If your electric car comes with a portable plug, you can charge it up at home. More charging stations are also coming on line up and down the state. But here in Orange County, we love to shop. No sweat if you take to the aisles at four OC shopping malls.
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They are Brea Mall, Westminster Mall, The Outlets at Orange (formerly The Block and The City) and The Shops at Mission Viejo. Each within the past several weeks has seen the installation of Freedom Station sites that promise to recharge shoppers' EVs in 30 minutes or less.
“Our growing network of state-of-the-art electric vehicle charging stations at our shopping centers shows our commitment to delivering a more sustainable shopping experience that is also convenient for our customers,” says Ron Hanson, vice president of Operational Efficiency with the malls' operator, Simon. “Adding charging stations to popular destinations such as The Shops at Mission Viejo, Brea Mall, Westminster Mall and The Outlets at Orange illustrates the many opportunities we have as a company to incorporate sustainable practices into our day-to-day operations.”
The Outlets at Orange got the jump on the charging stations, with its opening in April in the parking lot near Neiman Marcus Last Call and Burke William's Day Spa. The Shops at Mission Viejo's Freedom Station, which opened in May, is in the lot between Forever 21 and P.F. Chang's. Brea Mall's station, which was online in early June, is in the lot near California Pizza Kitchen. Westminster Mall's opened in mid-June in the lot near DSW (between Sears and JCPenney).
The Freedom Stations fold into Simon's “sustainability strategy,” which company officials say includes initiatives to measure and reduce overall energy consumption, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.