Matanuska Electric offers free EV chargers to local businesses, but hosts pay install costs

Matanuska Electric Association is handing out free electric-vehicle chargers — and "free" is doing some work in that sentence. The co-op will give a business, nonprofit, housing authority or government office a commercial dual-port charger at no cost. The mounting, the wiring, the electrical upgrades, and a new transformer if the site needs one? Those are the host's problem, and MEA notes the bill swings widely depending on what is already in the ground.

What the co-op gets in return is the part the announcement underplays: data. MEA will collect three years of anonymized charging records to study how and when Mat-Su drivers plug in — useful intelligence for a utility trying to plan its grid. The host gets the hardware; MEA gets a sensor on its own system, and a stake in a kind of demand it expects to grow.

These are Level 2 chargers, the destination kind — meant for the hours a car sits at a store, an office, or an apartment complex, not the quick highway top-off. Hosts can offer the power free to the public or set a fee to recover their electricity and upkeep costs. Applications are open at mea.coop.

The timing is the interesting part. MEA makes roughly 84 percent of its electricity by burning Cook Inlet natural gas bought from Hilcorp — the same gas that is running short across the Railbelt, and the same supply worry the co-op's chief executive, Tony Izzo, is set to talk through with members at a "Taproom Tuesdays" session in late August. So the cooperative now coaxing more cars onto its wires is also the one warning that it may struggle to fuel the plant that powers them. The chargers are free. The electrons are the hard part.