New York City announced a significant new electric car charging program today that will bring 50 fast-charging stations across all 5 boroughs.

The deployment of new stations will start next year and extend through 2020.

Today, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $10 million investment from the city for the project, which is in partnership with electric utility Con Edison.

The Mayor commented:

“New York City will continue to invest in the new technologies we need to reduce our emissions, especially in the face of Trump’s abdication of leadership on climate. By helping develop the infrastructure necessary for electric vehicles, we’re going to make it easier than ever for New Yorkers to switch. This is another step towards aligning our action on climate change with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree stretch goal.”

New York City wants to add a lot of electric vehicles on its roads over the next decade and they are starting with their own fleets.

Last year, the city bought 80 all-electric Chevy Bolt EVs at a good discount for a shared fleet initiative and planned to add more EVs to their fleets. Those vehicles would benefit from more charging stations.

As for the state of New York, they recently introduced a new $2,000 EV incentive aimed at the Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt EV, and other long range affordable EVs.

Electrek’s Take

The announcement today is important for a few different reasons. Firstly, it focuses on fast-charging stations, which is something that has been lacking until recently as companies focused on deploying level 2 chargers.

Secondly, we are talking about a lot of charging stations here. They are referring to them as “fast-charging hubs” and plan to have “up to 20 chargers per site”. That’s good news since aside from Tesla’s Supercharger stations, you rarely see more than 4 to 6 chargers per station.

Currently, New York mostly has slow level 2 chargers in and around the city (307 sites with a total of 526 level 2 chargers and only 16 fast chargers), but that’s about to change.

Not only could those new hubs add up to 1,000 fast-chargers, but Tesla also plans to add a lot of fast-chargers through its Supercharger network expansion. Like we recently reported, they plan to build 8 more Supercharger stations in Manhattan alone by the end of next year.

Sometimes it’s hard to judge how certain markets are doing in terms of aligning their EV adoption rate with their charging station deployment, but it looks like New York is now going in the right direction.

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