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Update – February 7, 2025: The EA station at Westfield Valley Fair is back in operation! They had been out for three and a half weeks.

For the past two weeks, the Electrify America EV Charging station at the Westfield Valley Fair Mall in San Jose has been offline and marked as “Coming Soon.” The station opened in November, 2021, and featured 14 ultra-fast chargers.

I went for a run the other day and took photos of the upgrade at Valley Fair. EA is swapping out the old charging terminals with new ones.

When we bought our Hyundai IONIQ 6 EV, we were given two free years of 30-minute fast charging at EA stations. While we have a Level 2 charger at home, we’ve been taking advantage of the free charging, and the Valley Fair location is our go-to charging spot. I have found that if you go very early in the morning, there’ll be several spots available.

At other EA stations, there’s typically just three stalls with all of them occupied. I don’t like to wait, especially if there are other cars in the queue or if slow-charging cars are currently charging.

It’s unclear what other changes Electrify America is making to the Valley Fair stations. From their announcement of the temporary closure:

Beginning Monday, January 13, 2025, the chargers at this location will be temporarily unavailable as we work on upgrading legacy equipment to the newest generation of chargers, which helps to improve the customer experience and make public fast charging a more seamless process. Be sure to check the Electrify America app for the latest availability. Thank you for your patience as we work to make these upgrades as quickly as possible!

To help ensure improved traffic flow, please follow the new signs for the Entrance and Exit locations, as they have been updated.

For after hours access, please utilize the main entrance.

One change that they made about a year ago was swapping the positions of the exit and entrances. Are they reverting back to the original layout? I prefer the current better, since it prevented a traffic jam from forming at the Stop sign off of North Monroe Street.

With this station offline, the other nearby EA stations are constantly full, so we have been plugging in at home. At $0.16/kWh through Silicon Valley Power, charging at home is substantially cheaper than the $0.56/kWh we would have to pay once our two years of free charging are up. Of course, free is better than paying anything for those electrons, so we’re looking forward to when the Valley Fair EA stations comes back online.