CHATHAM – Visitors to the Village of Chatham can now charge their electrical vehicles for free at a new charging station. The station is located at the rear of the parking lot at 77 Main Street, adjacent to Chatham Brewing. By installing the charging station among other action items, Chatham earns the designation of a Clean Energy Community by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
Maria Lull, Chatham Town Supervisor said, in a press release,“The Town of Chatham’s installation of the Electric Vehicle Charging station provides a spark of creative innovation for the business district of the Town of Chatham and Main Street. By providing this service for visitors and shoppers who are in the area in electric cars, it is anticipated that they will shop and congregate in local eateries while their vehicles are charging. This is a great resource for the Town and Village of Chatham. We have a dedicated Climate Smart Committee that has worked tirelessly to bring economic change to our communities”.
Funding for the vehicle charging station was made possible through a grant from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) Office of Climate Change. Charging will be free for the next two years with a ChargePoint card under this grant.
This unit was installed through efforts by members of town’s Climate Smart Committee, an all-volunteer group made up of Chatham residents, in part to achieve designation as a Clean Energy Community through NYSERDA. Committee member Cara Humphrey was instrumental in getting the grant.
“I’m passionate about finding solutions for our troubled environment,” said Ms. Humphrey, also in the release, who is a senior energy consultant with Energy Resources USA and a Town of Chatham resident. “Electrical vehicles make sense and I hope that having more stations around will inspire people to switch to electric.”
This is the fourth item completed by the Chatham’s Climate Smart Committee out of ten high impact action items. Other activities accomplished include tracking of town building energy use, adoption of the unified solar permit to streamline the approval process for solar installation, and attendance by town building inspectors of energy code enforcement training. Completing four out of the ten high impaction action items now makes the town eligible to receive additional funding for town wide energy efficiency improvements.
Shortly after the town of Chatham installed their station, the Town of Ghent also installed a station in the parking lot off of Park Row in the Village of Chatham. Both stations have already seen a lot of activity with several cars utilizing the station each day.
Chatham is a registered Climate Smart Community through DEC and is now designated as Clean Energy Community through NYSERDA. For more information about Chatham’s Climate Smart Committee please contact chairman Kevin Weldon at kevin@kevinweldonchatham.com.
