UW Students Present EV Capstone Projects

Trans­porta­tion En­gi­neer­ing stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton pre­sented their Cap­stone Pro­jects on July 1st, on the UW cam­pus. Mayor Jill Boudreau and mem­bers of the De­sign Team were in­vited to watch the stu­dents pre­sent their re­search and rec­om­men­da­tions.

The stu­dents worked in four teams, and each pre­sented their fi­nal pro­pos­als to the en­tire class. The ar­eas of fo­cus in­cluded:
• Com­mu­nity Needs
• EV Adop­tion Pro­jec­tions
• Eco­nomic Ben­e­fits
• Analy­sis of User Types (lo­cal vs vis­i­tors)
• Type of EV Charg­ers and Dis­tri­b­u­tion on lev­els
• Power Loads and Ef­fi­ciency
• EV’s at ADA stalls
• Fu­ture Ex­pan­sion and Flex­i­bil­ity
• Op­er­a­tions and Main­te­nance
• Sig­nage Re­quire­ments

The stu­dents val­i­dated many of the ap­proaches to de­sign that have been in­cor­po­rated into the pro­ject to date, and also brought up some very in­ter­est­ing and in­trigu­ing items for the City and De­sign Team to pon­der.

Stu­dents stud­ied the adop­tion rates of Elec­tric Ve­hi­cles (EVs) in Sk­agit County com­pared to the rest of the State, and in re­la­tion to the poli­cies that will phase out gas-pow­ered ve­hi­cle pro­duc­tion by 2030 (only 8 years from now!).

Gen­er­ally, all of the team agreed that the amount of charg­ers planned for the fu­ture, both at open­ing and in the fu­ture, aligns with fu­ture adop­tion rates. It was ac­knowl­edged that full uti­liza­tion of all EV’s will take time, but once the scales tip, the fa­cil­ity will be used to its full po­ten­tial.

There were pro­pos­als which sug­gested that all types of EV charges should be used (Level 1, Level 2 and FCDC), while
oth­ers sug­gested just L2 and FCDC, as the po­ten­tial wave of the fu­ture for de­mand.

Some teams pro­posed lo­cat­ing the charg­ers all on one park­ing level and oth­ers rec­om­mended dis­trib­ut­ing the var­i­ous types through­out all of the lev­els of park­ing.

There was dis­cus­sion about the use of the charg­ers by lo­cal res­i­dents and vis­i­tors, and how that in­flu­ences the types of charg­ers rec­om­mended, as well as the eco­nomic ben­e­fits of hav­ing peo­ple shop and dine in the down­town while
charg­ing.

We ap­pre­ci­ate all of the hard work that the stu­dents put into their thought­ful analy­sis and pro­pos­als, and are ex­tremely grate­ful for the op­por­tu­nity to be in­vited to watch their pre­sen­ta­tions. Thank you to the stu­dents and fac­ulty for en­gag­ing with us on this im­por­tant fu­ture-for­ward pro­ject!