Planners gathered in Will County this week to discuss building a network of charging stations along Interstate 80 for vehicles powered by electricity and natural gas.
Infrastructure will soon be in place to help the nation shift from using gasoline and diesel to fuel cars, trucks, school buses and other vehicles. Energy created from fossilized carbon harms the environment when burned and worsens the effects of climate change.
“The cars are coming, we need to build these now,” Naperville Public Works Director Dick Dublinski said Wednesday during a half-day conference at Joliet Junior College. “What we’re doing here is making the world a better place.”
The Chicago Area Clean Cities coalition organized the event that brought together representatives of utilities, manufacturers, government and other interests to discuss a rapidly approaching future in which most vehicles will be powered by alternative, or alt, fuels.
Like buggy whips and dial-up internet modems, gas stations will one day be a thing of the past.
“The focus of the program is talking about federal and state policies and programs, in particular incentives that could be used to reduce initial capital investments and ongoing operating expenses,” said Tim Milburn, conference moderator and representative of Chicago Area Clean Cities.
Milburn also co-owns the business Green Ways 2Go that helps implement electric vehicle charging technology. The Clean Cities coalition has worked with the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus and others over the past decade to prepare for the rollout of alt fuel charging stations.
The goal is to build stations to charge electric vehicles at least every 50 miles along various interstate corridors and at least every 150 miles for vehicles that run on compressed natural gas, or CNG.
If you consider electric cars made by Tesla and others and add in the fleets of CNG fuel trucks and buses already on the road, substantial demand already exists for alt fuel charging stations.
“It’s happening right now,” said Brian Robb, government relations director for Lion Electric.
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Gov. J.B. Pritzker has visited the company’s soon-to-open manufacturing facility in Joliet, where workers will make electric-powered school buses and trucks. The company’s other manufacturing sites have produced more than 700 vehicles that are already on the road.
“I-80 is such a massive transit area,” Robb said. “The southern Chicago area is a huge transportation corridor and carries a pretty sizable pollutant.”
There’s a lot to consider about identify locations along interstates to build stations that can fully charge electric vehicles in 30 minutes or less. First, government is not building them, though Congress has authorized billions of dollars in incentives to get the ball rolling.
Businesses will build the stations, which must be publicly accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Motorists can expect to pay charging fees to help investors recover their capital and maintenance costs.
Don’t expect to see charging stations at rest areas along interstates, said Elizabeth Irvin, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s office of planning and programming.
“Public charging doesn’t mean free,” Irvin said. “There are federal laws around rest stops. You can’t put commercial businesses there, only those vending machines you see.”
To qualify for government funds offered through incentive programs, alt fuel charging stations must be built within a mile of an interchange along an interstate identified as a clean energy corridor.
“I-80 is one part of this network,” said Tom Stephens, principal transportation analyst at Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont.
Planners expect investors will want to build stations near exits already populated with hotels, restaurants, shopping centers and other businesses. Government is working with ComEd, Nicor and others to ensure utilities can supply enough energy to stations with multiple charging ports.
“We are asking where stations should be placed,” said Christopher Schmidt, air quality manager for IDOT.
For now, planners have roughly mapped out where stations spaced 50 and 150 miles apart could be located. But they haven’t identified specific sites. They’re leaving that up to the private sector, though local governments are welcome to provide input.
Some stations already exist. For example, Mokena-based Ozinga has a CNG charging stations near I-80’s La Grange Road interchange. The company, known for its red and white striped concrete mixers, has a fleet of 850 trucks, said Ryan Jacobs of Ozinga Energy.
“Of those concrete mixers, one third of them run on CNG,” Jacobs said. “We built seven stations to supply that fleet of concrete mixers with CNG. Five of those stations have public fueling. Two of them are on I-80.”
Alt fuels emit dramatically smaller amounts of carbon and soot into the air, which is better for the environment and healthier for people, he said. The technology also makes vehicles quieter, he said, and fuel costs are less than diesel.
Customers use Ozinga’s public charging ports in Mokena and other locations, he said. Another consideration about building public charging stations is providing enough space so large vehicles can access charging ports.
“We can get anything from a CNG Honda Accord to a full-sized Amazon over the road truck in there,” Jacobs said.
Conference presenters did not discuss politics, but the information they shared helped explain why oil companies raked in record profits in recent months by overcharging customers for gas to drive up inflation leading up to this week’s midterm elections.
The era of gas and diesel fuel is ending. It was a good run. But Big Oil cannot undo the progress being made toward mass adoption of alt fuel technology.
It won’t be like 1980, when newly elected President Ronald Reagan ordered the removal of solar panels that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had people install on the roof of the White House.
“By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies — recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers,” Scientific American reported in 2010.
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.
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