Source: NYC.gov
As I mentioned in my last post, I was impressed with the NYC/FLO curbside L2 chargers near my apartment before and after a recent road trip. The chargers were installed as part of a pilot program that rolled out 100 chargers from June 2021 to July 2022 through a collaboration between the city and Con Ed, with FLO serving as the provider responsible for charger installation and maintenance. The admirable goal of the program is to accelerate EV adoption, particularly in low and moderate income neighborhoods. Earlier this month, DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez released the pilot’s first evaluation report. After reading it, I think the thorough approach the city has taken towards measuring success is at least as impressive as the chargers themselves.
The city has done a great job capturing data. That the DOT is releasing this report at all is a sign of its data-driven approach to EV charging and marks an encouraging shift from the norm. This is the most detailed analysis of L2 charging I have seen, and includes information that I have never seen from a charging provider, let alone a municipality. This is the kind of data that allows governments to understand whether their initiatives are actually driving EV adoption. I highly encourage anyone who is interested in EV charging to read the report in its entirety, but I’ll highlight some of my favorite stats here.
Source: NYC.gov
1. An example of unusual data: DOT actually measured the rate at which chargers are ICEd (blocked by an Internal Combustion Engine car), and concluded it’s about 20% of the time. While most EV owners and EVSE operators generally know that ICEing can be a problem, DOT took this on not only by issuing 3,200 tickets, but by installing time-lapse cameras (and presumably tasking someone with reviewing the footage) to get a sense of the scale. Even during my time at Tesla, where I had highly detailed charging data, we didn’t have accurate information on ICEing frequency or duration. Though the report shows that incidents of ICEing lasted, on average, less than half an hour, it still represents a huge impediment to increasing utilization of the chargers. Hopefully we can chalk this up to teething problems as people come to accept the idea of dedicated EV charging spaces, but it is certainly worth tracking.
Source: NYC.gov
2. ICEing and other issues affecting charger availability may take on new importance given another interesting detail in the report: the relatively high utilization of the chargers. Here, utilization is defined as the overall percentage of time when a charger was plugged into a vehicle (excluding ICEing). On average, the chargers reached 34% utilization by December 2022. A third of the locations saw over 50% utilization and some reached as high as 69%, which is a particularly impressive feat considering the ICEing problem. This is an unqualified success, since 60%+ utilization is about as high as can reasonably expected of any public charger considering the relatively low turnover overnight.
3. The most surprising part of the report is its claim to 99.9% uptime. Although I have seen very few complaints on Plugshare about inoperable NYC/FLO chargers, and the status lights on the chargers in my neighborhood have never indicated anything other than a functional charger, 99.9% sounds almost too good to be true. The design of the FLO chargers that locks the plug to the post until a session is initiated may have some effect on the reliability and discourage vandalism. It’s also unclear whether the city is using the same uptime calculation as the NEVI guidelines, which excludes factors like electric utility service interruptions, internet or cellular service provider interruptions, and outages caused by vehicles. In any case, anything close to this reliability is encouraging for the feasibility of a wide scale deployment of curbside L2 in the city. That said, it has only been a year or so, and I will be interested to see how this number changes over time.
4. Perhaps most unsurprisingly, the chargers located in neighborhoods with higher median household incomes (Manhattan, Williamsburg, Park Slope) tended to have the highest utilization. Less wealthy neighborhoods, which are less likely to own EVs, such as the Bronx, Eastern Brooklyn and Queens, tended to have lower usage. This is despite a higher density of EV chargers inside of paid garages in the wealthier neighborhoods. So we have confirmation that if the city installs chargers where EVs are popular already, owners will use them. Measuring the impact of the program on the stated goal, driving EV adoption in low and moderate income areas, will take time. Most Americans only purchase a car every six years, so patience is necessary when quantifying the effect of this infrastructure on EV adoption. Whether and how those trends change will be interesting to watch in the coming years, but the instrumentation is in place.
Measuring the impact of the program on the stated goal, driving EV adoption in low and moderate income areas, will take time. Most Americans purchase a car only every six years, so patience is necessary when quantifying the effect of this infrastructure on EV adoption. Whether and how those trends change will be interesting to watch in the coming years.
For example, according to the report, the city has seen a steady increase in EV registrations of 2-3% per month. That is about a thousand new EVs per month in a city where fully half of all vehicles are street-parked. It’s clear that there was pent-up demand for curbside charging in some neighborhoods, and the availability of curbside might encourage EV adoption in others. That’s true for me, anyway–the presence of available L2 charging in and around my neighborhood is certainly going to inform my next vehicle purchase decision. One way to measure the program’s impact on adoption would be to not just track EV registration growth but also to compare rates of change in neighborhoods with curbside L2 versus those without.
Either way, this report is encouraging both because of the preliminary success of the curbside program itself, and because of the rigorous, data-driven approach the city has taken to its rollout. Given the success of the pilot, I look forward to the expansion of the program and am eager to see how these figures change in the next edition of this report.