Los Alamos County Council adopted an EV charger plan during its work session March 17. Photo by Kirsten Laskey/ladailypost.com

By KIRSTEN LASKEY
Los Alamos Daily Post
kirsten@ladailypost.com

A plan for County-wide electric vehicle (EV) chargers was adopted March 17 during the Los Alamos County Council work session.

Having this blueprint in place for where to install EV chargers is another step forward to reaching the County’s goal of being carbon neutral.

As Los Alamos County Sustainability Manager Angelica Gurule said during the March 17 work session, “These plans are tools meant to help guide thoughtful, data-driven decisions over time and our goal is to use them as a road map by regularly evaluating fiscal responsibility, prioritizing the investments that we are making, building partnerships to further expand EV charging and expand EV infrastructure in ways that support EV adoption, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to our community’s needs.”

To effectively check all these boxes, Josh Schacht of Stantec, the contractor hired to assist with the EV charging plan, explained the plan had undergone revisions.

The revisions, he explained, were “to either increase or better clarify the equity of this report. I say increase and clarify because we made some changes that are changing where we recommend charging or rather adding locations where we recommend charging so that’s what I mean by increasing equity. And when I say clarifying the equity, a lot of the changes we made to this final draft are just how we talk about the process that was used to get here …”

Schacht said there are three areas covered in the plan: multi-family equitable charging, public charging and education and engagement.

For multi-family equitable charging, the plan’s analysis forecasts the needs of people and not necessarily houses, he said. Multi-family properties are accounted for in the process and in load projections so as land use changes, these projections will be accurate. Multi-family housing was one of the key factors where chargers were recommended.

Schacht added regarding public charging in the draft plan, the focus was on multi-family housing, commercial spaces and places where people leave their vehicles for long periods of time like the grocery store. On top of that, he said the public requested there be a focus on other places including residential areas and in White Rock.

As far as education and engagement, Schacht said two in-person community sessions were held, which helped lead to more recommended locations for EV chargers. He added that housing density was a big driver of this model. In this final version, Schacht reported that the plan significantly built up how multi-family properties are talked about and described. A location’s suitability for EV chargers was driven by multi-family properties.

Schacht added that the plan includes references to other forms of charging like light post chargers that the Board of Public Utilities recommended to meet demand with cheap and small-scale solutions. Light post chargers, Gurule explained to the Los Alamos Daily Post, are existing light posts modified to add an EV charger and provide accessible, convenient charging to residents who don’t have access to a conventional EV charger.

Additionally, four new chargers were added in residential areas: at Urban Park and the Hilltop Shopping Center in Los Alamos and at Smith’s and Overlook Park in White Rock.

As for the next steps in the plan, Schacht said phase I locations for EV chargers will be addressed first. Phase I locations are considered the most suitable, most highly requested and most logistically important to install in the near term.
“This plan is about proposing a network of chargers,’’ Schacht said. “The exact implementation of these chargers is going to demand data that is not yet available.”

He explained this data will be collected once the County “sees how much these first chargers in phase I are used, what the return on investment is like for those sites as well as the sites you already have underway and how these sites in phase I impact equity and then adjusting your future implementation based on what is learned from those.”

He added that “from a communication standpoint that means continued external engagement to tell people about these chargers, how to use them, help decrease those barriers to obtain an EV and charging an EV and it also requires the County to interface intentionally with many of the recommended private locations because these are locations where the County doesn’t have the jurisdiction to build the chargers themselves like the Smith’s location. This is an opportunity for close collaboration with those privately owned locations to show the demand that this report has found at those areas and encourage them to be partners as part of these processes.”

This will clearly be a very iterative process of installing infrastructure in highly desirable areas, seeing how it is used and impacted and then installing more infrastructure based on what is learned in this process, Schacht added.

Council Chair Randall Ryti asked about the number of EV charging locations in Los Alamos versus White Rock proposed in the plan.

He noted the locations are significantly higher in Los Alamos than in the White Rock community.

Gurule said a lot of the locations are based on density and where people charge their EV vehicles.

It was learned from this study that the majority of households are single-family homes and if they have an EV, they typically charge the EV from their home.

“So, the sites were selected based on where people are traveling to and where density is the highest,” she said.

The adopted EV charger plan will be presented to the Board of Public Utilities April 15.