UC Berkeley has only one electric vehicle charger. How did it become so pre-EV?

Berkeley is so eco-conscious that it will soon ban everything from plastic forks at restaurants to natural gas in new homes, but that doesn’t help drivers find a spot to plug in their Teslas, Bolts or Priuses on the Cal campus.

The famously green UC has 6,000 parking spaces in university lots, but only one has direct access to a Level 2 EV charger. There’s a second space reserved for electric vehicles, but you’ll have to use the 120-volt outlet and your own portable charger. To make matters worse, both spaces are in the Upper Hearst Parking Structure, scheduled to be torn down next month.

How could UC Berkeley, of all places, be so pre-EV?

“We are currently not a good example,” admits UC Berkeley parking and transportation director Seamus Wilmot.

To be fair, Stadium Garage, on the eastern edge of campus, boasts four chargers operated on the ChargePoint network, but since the garage isn’t operated by the university, a campus parking permit won’t get you in.

Even then, UC Berkeley falls well on the low end of EV-friendly Bay Area colleges. Across the bay, Stanford University comes in first with 132 spaces for electric-vehicle charging, although 52 of them are located on the school’s new Redwood City administrative campus. UC San Francisco has 57 spaces, operated through the private company ChargePoint’s network. Even CSU-East Bay has 50 EV spaces.

But Wilmot says there’s little the university can do to catch up. Most of Berkeley’s parking lots were built well before the advent of electric cars. As a result, in many cases, they’re only designed for enough electricity to turn on the lights, says Berkeley engineering professor Scott Moura — making retrofitting existing infrastructure prohibitively expensive.

Thanks in part to Moura’s research, though, new chargers are on the way. The project he’s involved with is scheduled to add eight chargers — servicing up to 16 vehicles at a time — to UC’s Recreational Sports Facility Garage by January 2020.

The installation carries a price tag of $185,000, a cost that will be shared between the university and the French energy firm Total, which sponsors Moura’s research on EV charging.

Moura is studying schedule optimization in EV charging: People tend to park for long periods of time, but their cars may not need to be charged for that whole time. Rather than charge everyone’s cars right when they park, charging them on a schedule can reduce stress on the system — and result in lower utility bills.

Moura’s research partner was intrigued by the theory, telling him, “That’s great. Now we want to see a real-life demonstration.”

So the new EV charging stations at the Recreational Sports Facility garage — along with new spaces at UC San Diego and at the SunPower offices in San Jose — will serve as that demonstration. Any driver with an electric vehicle will be able to drive up and charge immediately for a soon-to-be determined price, but Moura will also be trying to recruit UC staff, faculty and students from those drivers for his study, presenting different charging and pricing options.

“We’ll fiddle with the prices and explore at what price thresholds people prefer to go to immediate charging vs. eco-friendly flexible charging,” Moura said.

Currently, the two chargers on the first level of the Upper Hearst Parking Structure are free of charge, provided the driver already has a C parking permit.

However, construction on Upper Hearst is scheduled to begin as soon as next month, and while the plans for the development include a 200-space parking lot with 10 EV chargers, the project may not be completed until July 2021, according to The Daily Californian. For at least the next few months, EV drivers may have to look elsewhere to charge their cars.

Berkeley’s efforts toward expanding its EV charging abilities come as electric vehicles continue to surge in popularity. Last November, the number of electric vehicles sold in California since 2000 reached 500,000, according to an industry group. Charging stations are proliferating as well. Tesla has built a network of 1,400 Supercharger stations across the country, and several other companies offer public stations that any electric vehicle driver can use, for a price.

ChargePoint, a Campbell-based company whose EV chargers make up the largest public network, has locations at colleges in the Bay Area and beyond, including Stanford, UC San Francisco and Santa Clara University. ChargePoint will sell the station to the company — in this case, the college — and offer software that enables drivers to make payments and find stations.

As would befit Silicon Valley, ChargePoint sees the service it provides as “more similar to charging your mobile device than charging a gas car,” says spokesperson Darryll Harrison: whereas drivers of traditional vehicles fill up only when needed, “every place to park is potentially a place to charge” — making it even more important to have chargers in as many locations as possible.

However, it also introduces new complications to the system. When drivers use EV chargers simply to top up, it may not take very long before their car is fully charged — but in a college or workplace setting, they might be working or studying all the way across campus, meaning their car sits for hours in a spot that could be used to charge another vehicle.

“The challenge is not just about electrons — it’s about atoms existing in space,” Moura said.

Facebook, for example, hires valets to move cars once they’re done charging, according to Moura.

Berkeley doesn’t keep statistics on the number of electric vehicles driven on its campus, so there’s no official estimate of how much drivers will benefit from more chargers.

But based on his experiences at UCSD, which has nearly 200 EV chargers and counting, Moura expects that at Berkeley, “utilization will be quite high.”

“It’s like grabbing the tiger by the tail,” Moura said. “You don’t realize how large this beast is.”