EV Charging At Citi Field, Yankee Stadium & UBS Arena

There are around 20,000 Electric Vehicles registered in NYC and the number of EVs registered in NYC will easily grow to over 50,000 EVs by 2025. Since most New York City residents live in multifamily residences, installing chargers near driver’s homes is going to be challenging.

Some of the EV charging options include street side charging, charging in private garages or charger stations where you can find the space. The latter is difficult, as evidenced by how few gas stations there are in New York City, where real estate is too expensive to get good payback on them.

To make it easier to drive EVs in the NYC metro area, 1000's of DCFC charging stations will need to be constructed. Considering all the options available, professional sport stadium's parking lots provide the most efficient solution.

Citi Field, Yankee Stadium and UBS Arena's parking lots sit empty most days of the year. And, importantly for EV charging they have a lot of power capacity and parking capacity, making them ideal places to build out DCFC charger stations, which require large amounts of electrical power to quickly charge cars.

It’s takes over 30 million Kilowatt (kWh) hours to power a baseball stadium for an entire season. This is enough electricity supply to power 3,000+ homes for a year or more than 500,000 charging sessions for electric vehicles. Getting the infrastructure in place to provide this much power is no small feat.

So, with all the capacity built out and sitting unused most days of the year, there is no better place to build out DCFC charging stations than in the parking lots of the Mets, Yankees and Islanders stadiums.

FWIW, UBS Arena had already announced plans to build-out 1,000 EV chargers in it’s parking lot. TBD whether this buildout actually happens & unsure how many of them would be rapid chargers vs. L2 chargers.

With the EV adoption about to sky-rocket upwards, there is no better time than right now to get these project going. The dollars are already there, with New York slotted to receive $175M+ from the federal government from the Infrastructure Investment Bill. This money is designated to fund the build-out a public national EV Charging Network (H.R.3684 - Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act)

New York state can easily put 250+ DCFC chargers in each of the three stadiums parking lots for a fraction of what it would cost if starting from scratch, since the most difficult part, the electrical upgrades and wiring has already been completed.

250 DCFC chargers isn’t even that big compared to the charging stations being built in China, where EV adoption is way ahead of where it is in America. In the technologically advanced city of Shenzhen, a DCFC charging station is up and running that can power nearly 750 vehicles at the same time, including fleets of taxi and delivery trucks.