Remember the old meme about how the federal government has spent $7.5 billion on EV charging stations but only three had been built? The meme needs to be updated. As of June, 17 stations have been built:
Hmmm. Still not very impressive, is it? But this is like looking at Hoover Dam in 1933 and being indignant that the government has spent a billion dollars¹ and only poured one bucket of concrete:
The EV charging station project was designed from the start to finish in 2030. Here's how it looks if you extrapolate the current growth rate:
We probably won't hit a thousand stations until the end of 2025. That's just the way exponential growth goes. But like Hoover Dam, the EV project is actually ahead of schedule even though there isn't much to see yet.
¹In 2023 dollars.
Hmm...I am not sure how charging stations would grow exponentially, unless they reproduce asexually by dividing.
Narurally, each station charges the vehicle that's used to install two more.
I understand now!
yeah, i don't even know why kevin mentions "exponential growth" since that's not even what his graph depicts, which i believe is usually termed a sigmoid curve. i'm not sure what he's basing those projections on, but i'd guess it's part of some publicly available plan from the federal government.
Since you are drawing comparisons with the Hoover Dam:
I rather doubt anything similar will happen here.
From the same source, which also describes the diversion tunnels and coffer dams and other prep work which had to be in place before concrete could be poured:
At RE+ solar power trade show, a speaker pointed out 2024 solar installs will be the equivalent of 19 Hoover Dams. As far as EV chargers, the projection (or hope) is 35 million by 2030, most will be in peoples' homes, and a few million available to the public.
The law was written before the Big 3 adopted Tesla's plug/charger setup. I hope the delay means the setups offer some of the other designs, but have been updated to build out predominately Tesla chargers.
Up here in Whatcom county WA new charging stations have been proliferating rapidly. We just came back from a trip to Seattle and the resort (one of a big chain) we stay at there has had 2 dual cable L2 chargers for the last 4 years in an underground garage, and on this trip Zipcar set up two more L2 charge stations - one dual cable and one single cable.
Our little coop in Bellingham had 2 dual cable L3 DC chargers and 2 dual cable L2 chargers installed just over a year ago. A lot of proliferation in a lot of local supermarket parking lots - including L3 stations.
This is before the NEVI funding was approved.
I bet WA is in the queue for NEVI funding. But - like the Hoover dam, it requires prep - beefing up local and statewide electrical grid capacity to support transmission to a lot of L2 and L3 chargers, then supplying lots more clean electricity generation plus battery farms to store and smooth power draw.
An L2 just about anywhere other than home or work isn’t really with much though.
L2 can go as high as 19 kw, although most of them are around 9kw. That's enough to put a useful amount of charge into a car while you are watching a movie or enjoying a leisurely meal in a restaurant. A typical car battery pack has a capacity of 70 or 80 kwh, and a 9 kw charger can improve its state of charge by more than 10% per hour. That means a two hour movie can get you a state of charge improvement of 20-25%. That's very much worth while.
The next step is to subsidize the retrofit of millions of parking spaces in thousands of high-rises and multistory residential structures and residential rebates for whole-house battery storage and EV hookups.
Yes, this.
Although this represents only a third of households.
I don't think it's even a third. Right around two-thirds of residential housing is single family dwellings. There is another chunk consisting of ground oriented multi-unit housing such as townhouses, duplexes and such. Multi-story is what's left over, maybe 20%.
how will charging stations work in cities with rowhouses and street parking, not garages? Will cords be running across the sidewalks?
fast charging stations. i was just talking to a friend who bought an EV and we live in a rowhouse/high rise apt area of a city and that's what he's doing. there's a 30-ish spot fast charging station setup a few blocks from his place which currently always seems to have an open slot available, 30 minutes to 80% charge. I've also seen people rub cables from their house, across the sidewalk, to their street parked car. That's obviously not scalable by individuals but there's no reason we can't build out the charging infrastructure in cities as EV adoption grows if we want to.
One method that they use in the UK is outfitting street lamps with chargers: https://ubitricity.com/en/charging-solutions/ac-lamppost/. LA has a similar street lamp charger network although it is much smaller in scale: https://lalights.lacity.org/connected-infrastructure/ev_stations.html .
Lamp post charging stations.