California Utility Aims To Quadruple The State's EV Charging Stations

Pacific Gas and Electric on Monday applied for regulatory approval to build and own 25,000 electric car charging stations, a proposal that would roughly quadruple the number of public charging stations in the state.

The San Francisco-based utility wants to build those stations on commercial and public properties, including shopping centers and multi-family housing. The plan is to complete the build-out five years after gaining approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.

California is the largest electric car market and home to Tesla Motors . It had over 5,700 non-residential charging stations as of August last year, more than any other state, said the California Energy Commission.

PG&E , which serves Central and Northern California, would contract with companies to install and operate those charging stations and offer to install them at no cost to property owners. Drivers who use those charging stations will not get billed from PG&E but from one of the contractors. Those charging station service providers will buy electricity from PG&E and then re-sell that energy to drivers, said James Ellis, director of electric vehicles at PG&E, during a press conference on Monday afternoon.

PG&E's 5 million electric customers would foot the project's construction and operational costs, which would lead to an estimated average increase of $0.70 on the monthly bills of residential customers from 2018 to 2022, the utility estimated.

In its application with the utilities commission on Monday , PG&E says it expects the program to cost $635.8 million in capital and other expenses. It's asking the commission for approval to recover $428.8 million from 2016 through 2022 by charging its electric customers. It plans to recover the rest of the costs in future filings.

 The utility designed the project to help the state achieve its mandate to reduce its emissions by 80% below the 1990s levels by 2050. California it's charged out a master plan to do so under a 2006 legislation. To achieve that, Gov. Brown issued an executive order in 2012 that calls for putting 1.5 million zero-emissions cars on the road by 2025.

The utilities commission in December overturned a regulation that didn't allow utilities to own electric car charging stations.

PG&E plans to build Level 2 chargers that can add 25 miles of range for every hour of charging. It also will install 100 DC faster chargers that can fill up a battery pack in about 30 minutes. It has yet to decide on the charging station locations of the entire project.

Companies that have installed public charging stations include ChargePoint, Tesla and   NRG Energy . NRG has built about 120 charging stations in California, the company said last month.