Electric vehicle charge stations

[hipp5]

Hello everyone,

We're currently writing a new Municipal Plan and Land Use (Zoning) Bylaw. We're hoping to actually plan ahead a little bit and develop forward-thinking regulations. One issue I see coming down the pipeline is electric cars, or more specifically, their charge stations.

Do any of you have experience with electric charge stations in your community? What do we need to consider? I suspect it's easy enough to have have something like a single station as an accessory to a business like Walmart, but what about charging kiosks run as a stand-alone business on their own parcel of property? Then I'm looking at full-on battery swap stations like those proposed by Better Place. It seems to me like they're basically gas stations without the gas. Any thoughts on those?

[DetroitPlanner]

Battery swap stations???? That sounds like a giant pain.

We pretty much let GM and Ford do what they want. But then again, Detroit ain't your average city.

[boiker]

whether it is gasoline, automobile servicing, or battery-swapping. The sites are going to generate traffic, desire visibility, be loud, *maybe* odorous. For now, zone them like gas stations. Once we learn more of their use, battery storage risks, traffic generation, etc we can tweak.

As for single site EV charging stations? I made them accessory uses in all districts.

[DetroitPlanner]

I am looking at a Ford C-Max (plug-in hybrid) for my next vehicle. Based upon my co-worker's experience with his Hybrid Focus, he has over 100k on it and has yet to need batteries changed. To be honest right now, plug ins are expected to be a small part of the future fleet of vehicles. Plug in stations will need to be either at home or at work for them to do any good. Most of the ones I have seen are just two, maybe three in a row in scattered locations. I don't think that this will result in any extra trips if done in a diffuse manner. I don't think that battery replacement places will generate much traffic either. I had always thought that this would be something done at a dealership.

I work with an engineer who thinks that these are run by a bunch of D cell batteries and you only need to replace the ones that no longer recharge. While it sounds interesting, it also sounds like he is living in Fantasy Island. Does anyone know of any such vehicle? I myself have never ventured into the battery supply areas on the plug-ins/hybrids.

[Suburb Repairman]

whether it is gasoline, automobile servicing, or battery-swapping. The sites are going to generate traffic, desire visibility, be loud, *maybe* odorous. For now, zone them like gas stations. Once we learn more of their use, battery storage risks, traffic generation, etc we can tweak.

As for single site EV charging stations? I made them accessory uses in all districts.

Agree. I would just amend your definition for a "fueling station" to include this, assuming it is called out separately in your ordinance. In my case, all of that simply falls under vehicle servicing.

For single-site, we treat them as accessory uses (though they are not specifically called out, they meet our definition of accessory use).

[hipp5]

Tghanks for all the input so far. I think the big difference for us between a charge station and a gas station is that we would probably allow a charge station in our wellfield areas, but gas stations are a big no-no. So I can definitely see us treating them differently if just for that reason alone.

@DetroitPlanner: When I talk of battery swap stations I don't mean places to replace aged batteries in a standard electric car. Some companies (try googling "Better Place") are proposing a system where rather than charging your car, you'd just go to a station and they'd swap out your empty battery for a fully-charged one. The idea is to do away with the concern people have that charging takes hours while filling with gas takes 5 minutes. Something like this would have significantly more infrastructure than a plug-in charging kiosk.