This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor on Aug. 23. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
As New Hampshire tries once again to prod more people into building public electric vehicle chargers, one of the few North Country charging sites is throwing in the towel because the cost of electricity is too high.
“I believe in electric vehicles, and people need a place to charge,” said Terry MacGillivray, president of Summer Fun Inc., which owns three businesses at 443 Main St. in Gorham where four Tesla Superchargers were installed in May. “If you’re depending on tourists — we’re relying on people going to Dixville Notch, going from Canada to the Ocean — and if you want the people from Rhode Island, from Boston, to come up … you have got to serve them.”
Despite this enthusiasm, however, MacGillivray plans to shut the chargers on Oct. 25, at the end of a billing cycle and after most of the leaf-peeping traffic has come through town. The electric bill has been too high. Net revenue of the four chargers through mid-August was almost $15,900, using the relatively high rate of 69 cents per kilowatt-hour, yet the electric bill has topped $32,500.
The decision is particularly painful for New Hampshire partly because of the site’s high-profile status as having the only Tesla superchargers north of the White Mountains, but also because of timing.
Friday, Aug. 21, was the deadline for applications to the state’s next round of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding. Roughly $17.2 million is up for grabs to build a public network of direct current fast-charging stations along major highways in the state.
New Hampshire is a laggard on public charging stations, and MacGillivray fears the current economic set-up means this latest effort could fail, since those who are selected must put up 20% of the cost themselves.
“Who is going to spend 20% of their own money on infrastructure if they’re going to lose money by turning it on?” he said.
EVs are the future
MacGillivray, who has owned a Tesla for 11 years, installed the chargers in Gorham at a cost of $407,000 under the Tesla Supercharger for Business program, while replacing the parking lot and upgrading the adjoining Citgo gas station. He made the investment, he said, because he knows electric vehicles are the future.
He has drawn a good chunk of traffic. In fact, more than 1,200 vehicles have charged since the site opened, almost half of them non-Teslas.
“We have real data now. If anybody from the government wants to know, will people use it or not? Just shoot me an email,” he said.
But the losses have piled up.
Part of the problem for MacGillivray is that he just missed out on a temporary lower power rate for EV chargers called EV-2, which Eversource dropped this year. He has talked with officials, including Department of Energy Commissioner Jared Chicoine, in hopes of getting it reinstated by the Public Utilities Commission. That is unlikely to happen quickly.
But even with that rate, he’d barely break even, he said.
The high Eversource bill reflects one of the surprising truths of the power grid. It’s not just the electricity that is expensive; it’s the grid that carries the electricity which can be the real problem.
“Our July Eversource bill was $13,211.73, of which $10,679.64 was delivery charges,” said MacGillivray. Delivery charges cover the cost of operating poles, wires, substations and other equipment as well as building more of them; that portion of electricity bills has been rising in recent years.
He has also been hit by demand charges, a method of calculating monthly bills that depends on the highest usage during that period. Several cars charging at the same time can cause the demand charge to spike for the entire month.
The question he has posed to state officials: “How can New Hampshire create a durable commercial charging tariff that allows privately funded rural DC fast-charging sites to survive while still paying a fair share of grid costs?”
“I am encouraged by what has happened over the past several weeks,” he said. “This is no longer a situation where we are trying to convince people that there is a problem.”
