JERSEY CITY, N.J. — The state’s second largest city unveiled a new fleet of 20 Chevrolet Bolts and five electric garbage trucks Tuesday in an Earth Day celebration of the city’s aggressive effort to transition away from fossil-fueled vehicles.

In a press conference in front of the vehicles, Jersey City officials also said they expect to issue a request for proposals seeking partners to expand the number of available public charging sites and to help boost the number of private electric vehicles. Mayor Steven Fulop said the city currently has about 30 chargers, most of which are available to the public, and the goal of the RFP is to more than double that number, perhaps to 70.

The event came a day after the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) announced that the third phase of the state’s popular Charge Up New Jersey program, which awards incentives of up to $4,000 for an EV purchase, would close because the allocated funds had been exhausted. The program awarded about $35 million for the purchase or lease of 10,000 vehicles, the BPU said.

The Bolts have just gone into service as messenger vehicles, replacing gasoline-powered vehicles in the task of ferrying documents and other items around the city and carrying city inspectors to inspection sites. With a range of about 220 miles, the Bolts are well suited for the task, doing on average 65 to 100 miles a day, Business Administrator John J. Metro said.

The garbage trucks, the first of which arrived last summer, pick up trash in the city’s parks and recharge every night after doing 40 to 90 miles a day — well within their range, employees said. The city purchased the trucks with $2.046 million awarded in 2019 by the state’s Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, and city officials say the vehicles were the first electric garbage trucks to go into service on the East Coast.

The trucks are charged by solar panels on the roof of the city’s Department of Public Works building, and the Bolts will be charged there when needed.

Fulop said the city’s growing EV fleet “speaks to the overall commitment we have about providing more access to electric vehicles here in Jersey City.”

“If we are going to be encouraging residents to move in this direction, the city should be setting an example by doing it ourselves,” he said.

Fulop said the city is still evaluating the economic benefits of using garbage trucks fueled by electricity rather than diesel.

“It’s surely not going to cost us more; that’s what we know for certain,” he said. “But how much we save is to be determined.”

Metro said the purchase of the Bolts, made with the help of funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, is part of an ongoing effort to replace the city’s entire car fleet. Fulop said the city has about 1,000 vehicles.

“We plan on doing this every year as long as the grant funding is available,” he said, adding that it could take up to 10 years.

The garbage trucks are among at least 52 trucks in 25 municipalities paid for by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection using funds either from the Volkswagen trust or the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The RGGI fund especially has invested heavily in transportation, which is the city’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions at 37%. (See NJ To Accelerate RGGI Fund Expenditures.)

Marking Earth Day a year ago, the DEP announced grants of $7.6 million to fund local government vehicle purchases, and the city of Paterson announced the purchase of 38 EVs for use by housing and health inspectors and its own Department of Public Works.

Jersey City in 2021 released its own Climate Change and Energy Action Plan, which called for an 80% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050 and the city vehicle fleet to be 100% electric by 2030.

Barkha Patel, director of the city’s Department of Infrastructure, said at the press conference that when her department started trying to electrify the city’s fleet six years ago, “we didn’t know how much we could expand the scope of this work.” But the city has steadily introduced a variety of programs to tackle the issue from different directions, she and other city officials said.

In one program, city workers can book a vehicle through an online ride-sharing scheduling system when they need it, so that individual employees are not assigned a specific vehicle all the time, allowing city vehicles to be used more efficiently. It now has 25 vehicles assigned to it, and the city is looking to replace them with EVs, Metro said.

The city also introduced a ride-sharing program operated by Via Transportation in 2020 to provide an option in areas of the city underserved by existing public transport, and now has 24 microvans and two SUVs. In 2022, the New Jersey DEP awarded the program $600,000 from RGGI for the purchase of four EVs and four Level 2 chargers. And the state in March awarded additional RGGI funds for the project to buy 15 to 20 Level 2 chargers and two to four DC fast chargers.

Incentive Support Halted

In announcing the closure of the Charge Up New Jersey program, the BPU said the state at the end of last year had more than 91,000 EVs, of which 25,000 were put on the streets with support from the three rounds of program funding. The board said applications already filed would consume the remainder of the $30 million set aside for the program by the legislature.

In the latest phase of the program, the BPU had shifted from a rebate system to one in which the incentive would be deducted from the vehicle cost at dealerships and showrooms. It reduced the maximum incentive available from $5,000 in the first two phases to $4,000 and continued a policy enacted in the second phase of awarding the maximum incentive only to vehicles priced less than $45,000. The changes were part of an effort to ensure that incentives would go only to “incentive essential” customers, those who would only buy an EV if there was an incentive available. (See NJ Cuts Incentives for New Phase of EV Promotion.)

“Due to the success of the point-of-sale incentive, available funds for this fiscal year are projected to be fully committed for eligible orders, purchases and leases by April 17, 2023,” the agency said in a letter to the state Department of the Treasury.

The program will continue offering $250 for the installation of home chargers, the BPU said.

ChargeEVC, a coalition of trade and environmental groups that advocates for greater adoption of EVs, said the closure of the program showed the level of public interest. The group said that 9.8% of all light-duty vehicles sales in New Jersey in 2022 were EVs, “ahead of the national average of 7%.”

“We can expect that the program will reopen in the new fiscal year under a new and approved state budget,” ChargeEVC said in a release, although the BPU’s release did not mention the future of the program.

The ChargeEVC release also quoted Jim Appleton, president of NJCAR, a car dealership trade group, saying that “the stop-again, start-again nature of the program over the last three years has not been conducive to an orderly business environment, and that ultimately hurts dealers and consumers.”

“Customers must be able to rely on incentives in the marketplace, or they will lose interest,” he said.