This county is California’s harshest charging ‘desert’ for electric cars. Local activists want to change that

Get the news that matters to all Californians. Start every week informed.A map shows the electric car charging stations that the nonprofit group Comite Civico Del Valle plans to build in the Imperial Valley. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMattersLack of EV chargers in remote areas could derail California’s aim to electrify cars. In Imperial County, residents have access to few public chargers and buy electric cars at only a fifth of the statewide rate.

Olmedo isn’t waiting for businesses or the state to make chargers a reality in Imperial County. Instead, his group has embarked on a $5-million, high-stakes crusade to build a network of 40 fast chargers at various locations. It’s an open question whether his somewhat quixotic endeavor will succeed. “When you have a rural community that’s low-income and distant from other locations, it’s incredibly important to enable people to get places where they need to go,” Conrad said.Its neighborhoods are vast distances from urban centers that provide the services that residents need: El Centro — its biggest town, home to about 44,000 people — is much closer to Mexicali, Mexico, than it is to San Diego, which is about a two-hour drive away, or Riverside, nearly three hours.

“We’re about to extract, perhaps, the world’s supply of lithium here, yet we don’t even have the simplest, the lowest of offerings, which is: Let’s build you chargers,” Olmedo said.Last year, electric cars were only 5% of all new cars sold in Imperial County, compared with 25% statewide. Getting chargers into low-income and rural places will become more and more important asby 2035, when more than 15 million electric cars are expected on the roads.

“You need revenue, and if the EVs aren’t there, then your customers aren’t necessarily there, so you do have a legitimate chicken and egg problem,” Nigro said. “We have to look to public policy to help that market failure.”for up to $80,000 per charger. Olmedo says the funding has been insufficient so he’s had to turn to donations and other sources of funding.

“We’re like a testing ground because we have poor air quality here due to the Salton Sea and being in a desert,” he said.

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