King Arthur Flour Bakes Up Solar Powered EV Charging
August 19-2013
King Arthur Flour Bakes Up Solar Powered EV Charging
It is a story only Vermont could produce. King Arthur Flour, known as a founding B-Corp entity and heavily involved in sustainability, recently teamed up with Green Mountain Power, a local electricity utility that makes use of clean energy, to place a solar-powered electric vehicle station at the former’s flagship campus location. It is of a dual port design and will be available with its own dedicated “prime parking spots” in Norwich.
Like many of the electric car chargers out there already, the one at King Arthur Flour
is compatible with all electric vehicles on the market today. It includes customer-oriented features such as on-line and smartphone directions and reservations, driver notification of charge status, and effortless charging session initiation.
What puts it a little more on the unique side though is the three-pole, 36-module solar array it is paired with that is 9.54 kW net-metered. Built by Same Sun of Vermont, the project all total cost $51,900, with a grant of $17,500 from Green Mountain Power approved by the Vermont Public Service Board.
Electric vehicle growth is slowly happening in Vermont. As noted by Karen Glitman, director of transportation efficiency at the Vermont Energy Investment Corp, there were 282 EVs registered in 104 Vermont communities as of July 1, 2013, up from just 88 EVs at this time last year. During that same period of time, the number of communities with EV registrations has nearly doubled.
In the works for the Green Mountain State, meanwhile, are projects designed to build out EV charging infrastructure. One such happening is dubbed the Vermont-Québec Electric Charging Corridor, which will place a large number of Level 2 chargers along a 138 mile international corridor between the United States and Canada, which includes I-89 and Highway A-10, Rte 104 and Rte 133.