Bay Area EV Adoption Getting Lift from Grants, Other Funding Opportunities

By Linda Dailey Paulson

Source: Newsdata

An infusion of state and federal funding, along with public-private partnerships, is accelerating electric-vehicle adoption and charging infrastructure in Oakland and throughout the greater Bay Area.

Central to these efforts is community choice aggregator Ava Community Energy, which has been working to get more public charging infrastructure installed.

“At Ava Community Energy we recognized that building a network of fast chargers across our community—mostly in areas close to multifamily housing where overnight charging is often not accessible—was one of the biggest actions we could take to drive the energy transition locally,” CEO Nick Chaset said in a June 1 LinkedIn post.

“We have been working with two great partners—EV Realty and Calibrant Energy—to bring this vision to reality. We are working together to build our first 11 fast charging depots including our first project in West Oakland that we expect to start operating this fall,” Chaset wrote.

The Ava service area has one of the fastest EV adoption rates in the U.S., according to Lori Bilella, Ava’s director of clean-energy services.

“Currently, there are more than 114,000 EVs domiciled in Ava’s service territory,” Bilella said in an email to California Energy Markets.

“Our service area is seeing some of the highest EV adoption in the country, with 32% of all new light-duty vehicles sold in 2023 being 100% electric, according to the California Energy Commission,” she said.

A CEC dashboard says Alameda County has 97,131 zero-emission vehicles on the road with 5,817 chargers. Of those, only 560 are DC fast chargers; the remainder are Level 2 chargers.

EV adoption throughout the nine-county Bay Area is also on the rise. Bay Area Air Quality Management District spokesperson Ralph Borrmann said some of this can be attributed to a push from state policies, including Executive Order N-79-20, signed in September 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The order set targets for both ZEV adoption and charging infrastructure.

Borrmann told California Energy Markets via email that the Bay Area has a target of adopting 1.5 million ZEVs by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050. “At the end of 2023, there were a total of 448,440 EVs registered and operating on Bay Area roads, representing 8% of the region’s light-duty fleet,” he said. Of those, 77 percent were battery electric vehicles; 22 percent were plug-in hybrids; and 1 percent were fuel-cell electric. He said the U.S. Department of Energy showed about 13,450 publicly available charging ports were located in the Bay Area at the end of 2023.

An April Realtor.com-Cox Automotive survey ranked the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area as the third most EV-friendly housing market in the nation. Of the area home listings on Realtor.com, 3.8 percent were deemed EV-friendly. It also said there were 29 EVs per public charging port in the region.

The top markets on the list were San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and Salt Lake City. Eight of the top 20 spots were California metro areas.

Another funding infusion for area charging is a $5.8 million CEC grant to FlashParking for a large-scale charger demonstration project in Oakland through the agency’s Convenient, High-Visibility, Low-Cost, Level 2 Charging program, or CHiLL-2, which is designed to increase access to chargers within high-density, low-income or disadvantaged communities. EV adoption is especially challenging for renters who don’t have ready access to charging infrastructure. Each project is required to have a minimum of 25 percent match funding in either cash or in-kind contributions (California Energy Markets No. 1759).

“Residents of multi-family housing typically can’t influence the installation of charging infrastructure in the buildings where they live, creating a real barrier for EV adoption that residents of single family homes don’t typically encounter,” Ava’s Bilella told California Energy Markets. “Ava is building out our public DC fast charging network to help provide relief to this issue and see if through offering reliable, accessible charging infrastructure near our customers who live in multi-family housing, if that will bend the EV adoption curve further within our service territory and help more of our customers join this electrification journey.”

In its May 2 announcement, FlashParking said it is creating an “EV charger innovation lab” in downtown Oakland. This includes 446 Level 2 chargers within a 1.5-mile radius, as well as two battery storage systems. The target completion date is the end of 2025.

“For residents living in downtown areas where at-home charging isn’t an option, reliable and convenient public charging is key for continued EV adoption,” CEC member Patty Monahan said in a news release. “The CEC is looking forward to Flash’s deployment of hundreds of Level 2 chargers throughout downtown Oakland to be a model of successful public charging.”

The City of Oakland did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Ava on June 4 also announced its 2024-2027 community investment grant for development and operation of EV charging stations. “This grant was in direct response to the call from our customers for more community ownership of EV infrastructure by our customers,” Bilella said. It is designed to create locally owned and operated EV charging sites in “local equity priority communities.” Ava expects the grant to support one to three charging sites with 10 to 50 or more Level 2 charging stations.

These grants are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Borrmann said there are numerous opportunities for Bay Area residents to apply for EV and EV charging incentives. Utilities, community choice aggregators, local-government agencies and state and area government agencies are all sources of funding that includes grants, incentives, rebates and tax credits.

Some of these include BAAQMD’s Clean Cars for All and Charge! programs; vehicle rebates through Pacific Gas & Electric and Peninsula Clean Energy; and charging grants through CCAs including MCE and Sonoma Clean Power, as well as the California Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Project, or CALeVIP, other state programs.

“Some incentives may be stackable with one another to further reduce the cost of EV adoption and installing EV chargers,” Borrmann said.

These programs are focused on light-duty passenger vehicles; however, the Bay Area has the fifth-busiest container seaport in the nation and a vast network of freight corridors. Bilella said other groups are working to coordinate the electrification of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles in the region.

A June 6 California Air Resources Board report said one of every six new medium- or heavy-duty trucks sold in the state during 2023 was a ZEV. This puts the state ahead of its Advanced Clean Truck targets by two years, which is key to reducing emissions in the state. CARB said trucks contribute a quarter of California’s on-road greenhouse gas emissions.