There has been a lot of talk today about President Joe Biden’s executive orders on Day One. One long-promised EO paves the way for mass adoption of electric vehicles. Joe has campaigned for a $ 5 billion plan to install half a million new electric vehicle charging points by 2030. emission-free driving.
Of course, an executive order has no teeth with no budget to fund it, so it needs the support of Congress to get it done. As one of the tent poles of this government’s plan for the future, electric vehicles and clean energy are likely to receive serious backing from Congressional Dems, and could favor two sides with the promise of new jobs packed into it. Biden’s plan calls for about 1 million new clean energy jobs created by it.
There are currently an estimated 111,000 gas stations in the United States. That number is lower than I thought it would be, since gas stations are actually frickin ‘everywhere. Most gas stations have anywhere from 4 to 16 pumps, right? Our current electric vehicle charging infrastructure includes 28,726 individual stations, although only 4,336 of those stations include DC fast charging, which is necessary for long distances. Of those fast DC stations, Tesla only accounts for a quarter of them and cannot be used to charge non-Teslas.
The electric charging infrastructure is pretty solid these days, as you can easily take an EV across the country or commute in just about any major city. I live in Nevada, and there are large areas of the state that are inaccessible to electric vehicles. And for people who don’t have the ability to charge overnight, for example someone who lives in an apartment building, or someone who has to park their car in the street, it is not really viable technology for the daily drive.
The big advantage that gasoline has with it right now is the ability to point your car in almost any direction and now you can get wherever you go as there are gas stations pretty much everywhere. Even in the most remote parts of the country, you can count on having a gas station so close that when the low fuel light comes on, you can go to the next one.
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As many have said in the comments section of dozens of blogs I’ve written, the one thing that keeps them from buying and driving electric is the lack of charging infrastructure. 46 calls on you to stop or shut up.
Since Biden’s plan doesn’t specify, I’m going to guess 550,000 means individual chargers rather than locations to charge, as I’m not sure it would make sense to have five times as many places to hook up as fuel up. So we assume that Biden is looking to match our gasoline infrastructure by installing something like 5 individual chargers in 110,000 different locations.
The current charging infrastructure is largely based on retail and restaurant parking lots, which is fine. As long as we don’t replace all our gas stations with charging stations, we’ll probably be fine. To really make lasting change, Biden’s policy should focus on low-income neighborhoods, multi-family homes, and parking lots for business and industrial estates. Wherever a car has to sit for hours on end, there is a good place to recharge. Equip street lamps with EV chargers. Equip parking meters with EV chargers.
One of the things I really like about driving an electric car is that I rarely have to go out of my way to recharge as I can ‘refuel’ at night while I sleep. The only time I’ve had to use fast charging has been on long car trips. In that case, our interstate infrastructure is already quite well developed by private companies. If given the chance, I would like to see Biden’s plan continue to expand the charging infrastructure to rural communities and smaller state highways.
As it stands, you can get to most places with the existing EV infrastructure we have, but if you’re trying to get to your cousin in rural Idaho or North Dakota, you’re going to have a hard time. Hopefully, by making electric car chargers as ubiquitous as gas stations, that range anxiety and usability problem will disappear completely. We can do with more charging stations the so-called electron deserts shrink.
With virtually every carmaker leaning hard towards an electric future over the next decade, this infrastructure expansion will bring with it the demand needed to not only support incoming electric models, but to grow beyond that. Biden has expressed a desire for the US to compete with China in electric vehicle adoption, largely out of support for the many car manufacturers with manufacturing facilities located here. China already has half a million public EV plugs, so this 2030 expansion plan would only catch us up to 2021 levels in China.
It is clear that the best plan is to force all Americans to live in megacities and invest in bullet train technology and moving sidewalks. But this is not a utopia, and people are not willing to give up their personal mobility, or the chance of exacerbating climate problems by living in the wilderness-urban interface (that’s the WUI, look it up), so we have to play by the rules of the existing system. If you absolutely need to keep your cars and your ridiculously long traffic, and your desire to traverse the wild, empty lands of this country by car, at least let’s make that happen in a clean way. And why not create a ton of jobs along the way?
When it comes to delivering on a promise to increase our charging infrastructure over the course of a decade, there’s no kind of kill like overkill. Are 550,000 new chargers bizarre and impossible? No. Is it ambitious? Just the right amount.