Think about your morning routine: your alarm goes off with some motivational song, you hit snooze a few times, drag yourself out of bed, sluggishly get ready for your 9-to-5, and struggle to get in your car to drive to work by yourself. Does that sound about right? For three out of four Americans, commuting alone is the norm, and this figure has been steadily increasing since the 1980s.
Employers have made some progress promoting public transportation, biking to work, teleworking and carpooling programs; however, we can do more to reduce the petroleum consumed and greenhouse gasses emitted by our workforce’s commutes.
Supporting employee plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) adoption is one key way that we can do just that. With the addition of workplace charging, PEV-driving employees can feel confident in being able to get where they need to go during the workday. The Energy Department’s Workplace Charging Challenge has found that employees are six times more likely to buy a PEV when charging stations are available at their workplace.
Workplace charging in the private sector has made significant ground in recent years. Today, more than 380 employers have committed to providing charging to their employees by joining the Workplace Charging Challenge.
Recognizing the important role that federal agencies play as charging station hosts, President Obama issued Executive Order 13693 in March 2015, in which he asked agencies to consider policies to foster workplace charging for federal employees. At the Workplace Charging Challenge, we have been working with the White House Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ) to drive this effort.
Eighteen federal organizations have now committed to providing employee charging by joining the Challenge. Collectively, these worksites have more than 200 charging stations accessible to more than 360 PEV-driving employees. We are confident that these numbers will continue to grow, especially after the CEQ-DOE Federal Workplace Charging Workshop held yesterday at the U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters in Washington, D.C. Around 150 attendees from 50 different federal organizations were present at the event, where they learned about federal workplace charging authority and newly-released federal employee charging guidance from the White House. They also heard from agencies that already offer charging to their employees and shared best practices for installing and managing a successful workplace charging program.
The federal Workplace Charging Challenge partners include:
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- National Institutes of Health
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- U.S. Department of Commerce
- U.S. Department of Energy
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Department of State
- U.S. Department of Transportation
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory
- U.S. General Services Administration
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management
- U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
The Workplace Charging Challenge is open to employers of all sizes and industry types, in all regions of the United States. If your organization is interested in joining the Challenge, contact us at WorkplaceCharging@ee.doe.gov and we’ll be ready to give you the guidance you need. You can also visit our website to learn about installing charging stations, managing workplace charging programs, and promoting them in your communities.
