James Cater has spent his career thinking about why drivers pull off the road and what keeps them there for a few minutes once they do. So when he describes the new fast EV charger his company installed at a convenience store in Orono, Maine, he talks about the things a tired driver actually wants. The lot is “nice and well lit,” he told Fox Bangor. “You have a place you can go into. It’s warm. Wifi. Grab a coffee. Grab a sandwich, and you’re on your way. So for all of those reasons, we thought this was a good opportunity for us.” The location is also highly strategic; it sits on the home campus of the University of Maine, in an area with year-round tourism.
Cater is Senior Director of Sustainability Strategy and Innovation at Global Partners, a company whose core business is selling liquid energy, including gasoline and renewable fuels. The company operates one of the country’s largest terminal networks, spanning from Maine to Florida and the Gulf states. “Our unique model, built on strategic assets, strong relationships, and principled leadership, has allowed us to adapt to customers’ changing needs for over 90 years,” the company writes. Now, it is adapting again. The Orono site sits at an Alltown Convenience Market, and it is the same calculation that Global has used for fuel for decades, applied to a different kind of fill-up.
Photo Courtesy Alltown
Global opened the station on April 1, 2026, marking its first EV charging location in Maine. Situated about eight miles northeast of downtown Bangor, the site features two NACS charging ports and two CCS ports. The DC Fast Charging station delivers roughly a 100-mile range charge in about 10 minutes, offering speed and reliability simultaneously.
For a fuel retailer, a convenience store is the ideal home for an EV charger because it is already built around the economics of the pitstop. The people who pull in are a captive audience of ten or fifteen minutes, and the store already sells them coffee and sandwiches while they wait.
Orono is Global’s eighth active EV charging site, following four locations in Massachusetts, two in New Hampshire, and one in New York, with more than a dozen additional sites in the planning phase, a representative told C-Store Dive via email.
The economics still needed to be penciled out, and they got it from the state. The Efficiency Maine Trust awarded Global nearly $300,000 through its DC Fast Charging Maine Destinations program, offsetting up to 80% of the cost of installing the chargers. In an April 2024 round, Efficiency Maine records show that the Orono Alltown Market project was awarded one of eight projects that will fund 16 DC fast-charging ports. That is a two-year path from award to opening, and it was not a sure thing: Efficiency Maine’s award lists show a long column of sibling fast-charging projects across recent rounds marked canceled. Getting one built to the finish line was not necessarily the rule.
Photo Courtesy Efficiency Maine
Part of what made Orono buildable was a piece of hardware that sidesteps the single biggest obstacle to putting a fast charger almost anywhere: the grid. A DC fast charger draws a large, sudden load, and connecting one sometimes means an expensive utility upgrade. The Orono station avoids that because, as Cater explained to Fox Bangor, it contains a battery and therefore does not overtax the local grid.
Global worked with Electric Era, a Seattle-based charging-station technology company founded in 2020 by former SpaceX engineers, to make this a reality. Its PowerNode charging stations use a built-in battery that discharges on demand to reduce grid draw, and the company says the design lets a site come online in mere weeks by avoiding grid infrastructure upgrades. It is an American engineering answer to a mundane but stubborn problem, and it is the reason a store in a Maine college town could add fast charging without tearing up its service connection.
Photo Courtesy Quincy Edmund Lee
The rest of the work stayed close to home. Global built the site with ReVision Energy, a solar and EV charging installer founded in Maine in 2003 that is 100% employee-owned and a certified B Corp, and with Versant Power, the state’s second-largest utility that delivers electricity to more than 165,000 customers across northern and eastern Maine. Both are the kind of durable, locally rooted operators that make a project like this stick.
Orono is one dot in a bigger and quietly surprising picture. Maine is rural, cold, and expensive to heat, none of which looks friendly to electric vehicles on paper. Yet, the 2026 U.S. Electric Vehicle Charging Station Report ranked the state third in the nation for charging points per electric vehicle. Maine sits at 16.5 charging points per 100 EVs, and after a 47.97% jump in public charging in a single year, it marked one of the largest expansions nationwide. Maine got there the same way Global got the Orono site done: by putting chargers where people already stop, and letting the practical case carry the argument.
Cater suggested to Fox Bangor that Orono won’t be the company’s only Maine location for long. For a business that has spent 90 years learning where drivers pull over, that is a market read. “We’re thrilled with the completion of our first EV charging station in Maine,” said Cater. “This project represents a meaningful step in our commitment to providing best-in-class fueling options for all of our guests while helping Maine continue to advance its climate and clean energy objectives.”
It is not Global’s first foray into environmentally-friendly transportation. Its GlobalGLO Low Carbon Solutions™, therefore, include biodiesel, renewable diesel, and ethanol. However, Global is not offering these products out of the kindness of its heart. “Meeting today’s energy demands while reducing emissions is no longer a choice, but a business imperative that serves the environment and your company’s competitive edge,” the company described. In this way, Global says, it helps each customer “secure your position as a leader in a market that increasingly values environmental responsibility,” meeting demand with products designed for efficiency, “while never losing sight of its bottom line.”
