Public EV chargers: Will they ever be as reliable as a gas pump?

Everything’s going electric in California, it seems – including hospitals. The UCI Medical Center in Irvine, now under construction, will be powered exclusively by electricity at its opening, now scheduled for 2025. No natural gas pipes will reach the building complex.

This is a hospital, though, so the question does arise: what about power blackouts? The hospital will have carbon-burning diesel generators on hand, reports Lilly Nguyen of the Daily Pilot. But Joe Brothman, the hospital‘s facilities director, said the goal is day-to-day operations running on 100% electric power.

And what about cargo ships? We won’t see battery powered container ships go beyond the experimental phase anytime soon, but electricity is making inroads. A fascinating story about shipping pollution in the Conversation points out that significant greenhouse gas reduction can result from something called “cold-ironing,” where a ship shuts down its engines and runs on electric current while in port. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are leaders in cold-ironing. A new terminal with all-electric, zero-emission equipment opened at Long Beach in 2021, set up for cold-ironing. The Conversation piece goes deep on efforts around the world to clean up ocean shipping, and the political, economic and technological cross-current that get in the way.

Back to electric cars: California exceeded its target of putting 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the state’s roads and highways – two years ahead of schedule. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Rob Nikolewski reports that sales of EVs had been running flat but soared over the past two years, as more EV models from more carmakers hit the market.

“I think it’s a coming together of having the right policy standards as well as having the right market conditions,” said Josh D. Boone, executive director of Veloz, an EV advocacy group, told Nikolewski. Of course, that popularity puts even more pressure on the state and the charger companies that taxpayers are subsidizing to dramatically improve public charger reliability.