San Diego Gas & Electric has launched a $52.5 million pilot program that within three years will install 3,500 charging stations at 350 locations and promises to include every community that SDG&E serves.

The “Power Your Drive” project is aimed at boosting electric vehicle ownership and comes with a $45 million price tag to install the stations that SDG&E will own and maintain.

There’s also a $7.5 million education program that will include electric vehicle, or EV, test drives for the utility’s customers, with an emphasis to include ratepayers in low-income areas.

“We want to make sure installations are available to everyone, not just the wealthy,” SDG&E CEO Jeff Martin said at a Monday morning news conference.


The move comes in large part because of clean air initiatives mandated by Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Legislature. Brown has called for 1.5 million EVs on the road by 2025, and Senate Bill 350 calls for 50 percent of the state’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2030.

The SDG&E pilot program was OK’d by the California Public Utilities Commission in January.

The program aims to place charging stations in businesses, multifamily residences such as apartments and condominiums, as well as low-income areas where EV drivers are hard to find.

“Now that the cost has come down (for EVs) and now that we’re seeing many of these vehicles going into the secondary market as used cars, we need to think about that for our community,” said Herman Collins, a member of the Bayview Baptist Church in the Encanto area in southeast San Diego.


Collins said his church, located on a 60,000 square-foot site, is looking to have two to five charging stations installed.

Customers who use the charging stations will be billed by the company for each charge. SDG&E officials say that customers will be able to use a smartphone app to make sure their electric cars get charged when energy prices are at their lowest rate.

“We’ve got so much solar (energy) in the middle of the day, sometimes there’s an overproduction of solar, so we’ll put it in the cars,” said Hanan Eisenman, SDG&E spokesman. “We’ll also encourage them to charge in the evening, off-peak, so it doesn’t affect peak usage times.”

The combination of the utility owning the charging stations and offering a real-time energy pricing mechanism during off-peak hours is the first program of its kind in the nation, Eisenman said.


Chula Vista is working with SDG&E to install 60 charging stations at its city facilities and other locations.

“That’s really going to encourage residents to let them know they have a place to charge electric vehicles,” said Chula Vista mayor Mary Casillas Salas, who attended the Paris Climate Summit last December.

San Diego Council member Mark Kersey, an EV driver, said dramatically increasing the number of charging stations will reduce what’s called “range anxiety” — the concern that the vehicle will conk out before the driver gets home.

“Infrastructure is everything,” Kersey said at Monday’s news conference.


But Adrian Moore, economist and vice president of policy at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, which calls for free-market solutions to energy issues, criticized the SDG&E program.

“It’s clearly outside their basic mission, which is to provide affordable access to electricity,” Moore said, adding that electricity in California relies heavily on natural gas, a fossil fuel. “They could use that money to to help keep (electricity) costs down for the poor.”

Martin said SDG&E is not only responding to state mandates but meeting giving ratepayers what they are calling for.

“Customers want real time information, they want cleaner sources of energy, they want access to technology and innovation and this program is right in the wheelhouse to providing what our customers want,” Martin told the Union-Tribune.


Who pays for the project?

Martin said the $45 million pilot program will be paid by SDG&E customers while the $7.5 million education program comes from the company’s shareholders.

He said SDG&E won’t make more money through the “Power Your Drive” project.

“If we stop selling electricity today we make the same amount of money if we sold a lot more electricity,” Martin said. “We’re really in the infrastructure business.”