Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams unveiled a brand new electric vehicle charging station today at the County Building. It’s the first publicly operated EV charging station in the valley.
The new EV charging station located at about 21st South and State street will provide electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 a quick and convenient way to fully charge their vehicles while out and about the city. It costs $2 to connect to the charger and then $0.20 for every kWh used. Mayor McAdams says while it’s only one charging station, he hopes it’s the beginning of a growing infrastructure that will help ease people’s concern about range anxiety.
“Hopefully you charge up at night, you go about your day, and you come home and charge when you get home," he says. "But people need to know that when they go out and they’re running errands or they’re going to work and they have some things come up that were not anticipated that there’s a fallback plan that’s easy and convenient.”
The level 3 EV charging station cost about $80 thousand to buy and install. Almost $40 thousand of that money came from the Governor’s Office of Energy Development and the Utah Clean Air Partnership, or UCAIR.
*Correction: The Governor's Office of Energy Development received a grant from UCAIR. The Governor's Office of Energy Development then helped the County offset the cost of installation. The county received approximately $40 from the Governor's Office of Energy Development, $11,500 of which came from the grant received from UCAIR.*
