The Expert Podcast

For electric vehicles, the big elephant in the room is recharging and charging stations. That's what everybody's worried about—what's my range, where can I recharge, and am I going to be able to take a trip? There’s a lot of effort and projects in the works from the federal government to make recharging more ubiquitous. How’s that working out, and what does that mean for you as a consumer? Here are the key aspects of that plan.

First of all, this is a five billion dollar investment by the federal government over the next three years or so. Five billion dollars—that’s huge! The way they’re doing it is by allocating that to the states, so the states can handle it at the local level. This may be a disappointment to some, as people wanted a national network of charging stations owned by the federal government, but that's not how they’re doing it. They’re issuing funds to the states, and the states might use private enterprise to carry this out. It’s a big project, and the Department of Energy has a list of all the plans that each state has put together—state by state, what the actual funding is, and what the plans are. You can see that link on our website for more details about what each state is planning to do.

The key points, or pain points, for this are uptime and charging speeds. Uptime refers to whether the charging stations actually work. Right now, you’re going to find that a lot of charging stations may not be operational. Some places are talking about stations being broken and only up 66% or 80% of the time. That may seem like a lot, but what if your cell phone only worked 80% of the time, or if gas stations were only open two-thirds of the time? This is a mission-critical, life-or-death safety issue when it comes to being able to charge your car. If the charging stations aren’t working, that’s not really going to help you. Uptime is important.

There’s also a difference between a charging station and a gas station. A gas station has attendants on site who can immediately fix things when something goes wrong. They can repair equipment, and they may have the necessary parts. Charging stations are usually unmanned and not staffed. This may change in the future, but for now, they are not staffed. If something breaks, there will be a notification, but it may take days or even weeks to get the station fixed. Uptime is a big deal.

Another factor is how fast the charging stations work. There are Level 3 and Level 2 chargers. Level 3 chargers can charge a car in 20 to 30 minutes, if available. Level 2 chargers may take two to three hours. Very few stations have Level 3 chargers, so most of the time, you’ll have to wait a couple of hours to fully charge your car. You may be able to charge it enough to get to where you're going, but Level 2 chargers are kind of borderline mediocre and almost non-usable.

Here's where it gets interesting—the amount of power needed. Charging speeds have gone up from 7 kilowatts to now 150 kilowatts for a charging station. Most sites don’t have that kind of power. If you look at an average gas station, the entire site uses only 50 kilowatts of power. So if you have a charging station with four chargers, that could add up to 600 kilowatts, which is not feasible. You’re talking about needing megawatts of utility infrastructure. Few areas outside of major highway corridors have the electrical capacity to support DC chargers (Level 3). This is a big deal. This is not just slapping together a charging station.

A charging station is easier to build than a gas station. With a gas station, you have to dig a hole in the ground, put in a tank, and follow very strict environmental safety protocols for handling liquid fuel. There’s a database of what they call LUST (Leaking Underground Storage Tanks), and getting storage tanks approved to be put underground is a very difficult and regulated process. For charging stations, it’s no big deal—you don’t have to dig a hole in the ground, and there’s no tank. It’s just an electrical system with a fancy plug. However, it uses a lot of power, and most places in the country don’t have enough electrical bandwidth to support Level 3 chargers. This is not an easy fix.

To change that, you’d have to completely overhaul the infrastructure of the electrical grid. Forget about whether the grid can support that much power—getting it to the charging station is another issue. Wires underground or on poles—it’s a completely different network.

The last factor in deploying this infrastructure is the “Buy American” clause in the bill. This bill supports American products, which is great. However, many of the parts used in EV charging stations—the computers, controllers, and plugs—are not manufactured in the U.S. right now. All the factories are overseas. If the law requires only American-made products, these parts aren’t available to buy, even if you wanted them or if the price were higher. There are no factories here that make these parts, although that could change in the future. But for now, this issue remains unresolved.

So, do we have enough capacity? Are these stations going to be up and running? These are the main obstacles to getting an EV charger every 50 miles. What is the plan, and how do we use this billion-dollar program to build a network of chargers that people can rely on to travel from point A to point B with an electric vehicle?