At Tuesday night’s regular council meeting, council voted unanimously to enter a ten-year Licence of Occupation agreement with BC Hydro and turn over control and operation of direct-current fast chargers (DCFC) located within the city of Merritt.
“Essentially, the City entered into an agreement with BC Hydro back in 2013 to provide chargers in a few different locations around the city,” explained Deputy Corporate Officer Greg Lowis.
“We received a grant to install those, so it was done at no cost to us.”
The grant of $16,000 was provided by the Fraser Basin Council, a charitable non-profit society that seeks to advance sustainability in the Fraser Basin and across BC. With these funds chargers were installed at Baillie House, the Civic Centre and the Wagon West plaza, and later at City Hall.
The City of Merritt then paid a nominal $1/month per charger and covered the electrical costs.
“This was initially for a five-year term which would then become a month to month basis,” said Lowis.
“BC Hydro have now informed us that they wish to terminate this agreement, but they also wish to operate their own network and they don’t want to lose the chargers and potentially endanger adoption of electric vehicles. So, they would like to take over the chargers which are currently in place. And so, for the ones that are located on City of Merritt property they have requested to enter into a ten year Licence of Occupation, during which they would take over the responsibility of Hydro costs, maintenance bills, basically everything that’s being paid for and we would simply be providing them with access to our land to do this.”
Figures from BC Hydro indicate that while the chargers are only “lightly used”, there would be no advantage in removing them.
Councillor Kurt Christopherson was in support of the idea but questioned whether there would be any additional cost to the city should the agreement be adopted.
“So far as I understand it there should be no cost to the city, we will have a very small reduced expenditure as we will no longer be responsible for the hydro bills of the chargers,” explained Lowis.
Councillor Adam Etchart also voiced his support for the handover.
“If we can get Hydro to look after these things with little or no cost to us it’s a great time to take advantage of that, especially when you can still get federal rebates on some of these hybrid cars,” said Etchart.
“There’s incentive, and then people have less of this anxiety about range, but really we want to have as many of these chargers around town as possible and if we don’t have to maintain them it seems like a no brainer to me.”
