In its latest effort to be as green as possible, has installed new electric vehicle charging stations at its Troy campus on Livernois Road.
The stations "kind of look like skinny gas pumps, except they’re not," Walsh College Facilities Director Chris Stout said. "They are garnering a lot of curiosity."
The campus already boasts several "green" features, including naturalized landscaping, hybrid parking and a college-wide recycling program, and Stout said adding the charging stations to the LEED Gold-certified campus made sense.
“We want to be green," Stout said. "It seemed like the next logical thing.”
The charging stations, which cost $20,000 total and were installed at the beginning of December, were funded in part by a grant received from the Department of Energy in August, Stout said. There is a fee through ChargePoint America to use the station, though Stout said the charge is "minimal."
“You just swipe the card and it gives you access to the system," she said. “You leave it plugged in for a while."
A full charge takes about six hours, Stout said, though the idea is that current and future students can go to class for a few hours and be able to charge their vehicle – at least partially – in the meantime. Stout has already seen a handful of Chevy Volt owners use the charging stations, and she said she hopes usage will increase over time.
Currently, the campus also has preferential parking for "green vehicles," which include gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius.
"We like to save our best parking spaces for our environmentally conscious drivers," Stout said.
Now that the charging stations are established, Stout said she hoped to move on to the next "green" project on campus.
“We’re hoping to expand our naturalized landscaping into other areas," she said, "and I’d like to see more hybrid parking.”
