The Department of Enterprise Services (DES) manages procurement of goods and services for state agencies and sets policies and procedures for the state's purchases. In 2007, the Legislature authorized the state to purchase power at its own expense to recharge both private and public plug-in electric vehicles at state-owned locations where the vehicles are used for state business, are commute vehicles, or where the vehicles are at the same location for the purpose of conducting business with the state. The director of DES may report to the Governor and the appropriate committees of the Legislature, as deemed necessary by the director, on the:
By December 31st of each year, beginning in 2022, the director of DES must report to the Governor and the appropriate committees of the Legislature on the estimated amount of state-purchased electricity consumed by plug-in electrical vehicles and the number of plug-in electric vehicles using state office locations.
PRO: This bill is necessary as a transparency measure and will provide useful information to our government agencies. It will also help us as we move towards a new forms of energy for our transportation system. We need to have this information to help us make assessments for what our future holds with regard to the electric vehicle charging stations and our highways.
OTHER: There is a mix of public and private charging stations currently and the private sector charging stations are likely to increase. Electricity is not free, someone is paying for it and as such we continue to have concerns about charging stations that are subsidized by tax payers. This creates an unfair advantage when private stations must charge the full price of the power. DES plays an important role in full sweet electrification and work with the state to make meaningful progress to reduce greenhouse gases. There are many data, operational and financial challenges to overcome to implement this bill. There is no central repository for state office charging locations, DES only manages chargers in DES owned facilities and only five of the 102 electric vehicle chargers owned by DES have the capability to capture the data elements required under the bill.