Charging Infrastructure Trends from Alternative Fueling

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fueling Station Locator contains information on public and private nonresidential alternative fueling stations in the United States and Canada. Currently, the Station Locator tracks ethanol (E85), biodiesel, compressed natural gas, electric vehicle (EV) charging, hydrogen, liquefied natural gas, and propane stations. Of all these types of fuel, EV charging continues to experience growing infrastructure and rapidly changing technology. This report aims to paint a picture of the state of EV charging infrastructure in the United States in the first calendar quarter of 2022 (Q1 2022).

Published

November 2022

Industry

EV Charging

Topic

Funding

Author

NREL

Based on data from the Station Locator, this report breaks down the growth of public and private charging infrastructure by charging level, network, and location. On top of that, this report takes measure of the current state of charging infrastructure and compares it with two different 2030 infrastructure requirement scenarios. The goal of providing this information is to help transportation planners, researchers, policymakers, infrastructure developers, and others understand the rapidly changing landscape of EV charging infrastructure.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Station Locator shows a 1.2% increase in the number of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), including a 1.3% increase in public EVSE ports and a 0.7% increase in private EVSE ports. The largest growth percentages were found in both public and private direct-current (DC) fast EVSE ports, growing by 6.0% and 2.4%, respectively in Q1 when compared with Level 1 and Level 2 EVSE ports. The largest increase in public charging infrastructure in Q1 (7.6%) was seen in The Mid-Atlantic region of the Clean Cities Coalition Network. However, California, which contains one-third of the country’s public charging infrastructure, continues to lead the country in the number of available public EVSE ports.

In this report, three different benchmarks are used to assess the current state of public charging infrastructure and the needed future requirements to support an ever-growing fleet of light-duty EVs.

The Biden administration has committed to a goal of building a national public charging network of 500,000 EVSE ports by 2030. Approximately 12,390 public EVSE port installations will need to be deployed each quarter for the next 8 years to meet this goal. This requires a significant increase from the 4,674 public EVSE ports that have been installed each quarter, on average, since the start of 2020.
In 2017, NREL’s National Plug-In Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Analysis estimated that by 2030, 15 million light-duty EVs will be on the road in the United States. To support this scenario, the US would require 27,500 DC fast ports and 601,000 Level 2 public and workplace EVSE ports (Wood et al. 2017). Based on this analysis, 83.8% of the required DC fast ports and 16.9% of the required Level 2 EVSE ports have been installed as of Q1.
Lastly, this report uses Atlas Public Policy’s 2021 U.S. Passenger Vehicle Electrification Infrastructure Assessment as a benchmark. According t0 their assessment, an additional 252,000 DC fast ports and 244,000 Level 2 public and workplace EVSE ports would be required by 2030 to support a scenario in which 100% of passenger vehicle sales are electric by 2035 (McKenzie and Nigro 2021).

This means that in Q1 of 2022, the number of DC fast ports and Level 2 EVSE ports were 8.5% and 27.9%, respectively, on the way toward meeting 2030 requirements.

An important side note: 57,6% of public DC fast EVSE ports in the Station Locator are on the Tesla network. Therefore they are only readily accessible to Tesla drivers.