Amid Electrify America's recent completion of a cross-country fast-charging route, and plans by over half a dozen startups and automakers to field electric pickup trucks, it seems right to feel that we're entering a new era for electric vehicles—one marked not by high-priced luxury cars aimed at early adopters or small city cars with purely intracity ranges, but one marked by a wider adoption of electric vehicles. Indeed, the era of early-adopter specials appears to be in the rearview mirror, despite EVs still accounting for between 2% and 3% of all vehicle sales, and another era appears to be on the horizon, one where EV powertrains will be offered in just about all vehicle segments. Likewise, the next generation of EVs seems to be just around the corner, at last priced analogously to gas-engined models.
But has the U.S. electric vehicle charging infrastructure progressed to a point where this next step could be taken?
To be sure, the past three years have seen encouraging progress, but perhaps only in comparison to the glacial pace of the early years of the last decade.
In March of this year EVgo celebrated the opening of its 800th fast-charging location, after a record 2019 year for the company that saw the opening of 75 new stations. The company also grew the number of its charging stations in California by 40% in 2019, bringing the total number of fast-charging stations in the state to over 300.
"Nationwide, EVgo serves more than 200,000 customers who drive a broad array of fast charge-capable electric vehicles available today, including the Nissan Leaf Plus, Chevy Bolt, Kia Niro and Tesla Models 3, X and S," the company noted. "EVgo, in partnership with ChargePoint, also implemented the nation's largest public roaming EV charging integration in 2019, enabling access to more than 30,000 public chargers on both networks with a single app and no roaming fees."
The company also indicated that 100 million people in the U.S. live within a 15-minute drive of an EVgo charger, which includes integrated connectors for Tesla vehicles.
In 2019 Electrify America opened 318 new public charging stations, bringing the total to 435 stations featuring over 1,900 DC fast chargers. Last year alone the company averaged opening more than one new station per business day and just a few days ago completed a cross-country route spanning 11 states and 2,700 miles, linking up Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and plans to complete a second cross-country route along the Southern states by September of this year stretching from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Diego.
"Electrify America's primary goal has always been to advance electric vehicle adoption in the U.S., and that starts by instilling feelings of confidence and freedom in consumers when it comes to EV ownership," said Anthony Lambkin, director of operations. "The completion of our first cross-country route is a significant step towards that goal—by making long-distance travel in an EV a reality, we hope to encourage more consumers to make the switch to electric."
While Electrify America's station route isn't the first to link up the two coasts—Tesla did it first in creating a coast-to-coast Supercharger route—it is the first brand-neutral EV network that all EVs, not just Teslas with their proprietary system, can actually use. The company has over a hundred other sites in development, as a part of its goal of promoting EVs in the U.S. By the end of next year, Electrify America plans to open or at least have under development another 800 stations featuring 3,500 DC fast chargers.
Of course, while Electrify America's two routes across the U.S., as well as the efforts of other EV station builders, create the possibility of easier interstate travel, no longer trapping EVs in several bubbles along the two coasts, there are plenty of challenges to be addressed in the new decade.
First of all, more than half of all EVs currently on the road in the U.S. reside in California, which has been the focus of many of the early station-building efforts. Indeed, it makes sense to place stations where the EVs actually exist, as opposed to rural Nebraska, and California played an important early role in the adoption of EVs starting in the late 2000s.
This relates to another challenge, one that at least seven automakers planning to field electric pickups in the next several months and years will have to address: EVs are still largely an urban and suburban phenomenon on the two coasts, even though a number of Midwestern cities have made important strides in offering an EV-friendly landscape. The rest of the country remains, well, dotted with EV stations on the major east-west interstates that permit EVs to carefully dart across from coast to coast without taking too many detours. The typical EV customer may no longer be an owner of several luxury cars besides the electric car, but the EV is not likely to be that person's sole vehicle in the household.
Second, as it concerns residential charging, EVs are likely to remain the vehicles of homeowners rather than apartment renters. While it's true that a sizable proportion of new apartment buildings being built today are built with EV chargers, the stations themselves are nowhere near the number to provide overnight charging for any significant fraction of residents, assuming that an apartment building with that many EV owners existed in the first place. This means that until apartment buildings provide EV charging opportunities to something close to 25% of their residents simultaneously, those residents who are car owners and would have otherwise been shopping for an EV just won't be able to get one, unless all of their charging needs are met at their workplace. This is the point at which this scenario begins to exclude a lot of potential owners. Reliable charging at home or at work is a high bar at the moment, even in the Bay Area where most chargers are actually in single-family residences. The issue with apartment buildings at the moment touches upon a classic problem of EV infrastructure: Someone has to pay for it.
Lack of curbside charging stations on the sidewalk, along a row of parallel-parked cars, is a related issue. Many public EV stations being built in the U.S. today are not positioned along rows of parallel parked cars, which is at times the only type of parking available to apartment building residents. In effect, they may have access to reliable overnight street parking, as opposed to a garage structure, but this type of station is not something that's being built en masse in the U.S. today. That same apartment building could have a charging station in its parking lot, but unless it offers a high number of charging points for multiple cars, this won't create an incentive for apartment dwellers to buy an EV, knowing that they may have to roll the dice when it comes to charging overnight.
Third, there is still a significant amount of red tape when it comes to the construction of public EV charging stations in a number of states, which surprisingly includes California.
"The cost to design and construct an Electrify America station costs 24% more, on average, in California than the same station designs built in another state," the company notes. "While many factors contribute to station costs, the additional permitting burdens imposed in California—including costs to address station design and other aesthetic requests of local jurisdictions—appear to be the primary cause for this difference. This higher cost per station ultimately means that California will receive fewer stations per dollar invested by Electrify America."
During Electrify America's building blitz in 2019, the average amount of time to perform the permitting process alone actually rose from 53 business days to 75 business days. And that's in a state that's an absolute leader when it comes to the number of EV stations—a crown that it may hold onto for decades. While 75 business days may not sound like a long time, and may even lead one to hope that other states will get more stations because of the length of the process, the reality is that EV station construction time in the U.S. still lags behind China, which outnumbers the U.S. when it comes to stations at a ratio of 8 to 1, as the South China Morning Post notes. The scale of the stations being built in China is also quite different from the U.S., with larger locations offering hundreds of charging points for hundreds of vehicles. Imagine a Walmart parking lot where each parking spot had its own little metal box just ahead of where the nose of the car would be, and that's essentially the scale of some EV charging plazas in China. As the South China Morning Post also noted recently, Beijing alone has more charging spots than the entire United States.
Fourth, while several EV station builders are rocketing ahead, public utilities are often struggling to keep pace with power demands and their own infrastructure, to the point that EV station builders are now in the process of engineering their own energy storage capabilities. In effect, to avoid grid loads during peak times, EV station builders are looking at using stationary batteries for energy storage meant for charging stations. Electrify America has already ordered Tesla batteries for 100 stations in California and other states totaling over 35 MWh to mitigate for energy availability in certain locations and during certain hours. Last year the company identified 75 sites that could use such systems and submitted 62 applications to utility companies for permission to connect battery systems as a part of charging stations.
"Electrify America encountered numerous challenges while attempting to gain approval for these behind-the-meter systems, including utilities that considered the storage as added load or generation," the company noted. "These battery systems are designed to reduce peak load and lower demands on the distribution system. Treating them as new load—in addition to the EV charging station load—serves as a barrier to rapid deployment efforts, and frequently leads to rigorous, time-intensive interconnection studies."
This problem, now beginning to be felt in the EV station industry, rubs up against a scenario in the near- to midterm future in which utility companies will have to increase output during the nighttime hours specifically to account for the grid load during EV recharge hours, which with Level 2 home-based charging systems typically last from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. in most regions. This is an entirely new issue that public utilities will have to contend with in the near future as the market share of EVs grows from its current level, and at the moment there are not that many easy alternatives to having plants produce more power—and not always the clean way. Needless to say, older utility infrastructure, especially in the Northeast states, will face some pains related to modernization of the grid as well as power generation.
But if there is a flicker of hope on the horizon when it comes to power production for EV use—a problem that Elon Musk deserves credit for predicting over a decade ago—it is residential power production and storage.
A handful of startups are currently building EV charging stations designed to run on local renewable energy resources, which in this case means solar panels dedicated entirely to powering an EV charging station. At the moment the scale, and more importantly price, of such setups can seem a little formidable, making them suitable only for commercial use as they require solar panels and a battery. But as solar panels and batteries continue to become less expensive it could be possible to power one's own EV for free, once you purchase your own solar power station and storage system. Envision Solar is one such company currently building solar-powered EV stations for a number of non-private customers, and its stations cost $65,000.
Needless to say, Tesla's solar tile and home energy storage system comes with a slightly easier-to-swallow price tag, but as Tesla itself has suggested after its first year of installing roof tiles to power homes, there is a long journey ahead for this type of power production and storage until every owner of an EV will be able to harness solar energy for charging their car without spending an amount equivalent to the price of their car.
While a Solar Roof utopia beckons on the horizon, EVs in the marketplace still have to contend with the fact that they account for less than 3% of annual car sales, and they still face the same chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to charging infrastructure: Until there are far more EVs, charging infrastructure is expected to remain largely tailored to their numbers on the road. But until EV stations become as ubiquitous as gas stations, potential buyers will still face some version of range anxiety ... unless they live in the Bay Area. What's still needed is a leap currently occurring in China and Norway—two countries different in every way imaginable—but ones that are making an effort to embrace electric mobility. The upcoming crop of electric cars, as well as pickup trucks, may do just that, if enough buyers outside of the traditional EV strongholds decide to go green.
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