The solar-powered EV charging station in Tumwater could be a metaphor for Washington state’s climate policy. High cost. Poor value. And results far worse than promised.
As part of its climate strategy, the city installed a solar-powered EV charger last year. The reasoning was that using solar panels to provide electricity was more sustainable than getting energy from the grid. In fact, the opposite is true. The extremely high cost of the system and the very low usage means that the project is incredibly wasteful.
At the time we noted that the promises made by city staff about the performance were probably inaccurate. The real-world performance since then has been even worse than our estimates.
Last year, we estimated that Tumwater’s cloudy weather would limit the solar-powered charger to about 68 miles per day on average. Real-world performance is about one-third our estimate.
After 10 months in service, the system has delivered 1700 kilowatt hours of electricity to EVs, the equivalent of 6,800 miles worth of charge for a Tesla Model 3. When the system was installed, it was claimed the system could provide 300 miles per day. On average, the charger has delivered less than 8 percent of that amount, about 22 miles per day.
This is not unusual. During the first 100 days after Bellingham installed four EV chargers last summer, they delivered the equivalent of about 24 miles per day of electricity.
The environmental benefits of that amount of electricity are miniscule.
According to Puget Sound Energy, the electricity they deliver emits 830 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour (MWh). For the 1.7 MWh of electricity delivered in the first 10 months, that amounts to 1,411 pounds of CO2 which, at current Washington state prices, is worth $37.15 cents. Over the course of 12 months that would be less than $50 worth of CO2 reduction.
Tumwater’s solar-powered EV charger cost about $100,000, which is about $85,000 more than a standard, grid-connected EV charging station. Tumwater and taxpayers of the state of Washington (which subsidized the purchase) paid tens of thousands of dollars more to reduce the equivalent of $50 worth of CO2 per year. Even if the charger lasts 20 years – unlikely both because the unit will degrade and technology improvements over the next 20 years will make the system badly obsolete – that is less than $1,000 worth of CO2 reduction over 20 years for $85,000 today.
Washington’s EV charger grants encourage this kind of waste by distorting the costs. Tumwater taxpayers paid $12,742 for the charger. Even that amount is not justified by the negligible benefits, but state taxpayers added another $87,052 to the cost. City councilmembers could reason that most of the cost was being paid by someone else and justify wasting the money. And since the state doesn’t make any effort to determine if the money is well spent, nobody is going to take the time to calculate the cost and benefits. It is a pattern repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times across the state as state grants entice cities, counties, universities and other government entities to overspend on projects that yield virtually no environmental benefits.
Legislators and city councilmembers should do two things to make sure waste like this does not continue.
1. Require any climate expenditure meet a basic cost-benefit test to show that the environmental benefits of a project are greater than reasonable alternatives.
2. The state should require grant recipients, including cities and universities, that do not deliver promised environmental benefits should refund grant funding.
Without some basic standards of effectiveness and accountability, Washington’s climate policy will continue to fail to waste millions of dollars without yielding real environmental benefits.
