their city than even owning an EV, nearly half of its households still own a car. If the city is to decarbonize, those car owners — along with the city’s fleets of taxis, buses, trucks, and delivery vans — need to leave gas behind.

For all those vehicles, ​“we want to make sure they have the capacity to go from gas to electric,” Prosserman said. And that can happen only with the proper charging infrastructure in place. 

Correction: Voltpost upgrades streetlights from 120 volts, not 150 volts as initially stated in the story.