Election Day in NH, EV Style

Wearing my pundit hat I took a quick trip to New Hampshire last weekend to bounce around Tuesday’s big Republican primary. As an old political hand and veteran of many N.H. primaries, my trip was a mix of nostalgic tourism, a chance to visit old political friends and a handy opportunity to grind out a serving of timely content for my Substack blog. I also was able to do a little shoe-leather journalism (that’s reporter code for hanging out in local bars and gossiping with local pols and other journos) for our Hacks on Tap podcast as well as satisfy my paymasters at NBC News with a few TV hits.

Naturally for this vital-to-the-nation journalistic mission I needed a vehicle, so I rented an EV from Hertz. Despite the company’s recent retreat from their early big move toward electrification, the Hertz location at Boston’s Logan airport remains well-stocked with EVs. (Such was not the case on my trip to Iowa to poke around the sub-zero Caucus a week before. I couldn’t find a rental EV in Omaha which is where I flew in. The Siberian temperatures that week would have been an interesting experience.)

Arriving for this Hew Hampshire caper in Boston, I rented a Polestar 2. Even with my status as a card-carrying EV crank, I’m just not a huge fan of the Tesla Model Y or Model 3 (I don’t like the ultra-minimalist cockpit or the huge center screen that hates Apple CarPlay).

It was cold, not Iowa Caucus cold mind you, but cold enough. Chicago charging disasters nonetheless, the whole EV side of things worked out great, except for, wait for it, charging.

N.H. north of Manchester is a complete CCS charging desert. (No sweat with Teslas. But I’m stubborn.)

Still, the CCS cavalry is on the way. A friend and I are working to inspire a Freewire battery based DCFC in the next few months. And Bow NH’s Grappone Ford has nearly finished building a nice CCS fast charging station. It has been there since October, but is still coned off and not working. I suspect Team Grappone is waiting, as is the norm with DCFC stations, for the local utility to bring in the heavy power infrastructure that their station will require. That is just a guess, I don’t know the actual story of what’s up.

I say big kudos to Amanda Grappone, grand-daughter of Grappone Auto Group founder John Grappone. I don’t know her or any of the Grappone folks, but to my passing eye their Ford store looked very squared away: big, well organized, and spotlessly clean. The three dispenser DCFC station they have invested real dollars in tells me that unlike so many dealers, the family owners at Grappone Ford are deeply committed to EVs. I’d buy a Ford there in a minute! So a big plug for Grappone Ford! They get it.

Since Concord, and central N.H., is such a CCS charging desert, I was very lucky my hotel, the Hilton Tru — owned by another N.H. Great American I actually do know — had two Level 2 charging units on site. It really saved me as I zipped around the Granite State. The EV Connect app was a bit confusing at first (hint: enter the charging station’s ID number manually, don’t use your Smartphone’s camera to scan the QR code. I have no idea why, but the manual methold works a lot better.) Without the Hilton Tru’s Level 2 set-up, I think the ol’ News Hawk here would have been mostly stuck around Manchester.

The EV Politics Project Official News Hawk Mobile Reporting Unit Alpha One sucking down power at dusk on the eve of the big primary. The next day Nikki Haley made a final campaign stop at the restaurant in the background. She’s not an EV fan. We’ll work on that.. The colorful pickup two spaces down is the official campaign sled of extreme long-shot GOP Presidential Candidate Ryan Binkley. (His campaign manager was staying at the hotel.) Binkley is actually not too bad on EV related issues, at least on building more U.S. capacity to build batteries as opposed to relying on the PRC.

I won’t stuff this blog entry with my political thoughts from the primary. You can read a bunch of that here or on the Hacks on Tap podcast.

But I will touch on an EV political issue. Concord, NH serves whole central area of N.H. including the tourism critical Lakes Region to the east. So the north of Manchester charging desert is a huge problem for CCS EV drivers coming up from Boston or just about anywhere in the summer and winter. We have a summer lake house in N.H. and without our Level 2 charger in the garage we’d be out of luck.

A local VW dealer in northern New Hampshire told me last year about the trouble he’s had moving ID4s due to the lack of charging north of Manchester. When my friend and I looked into applying for NEVI funding for the DCFC station we want to build in Concord, we learned that we didn’t qualify for NEVI money because we “were too close to Manchester” to the south of us. Because of N.H.’s tall, standing triangle shape, the “too close to Manchester” stipulation in the NEVI rules is nuts; it just kills the center of the state for CCS fast charging. New Hampshire has been lagging in general in putting NEVI charging money to work;, the state only started taking NEVI applications last October.

So we threw in the towel on NEVI funding and instead plan to install a battery based Freewire charger in Concord, which will not need the big, long wait heavy power install of a full charging station and therefore should be up and running soon once we close on location details. Our estimates show it should do fine servicing Concord’s limited fast charging demand. We’ll add other Freewire units in other charging starved NH towns later if our experiment works out. And of course we’ll migrate to NACS next year of the year after. It should be an interesting journey and good opportunity to learn. Our goal is to do a little charing good, test out the niche idea and see if we can break even or better. I’ll keep you all informed.