At the new electric-vehicle charging station in downtown Santa Barbara, a young couple from Canada in a dark green hybrid Porsche were on a road trip across the West Coast. A Tesla driver was on his way up to Paso Robles from Los Angeles. A Santa Barbaran said her family had two electric vehicles, and when one was using the charger at home, she simply came down to the corner of Chapala and Carrillo streets, plugged in, and went shopping for groceries at Ralphs across the street.
Only open for a couple of weeks at the former Greyhound bus station, Electrify America’s newest charging location is already proving to be popular. It has 20 hyper-fast, 350-kilowatt chargers that can add up to 20 miles of driving for each minute a vehicle is plugged in. This is fast enough to add hundreds of miles of range in about 15-20 minutes compared to older chargers that average 30 minutes to get 100 miles worth of charge.
Electrify America, which is based in Virginia, has more than 1,080 charging stations across North America, and 358 in California, only two of which are located in Santa Barbara. The second location is on upper State Street, next to Bank of America at 3790 State Street.
“We selected Santa Barbara accordingly, and importantly, because of the size of the site and us wanting to be a very iconic location. We really wanted to be in downtown Santa Barbara as a result,” said Anthony Lambkin, vice president of operations at Electrify America.
The new downtown chargers are also home to the company’s largest battery energy storage system to date.
“The great thing about this location is that we have a very large battery pack that’s also connected to the site, and actually allows us to supplement the power that’s coming from the electric utility, in this case Southern California Edison,” Lambkin explained. “So we can use that battery to essentially buffer the energy needs at the site, whether that’s in the current format of the location … or if we wanted to reach higher power levels in the future.”
The EV-serving lot at the old bus station was a long time coming. The Greyhound depot was vacated in March 2012, after more than 70 years of service. The corner lot remained empty until demolition in 2017 for a proposed two-story 10,329 square-foot retail-office building that never came to fruition. The lot gathered dead leaves until 2021, when Electrify America proposed the EV charging station.
The location and speed enable users to take a walk downtown or simply sit in their car while they charge up. The travelers who spoke with the Independent had opted to stay with their car. In the case of the Canadians, their car was loaded with camping gear, suitcases, and mementos of their trip. The Tesla driver said he “loved the location” because of its closeness to the highway.
