Going Green: Electric Vehicles and Charging Stations

GOING GREEN: Electric Vehicles and Charging Stations

CONTRIBUTING WRITER: Zachary Eichholz Sustainability Manager, City of Cape Canaveral

The Space Coast EV Drivers are a local club formed in 2014 dedicated to helping promote, educate and showcase all electric vehicles (EV) to the public in Brevard County. Currently, the growing club has 127 members and 116 electric vehicles, including all electric motorcycles and conversions of formerly gaspowered vehicle models. They were also in attendance at last year’s Founders’ Day.

City of Cape Canaveral Staff spoke with club members at a recent meetup to inform them about what the City of Cape Canaveral has been doing in terms of progressing its own EV infrastructure and its future plans to help further accommodate this rapidly expanding transportation sector. EVs are of particular interest to the City due to their growing adoption by other municipal fleets, extremely low cost to refuel per charge, increased torque and power, low maintenance cost and much lower carbon dioxide emissions over their life cycles when compared to their gas-powered equivalents.

As part of our commitment to sustainability, the City of Cape Canaveral has four publicly available level 2 EV charging stations, each one containing two ports. These stations are compatible with all EV models on the market today and are free to use. These four charging stations are located at City Hall (100 Polk Ave.), the Public Library (201 Polk Ave.), Manatee Sanctuary Park (701 Thurm Blvd.) and Banana River Park (901 Puerto Del Rio Dr.). The City will be installing six more dual charging stations within the next twelve months! This will put our Community ahead of any other municipality in the county in terms of the number of publicly available universal charging stations.

The City also utilizes one allelectric vehicle within its City fleet, a 2017 Ford Focus with a 115 miles of range. Soon the City will also be adding two new Toyota RAV4 hybrids to its fleet, with each capable of achieving over 40 miles to the gallon. As older fleet vehicles are retired, the City will continue to add more low and zero emissions vehicles. To view charging station locations, visit PlugShare.com or download the app to your device.

If you would like to find out more about the Space Coast EV Drivers Club and electric vehicles in general, come out to Cape Canaveral’s National Drive Electric Week event on Saturday, September 21st from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm at Manatee Sanctuary Park! This event is completely free to the public and there will even be test drives available. You can also checkout the club’s website here: spacecoastevdrivers.com.