In September 2017, a North Slope oil engineer named Kris Hall sat down and wrote a white paper. It proposed a three-phase plan for a Tesla Supercharger network across Alaska, complete with GPS coordinates for parking lots in Anchorage and Fairbanks and corridor stops at Talkeetna Junction, Healy, Delta Junction, and Glennallen. Hall noted in the paper that Tesla had no service center, no sales center, and no Superchargers anywhere in the state, though he counted roughly 200 of the company’s cars already on Alaska roads. He sent it to Tesla’s Supercharger team and never received a response.
Three years later, he stopped waiting, and the company ReCharge Alaska was founded. Started with his wife Sara, their company still lists the document on its research page with a one-line description: “submitted to the Tesla Supercharger Team in 2017 with no response.” The decision to start ReCharge Alaska dates back to August 2020 when Hall drove a new Model Y from Anchorage to Fairbanks, after making the same trek in a Model 3 the year before. He needed to stop in Cantwell and take on 36 to 40 kilowatt-hours to finish the trip, and the fastest option available to him, a portable charger drawing 40 amps, took just under four hours. On the slower unit, it would run about five and a half hours. Even with the faster charger, a six-hour drive became an eleven-hour day.
“It’s frustrating to me that we do not have access to DC fast chargers and that we have these groups throughout Alaska that are all working toward a solution, but as of August 2020, we still do not have a single DC Fast Charger in Mainland Alaska,” Hall wrote that October, in the same post where he laid out nine goals for the project. Some of those goals were technical: the equipment had to withstand the temperatures at which it would sit, and it could not draw enough power to trigger the utility’s demand charge.
Photo Courtesy ReCharge Alaska…