8 March—Last night Litchfield easily bounded over the last hurdle to go into the retail fuel business when the borough’s Historic District Commission unanimously granted a coveted Certificate of Appropriateness for two of the three EV charging station installations on town parking lots in the borough. (The third installation, at the town garage, is being revised of town’s own volition.)

The HDC’s purview is purely aesthetic. And the well-conceived superficial alterations to the charging stations proposed by the town looked good. Shy of putting the chargers in clapboard-sided sheds, you couldn’t ask for anything more appropriate for inner-city Litchfield. (While I reiterated my objection to the town going into the retail business—irrelevant in the circumstance—I had to admit I saw no reason for the HDC to deny a COA.)

Some dangers of high-voltage EV charger installations were in fact brought up at the HDC’s public hearing. And earlier yesterday, the Connecticut General Assembly’s Public Safety and Security Committee held a public hearing on long-winded Senate Bill 343, “An act making various changes related to the state building code and fire safety code, fiscal notes for the proposed regulations, barriers for swimming pools, battery-charged security fences and parking of electric vehicles,” which, inter alia, implicitly raised the danger of lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles, if not of high-voltage chargers.

Briefly, while SB 343 proposes to mandate that “buildings and structures are designed and constructed in such a manner as to conserve energy and, wherever practicable, facilitate the use of renewable energy resources, including provisions for electric circuits capable of supporting electric vehicle charging in any newly constructed residential garage . . .,” it stipulates at the very end, “No person shall park an electric vehicle, as defined in section of the general statutes, in a residential or commercial parking garage.”

(Perhaps the EV charger provision is intended only for exterior installation?)

Battery-powered vehicles are not in themselves at all dangerous, of course. In fact, electric motors are far more efficient than internal-combustion engines. But the high-voltage lithium-ion batteries that power them present a proven risk of fires that are considerably harder to quench and more toxic than good old-fashioned gasoline fires.

There’s no doubt the EV garage parking ban will be stripped from the final bill, not because it goes way too far, mind you, but because it’s politically inexpedient in addition to being just plain dumb. (There’s no name attached to the bill, so we don’t know whom to blame.) Katie Dykes, Ned Lamont’s pet DEEP commissioner and an ineluctable EV advocate, wants its stripped, for instance. And so does virtually everybody else in and out of the state administration.

On the other hand, remember being advised not to park your car in a garage attached to your home, lest it catch on fire or, even worse, start up by itself and poison you with odorless carbon monoxide?

Life gets more dangerous with each advance in progress . . .