The Expert Podcast

…One of the biggest obstacles to getting more electric vehicle adoption. In the marketplace has to do with E V charging stations And there's a great article in the wall street journal about why there aren't more charging stations It's not just a matter of. rollout and the. A number of companies putting bees in service. There's actually a great deal of headwind against putting out more charging stations. they could actually be created faster. If these obstacles were in place and in some cases there's a fight between who's going to do it For example, there's tension has erupted between businesses such as gas stations convenience stores truck stops and utility companies over who gets to sell electricity to drivers. As an example, in some jurisdictions the electricity provider the electric company the utility. Wants to be the one who puts these charging stations in place. So they're lobbying to be. The provider of these charging stations and have the licenses and the permits. But at the same time, there may be a gas station that also wants to do it. The problem is the gas station is afraid to go ahead and put in charging stations because. they have to buy the electricity from a competitor from a company who actually wants to also have charging stations So it's very difficult to put in millions of dollars of investment into infrastructure to build the chargers. If you're not sure if your partner that you're buying electricity from, wants to drive you out of business by charging you too high of a rate. To fund the. the electricity for those chargers and the utility companies know this, there are monopolies in most markets there's only one electric company and they want to own and operate the chargers extending electricity sales into a new market. They have a competitive edge because they have the approval of the state utility regulators They can pass the cost of infrastructure to all rate payers, meaning that. When they build these charging stations they can add that as an expense to their entire business and the electric rates that people pay at their house at their business. Even for electricity not used for chargers, that rate absorbs the cost of building the chargers. I'm a private company that wants to put chargers in a gas station or convenience store. Doesn't have that luxury of passing along that. Investment to the other part of their business. And one is. there's a gas station. in Minneapolis who wants to build it but. The utility company called Xcel has asked regulators to let it build own and operate. 730 fast charging sites within the next two years. That will be almost half of the market in Minneapolis. The 193 million costs would be paid by rate payers So the electric company really doesn't have to come out of pocket to build all these chargers. And there's another…obstacle for. private sector let's say a…convenience store. Because Evie charging requires a surge of power. gas station owners say their monthly bills are spiking. By hundreds of thousands of dollars because of that surge in electricity. Electricity rates for most commercial use. Is done on a meter basis So the rate you pay is dependent upon how how much it fluctuates If you have big fluctuations. In your electric use your Bill's going to be much higher. And the last problem is what happens in rural areas. The rural areas. Who's going to put in there. According to the article who if anyone will want to build and operate chargers along remote highways, because those. will have to operate a loss for many years because there's not going to be a lot of people using them and paying to charge our vehicles. No rural charging station built a requirements. in rural Wyoming four chargers placed every 50 miles would be profitable…in until 2040 that's 15 almost 20 years away. So the rollout these is going to make a big difference because right now about 1% of us drivers own EVs, but wait-lists are growing and automator automakers are expecting EV sales to keep rising. The problem is there's already a backlog of. Places to charge your vehicle There's people that have to wait. Now sometimes half an hour 45 minutes just to be able to plug in plus the charging time So the rollout of these charging stations make seem like a no brainer. Why not just build them, but there's a lot of regulatory red tape that's behind the scenes. Some people are even saying that there should be government subsidies or the government should build these at taxpayer expense. Let us know in the comments what you think about how the electric vehicle charging systems should be created and how it should roll out for adoption of the vehicles.