How Joe Biden can build 500,000 electric vehicle chargers by 2030

• President Joe Biden wants the U.S. to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles over the next decade.
• The US could have 35 million EVs by 2030, requiring millions of plugs where the country has only 100,000.
• More plugs will do wonders for a transition to commercial vehicles, but it’s not always easy to attract businesses to build them.
• Visit the Insider Business Department for more stories.

With plans to eliminate the country’s carbon footprint by 2050, Joe Biden could easily be the greenest president in American history. But achieving such a flashy goal would involve a lot of work in much more mundane areas, such as having enough places to charge a fast-growing fleet of electric vehicles.

Even with 1.8 million battery-powered cars already on U.S. roads, there are only about 100,000 charging plugs at about 41,000 public station locations. The difference makes it easy to see how anxiety in the range – or the fear of having to run out of juice without a charging station in the area – is one of the biggest obstacles for the consumer to consider a clean car.

President Biden has promised to build 500,000 new plugs in the next decade, in an effort to reduce highway emissions that are currently the largest source of carbon emissions. To get there – and to achieve a fully electric future – five industry experts and leaders say the country needs an aggressive infrastructure plan and a range of green policies to work with.

Volta

The number of EVs in the US could reach 35 million by 2030, requiring more than 2 million public loaders, according to The Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm. With such a surge on the horizon, charging operators are excited about the prospect of a federal investment of more than a million dollars in charging infrastructure that could give a shock to the EV transition that is already underway.

“This industry is happening. The question is how much faster it can happen,” Jonathan Levy, chief executive of fast-moving company EVgo, said in an interview. “What we are really excited about is that the Biden government recognizes that this is going to happen worldwide, and if the US wants to lead, there will need to be more federal policy support to help make that happen.”

But Biden’s plan – and ultimately any congressional action – could take many forms. Industry leaders and policy experts are divided on the best way to make this happen.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the government’s plans.

How to get the ball rolling

Making things happen quickly, something that is not the federal government’s strong case, is a top priority for Drew Lipsher, head of strategy at levy company Volta. After all, EVs accounted for less than 3% of all car sales in 2020.

“I think the most important thing the government can focus on to meet the expected demand – speed,” he said in an interview. “The harder they do it, and the more it slows down the process, it’s only going to hurt the transition to electric mobility.”

Convincing millions of consumers to go electric will require a huge pre-investment to drastically scale down access to the levy, Nick Nigro, founder of the Atlas Public Policy concentration consultancy, told Insider. He wants Congress and the Biden government to approach the charging infrastructure in the same way that Tesla is going to work to build its Supercharger network.

“[Tesla] “made significant investments early on to establish that no matter where you were in the United States, you could travel with your Tesla vehicle without having to worry too much about range or charging access,” he said. Now the federal government is in a position to look at all electric transport with the same lens. “

ChargePoint

Nigro recommends that the departments of transportation and energy work together to distribute grants to vendors, possibly through existing channels such as the State Energy Program.

Discounts that encourage businesses to build chargers, or to buy it from customers, are another option to quickly stimulate activity.

Anne Smart, vice president of public policy at ChargePoint, a levy company that sells plugs to businesses, fleets and for home use, is particularly excited about extending consumer rebates. It can be rolled out faster than grants, it is effective at the state level and can make the market work as usual, she said. Customers can choose which charging provider they want and a few thousand dollars off the sticker price.

However, according to Volta’s Lipsher, a company tax rebate program could hamper progress if it encourages companies to wait months and years for a rebate to be approved before starting construction.

Not so fast

EVgo’s Levy, who has held positions at the Department of Energy and in the White House of Obama, says there are risks of building too many charging stations too quickly. Charging infrastructure should remain just ahead of EV ownership and demand, and not drastically exceed it, he says.

To make his point, Levy quotes the famous saying of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky about skating where the disc is going to be, not where it was. For charging companies, “you want to skate just in front of the puck. If we skate so far outside the puck that we’re out of the arena, it’s a problem for the industry,” he said.

This is because overbuilding can crater the economy of the loading industry, he said, leading to large numbers of stations being underutilized and not profitable to operate.

EVgo

This is a mistake made in the past – with significant consequences. As part of the 2009 Recovery Act, the Department of Energy has allocated $ 100 million to a company called Ecotality to build more than 10,000 charging stations. Four years later, Ecotality filed for bankruptcy. An audit of that year found that demand for EVs was not growing as fast as expected, and that the majority of the commercial charging stations that Ecotality built were suffering from low usage.

To avoid similar pitfalls, clean energy government programs could allow funds to be used not only for capital investment, but also operating expenses to bridge the gap to profitability, Levy said.

Location is the key

Whatever funding model he chooses, experts say the government should be conscious about where chargers go and what kind of technology is used. Fast chargers, for example, are not needed in urban and suburban streets where people regularly park for hours. On the contrary, slower Level 2 plugs are not suitable for rural areas or rest areas on the highway where people only want to spend 45 minutes.

Then there is the question of equity.

Volta

Anne Shikany, an expert in infrastructure policy at the Council for the Defense of Natural Resources, told Insider that the major transport improvements to minority communities are important as they are the heaviest for the country’s carbon emissions. But investment should not come at the expense of community involvement.

“One thing we’d like to see is a lot of consultation with communities before infrastructure goes in,” Shikany said. “Talking to communities and making sure the goods you want to provide match their needs is incredibly important.”

Loading is just one piece of the puzzle

Charging is just one piece of the mystery of moving the land of gas-powered cars. Taxpayers hope the new government will take a number of other measures to increase demand for EVs.

Biden also undertook to convert the entire federal government fleet – about 650,000 vehicles – into electricity, promising that every bus manufactured in the US will run on batteries by 2030. Charging companies hope that an expansion of the current zero-emission vehicle tax credit is also imminent.

Excited on the side, the levy firms with whom Insider spoke said they were also prepared to go it alone if the White House did not get through. The train has left the station, they said, and the EV surge is taking place with or without federal government support.

“Policy is also primarily a gust of wind as we see it,” Levy said. “The EV future is now, and it’s here, and it’s happening regardless of anything else.”