Lafayette’s First, Public Electrical Vehicle(EV) Charging Station At Cajun Field

The city of Lafayette now has its first, publicly-available EV charging station, located at UL Lafayette’s Cajun Field. While this EV station is new for the city, Lafayette Parish’s first EV charging station is located at the new public library in Scott, LA. See that post (here).

Updated: A ribbon cutting will be held August 1st for the EV charger. It will then be active at that point for use.

The new EV charging station at Cajun Field is the first in the state of Louisiana that is primarily powered by locally-sourced solar energy.  On a bright sunny day, approximately 80% of the EV charging station’s power is generated by the 1.1 MW Photovoltaic Applied Research and Testing (PART) Lab located in the Research Park—a local solar farm. The PART solar lab supplements a portion of the utility power to all of UL Lafeyette’s South Campus. The expected cost to charge an EV vehicle the new EV charging station will be a minimum of $0.99/Hr, which will cover operation & maintenance costs.

Any additional funds generated by the charging station will be used to support additional sustainability projects at the University.

“In addition to providing power for the university and a much-needed service to supply environmentally friendly EV charging in the Lafayette area, the PART Lab and the new EV charging station are research tools that allow College of Engineering and Energy Institute of Louisiana (EIL) researchers to study the effects of integrating solar energy and electric vehicles into the electrical grid.  The work also ties into related work of EIL faculty and students who are studying the cyber-security aspects of EV charging stations and electric vehicles.”

This is the first of several planned charging stations that we hope to install over the course of the next year, pending approval of a grant proposal currently under review at the State of Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

“The PART Lab and the EV charging station projects are both led by Dr. Terry Chambers, the Donald & Janice Mosing BORSF Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Energy Center.  Both projects were designed to serve not only as research facilities, but to also directly support the University Sustainability Strategic Plan by reducing our carbon footprint and developing University assets into a Living Laboratory that benefits students, faculty, and the public.  The project is entirely externally funded, but has received extensive internal support from Gretchen Vanicor of the Sustainability Office and Terry Jenkins of the University Physical Plant, for which we are extremely grateful.”