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Fred George charges his Tesla at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Fred George, right, and Erin Rogers charge their Teslas at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Fred George charges his Tesla at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
A Tesla charges at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Fred George charges his Tesla at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Fred George, right, and Erin Rogers charge their Teslas at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Fred George charges his Tesla at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
A Tesla charges at the charging station in the Gateway Centre.
Their numbers are small but growing.
Registered zero emission vehicles, or ZEVs, are on the upswing in Nash and Edgecombe counties.
Also called EVs, or electric vehicles, the number of registered EVs almost doubled in 2021 in Nash County, from 35 in January to 60 in December, according to state DMV statistics.
Edgecombe County showed a lesser increase, from 17 in January to 24 in December. Comparatively, the number of hybrid vehicles in both counties was nearly unchanged, with 37 registered in Nash and 15 in Edgecombe as of December 2021.
Rocky Mount Director of Energy Resources Chris Beschler said the city is under contract to add two charging stations within the next several months, one on the Nash County side of the city and one on the Edgecombe County side.
“We’re not sitting on our hands,” Beschler said. “We’re going full steam on this. We think EV fueling is something businesses would want.”
Junius Moore, vice president of Smithfield’s, agrees. Both Smithfield’s restaurants in Rocky Mount and Nashville offer free charging on-site to customers with Level 2 Tesla chargers.
“We reached out to Tesla two to three years ago and told them we were interested in being in on their destination program,” said Moore, who drives a Tesla.
Moore said he is enthusiastic about the partnership with Tesla, which he said has grown.
“It took us a year to get our first chargers,” Moore said, who explained that Smithfield’s leases Tesla the space. “We see this as advertising, and they are magnets for people who need this type of fuel.”
Moore said most of the Smithfield’s restaurants that have Tesla chargers have Level 2s, but that Tesla then approached the company about putting in Superchargers. Tesla Superchargers are able to identify user’s cars when they plug in and charge the user’s credit card on record.
“Our first Supercharger was in Kinston,” Moore said. “We got 700 cars there in the first month.”
Beschler said Rocky Mount plans to start with two chargers and add more on a buildout. He said that chargers come in three types. Level 1 chargers are typically installed at people’s homes and take about eight hours to charge a car’s battery from zero to 100 percent.
Level 2 chargers typically charge in two to three hours and are often located at destinations like shopping centers where drivers can eat at restaurants or shop. In those cases, Beschler said, car batteries are usually not totally empty, and the extra charging is more of a convenience. Level 3 chargers, also called Superchargers, bring an EV car’s battery up to full in about 30 minutes.
“Research is showing that between two and five years from now, 80 percent of charging will be done at peoples’ homes,” Beschler said.
Rocky Mount Electric Operations Manager Darryl Strother said city officials are examining electric usage data at homes of several EV owners who had given permission.
In one case, a homeowner in a small Nash County neighborhood was the only one in her neighborhood with an EV. Strother said that the current transformer servicing the neighborhood would have to be changed to a bigger one if everyone in that neighborhood were to switch to EVs.
Based on an analysis of that customer’s past household electric usage and her mobile Tesla app, which records electricity used for the car, Strother figured out the customer, who works in Rocky Mount, had spent less than $40 in the past month for electricity to power her Tesla Model Y.
“One issue we need to look at is if we would need to install a second, separate meter for homeowners’ EV charging,” Strother said. “We’re also looking at the possibility of there being two separate rates, including a time-of-day rate.”
Strother said there could be an incentive for EV owners to charge during off-peak hours at a time that would be cheaper for them and better for the city’s grid, rather than to incur extra load during the 3-6 p.m. peak rate on hot days.
Edgecombe-Martin EMC, which has customers in Edgecombe, Martin, Bertie, Pitt and Beaufort counties, put in a ChargePort Supercharger at its headquarters at the end of June 2021, using a grant from the state Department of Environmental Quality. ChargePort chargers are able to be used by any EV cars, not just Teslas.
Edgecombe-Martin EMC CEO Winston Howell said the EMC offers a $200 rebate and special household rate to members with electric vehicles. Howell said a customer with a Long-Range EV could fully charge an 80kw battery during off-peak hours — between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. — for less than four cents a kilowatt hour, or about $4 total. If a fast charger, or Supercharger, is used, the rate would be $15 to $16, he said.
Howell said Edgecombe-Martin EMC owns a Model 3 Tesla that is available for test drives to members who are considering EVs.
Fred George, owner of the Small Shops Marketplace in Rocky Mount, bought his first Tesla Model 3 Performance two years ago.
“I’ve driven it about 60,000 miles with no maintenance except tires and two gallons of windshield wiper fluid,” George said.
George said there are many advantages to having an EV and that he pays the equivalent of 70 cents a gallon to drive.
“There is no coolant, no fan belts, no O2 sensor, spark plugs or really anything else to break or wear out until I need to replace the battery at 500,000 miles,” he said. “I plug in at night, wake up every morning to a full battery, have onboard computers that actively steer me away from potential accidents and can beat pretty much any gasoline car off the line at a stoplight. Teslas depreciate more slowly than any car on the market, so I can get my money back out of the car at any time.”
George said the only disadvantage he sees with EVs is the wait time to charge while on long trips, which he said takes 15-20 minutes. He said there is a learning curve to driving one and that it takes a few days to get used to the features, particularly regenerative braking, where the car puts energy back into the battery when the driver takes his foot off the accelerator.
Would George buy another EV?
“I would and I have,” George said. “I just bought a Model 3 Long Range for my wife a couple weeks ago. It’s not as fast as my Performance but has a range of 360 miles.”
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