I ride my motorcycle to work every day. The last few winters have included stretches of freezing temperatures with icy or snowy roads, so I’d expected that I’d have to spend a month or so driving or taking the bus instead, but so far the weather has remained mild.

There are no assigned spaces in the Google parking garage, but as a motorcyclist I can fit into otherwise-inaccessible spaces, so I always slide my bike in to a certain half-width slot next to the door. It happens to be right next to the bank of EV charging stations. Seeing that line of Leafs and Volts every morning has gotten me thinking….

I’ve looked at commercial electric bikes, of course, and either the Brammo Enertia or the Zero S would make a great commuter. There’s just no way I’m spending $10k-plus on a motorcycle no matter how cool it is, and electric motorcycles haven’t been around long enough for a used market to develop. I might be able to talk myself into considering a used Zero S if it were even half the price, but it’ll be five or ten years before that’s an option.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about building an electric trike for Burning Man, using bits of mountain bike frames, a pair of deep-cycle batteries, and a 24-volt motor. But what if I took it further? I could mount six batteries, a beefier controller, and a 72-volt motor onto the frame of some cheap bike from Craigslist, preferably one with a blown engine, for a total parts cost around $2500. This is not a novel concept; there are dozens of tutorials on the web showing off various conversions, and you can buy all the difficult bits of electrical engineering as commercial modules. Most of the work would be in the fabrication, and I’ve got a workshop with a MIG welder handy…

Once I’ve got this electric bike, then, it’s easy to see how to charge it at work, but what to do at home? I could roll it up into the alley behind my apartment and throw a cord out the window, perhaps. Or I could rig up a charging station out in front of ALTSpace.

That suggests an interesting problem. How do I secure this charging station? Electricity costs money, and if I stick an EV charging station on the sidewalk, people other than me are going to plug their cars into it, and I’ll end up paying. It clearly needs some kind of lock. But what if people could just pay to use the charger, using something like those fancy parking meters the City of Seattle installed a few years ago?

Perhaps this is a way to help drive the build-out of EV charging infrastructure. There’s currently a weak incentive for people to install EV charging stations for their customers, but the incentive could be much stronger if the chargers would pay for themselves. I imagine the installation cost might be on the order of $1000 per unit. Car owners would park, pay for some number of kilowatt-hours, plug in, and go about their business. The station owner would pick some markup over the base per-kWH rate. It would obviously take a long time to pay for the charger given current levels of EV penetration, but it might be enough of a boost to get a few ecologically-minded property owners to sign on. There’s also a potential marketing boost; EV owners are likely to be well-off compared to the population at large, and sticking an EV charging station in front of your business is a good way to get them to come to your shop instead of someone else’s.

Postscript: well, what do you know, I’m not the first one to think of this.