In California, a Fast-Charging First

350GreenA Mitsubishi i at the public fast-charging station in Palo Alto, Calif. Customers would pay $21 for three 30-minute charge sessions.

A Los Angeles-based firm claims to have installed California’s first public fast-charging station, which opened for business last week. The unit, which can recharge the battery pack of a Nissan Leaf in about 30 minutes, is located at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, adjacent to Stanford University and about 30 miles south of San Francisco.

Roughly 2,000 public charge stations dot the state, according to Obrie Hostetter, the regional director of 350Green, the firm that installed and manages the Palo Alto station. None of those, however, offered fast-charging capabilities on a self-serve basis. The company owns and operates the fee-based charger, and plans to install another 24 units this year at retail locations in the Bay Area. Use of the chargers would require a membership with 350Green, which charges $21 for three 30-minute charge sessions.

Efacec USA, the American arm of a Portugal-based power-solutions company, designed the charger to conform to the Chademo standard followed by vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i. The unit operates at 480 volts, compared to the 240 volts for so-called Level II chargers, and should provide an 80-percent charge for a vehicle like the Leaf in 20-30 minutes.

Installation of the fast charger was financed in part by a grant from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a state agency which has awarded over $6 million in grants to companies like 350Green to install E.V. charging points in the Bay Area, according to Ralph Borrmann, an agency spokesman.

The effort to build out a network of D.C. fast-charging points in California recently received a boost from a $120 million settlement between the state and NRG Energy. The settlement stems from claims that an NRG subsidiary overcharged the state for long-term energy contracts. Ultimately, the California leg of the electric highway will join with a portion in the Pacific Northwest, the first section of which opened last month.

NRG has agreed to finance the construction of 10,000 new charge points, including 200 fee-based public fast-charging stations, to operate under NRG’s eVgo brand.