AEP Ohio to build car charging stations as part of Columbus Smart City initiative

Published on September 08, 2017 by Chris Galford


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As the city of Columbus, Ohio settles into its pursuit of a Smart City initiative this summer, American Electric Power Ohio has partnered with its hometown to establish a series of new electric vehicle charging stations.

The agreement, the details of which were sorted out between AEP Ohio and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), is also meant to lay the groundwork for a reliable distribution grid and prepare the city for growth of electric and automated vehicles.

Smart cities like Columbus are using deals like this to prepare for climate change, create electric infrastructure, convert existing public vehicle fleets to electric counterparts and incentivize shared ride options.

For moving in this direction, the city received $40 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation and another $10 million from Vulcan Inc. Yet an important part of actualizing that investment comes from the involvement of other players.

And AEP supported the move from the ground floor.

“Why should the utility be involved?” Ram Sastry, vice president of Infrastructure and Business Continuity for AEP Ohio, said. “Our message here is: this activity is all demonstration activity to seed the market, to gain data, to see how people use the chargers. You don’t want to put infrastructure where it won’t be used or maintained. The data we collect will help us build a much bigger market in the future.”

“While the numbers aren’t large, it’s a stepping stone to learning customer charging patterns – a long, ongoing sustainable program in the future,” Sastry told Daily Energy Insider.

AEP is to build 300 charging stations for its role in the initiative. These will be a mix of what Sastry calls pure public and site owner operations. The bulk of these will be workplace-based stations, but others will be doled out to approved applicants among public spaces and apartment buildings. The charging station push also includes 75 DC fast charging stations.

Originally, the company had intended to install residential chargers as well, but during the filing process, dropped that push. That was largely due to the fact that people can easily purchase their own personal chargers online.

“While we’re not providing residential charging to our customers at this point, we are working to make sure the chargers they get can optimize with our system,” Sastry said.

AEP Ohio’s initiative is part of a settlement addressing key elements of its Electric Security Plan, including EV charging, renewable generation and distribution grid reliability through 2024.

With as big an initiative as this, some costs will be passed onto consumers.

“For the whole package — including EV charging stations and other elements like micro grids, the average customer would see a 50 cent (per month) increase in their bill,” Scott Blake, communications consultant principal for AEP, said.

Customers pay for the charging stations, but site owners can apply to AEP Ohio to recover portions of their initial construction costs. According to AEP figures, up to $9.5 million in rebates will be available under the program, with amounts paid out to vary by station type, public access and public or private nature of the site owner.

“This is not about us selling more electricity, but about more people being able to buy a vehicle of their choice, with their utility being there to provide for them,” Sastry said.

Yet this is about more than merely investing in current electric technology. Smart Cities, Sastry noted, are in part about keeping a lead on technology, and for AEP, that means autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles are currently seeing an increased industrial research and legislative push globally, largely for the safety they can provide by removing driver errors that lead to fatalities. Building routes and connections for them is another important part of Columbus’s Smart City vision, and AEP sees them as the future of the electric marketplace as well.

“We really believe autonomous vehicle technology is very close,” Sastry said. “And we think they will be electric. It just meshes very well with electric.”

“That adds to our desire to make sure we have the right infrastructure in place,” he said.