US government will triple the speed of many public EV chargers at $33,000 a pop as Honda pegs Midwest a charging desert
Original Post Date: August 27, 2024
Source: Notebook Check
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People in places like the Midwest just don't have enough chargers nearby to go fully electric, opined Honda's CEO when trying to explain the EV sales challenge. The government, however, has embarked on a project to repair and upgrade thousands of public charging stations.
The Biden-Harris administration has earmarked more than $5 billion for a National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) fund that aims to have 500,000 EV chargers operational in 2030.
Instead of just doling out grants for building new chargers, however, the NEVI fund is doing the smart thing and will be repairing existing ones, too.
The US government has started an Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility (EVC-RAA) program to fix and upgrade 4,500 existing public chargers across 20 states. The project is financed with $150 million from the NEVI fund, which works out to about $33,000 per charger.
Before it downsized its Supercharger team, Tesla was winning a lot of public charging infrastructure bids, with prices that are sometimes 70% lower. Thanks to its easy to install prefab Superchargers, a Tesla station with multiple piles costs US$392,000 on average, which is twice less than the competition.
The US government's EVC-RAA program will not only repair broken chargers to put them back in service, but upgrade them as well. It will install the mandatory CCS and Tesla NACS connectors instead of making people lug around something like the Lectron adapter, and up the charging speeds to the level of Tesla's Superchargers.
In one example with a public charging station in Washington, DC, "the upgraded charging station will have the capacity to charge four vehicles simultaneously at a minimum of 150 kW each using either a Combined Charging System 1 or J3400 connector." That's up from 50 kW before, and a significant upgrade.
The local availability of chargers is one of the main barriers before EV adoption. The CEO of Honda Americas recently said that "you can’t force the customer" to buy an electric car if the infrastructure is not there:
We just can’t force the people living in, say, the Midwest, with no charging stations. Even with incentives, they will not change from ICE to BEV. I believe it will be very difficult to force people to go for it. We need to prepare the ecosystem gradually and let them migrate little by little... It’s changing. We’re closely monitoring the number of [new] charging guns per electric vehicle, so it’s not a very rapid growth, but gradually and steadily it is increasing.
An EV charging network reliability is as important as its reach, so with the EVC-RAA program the government wants to address the gap between Tesla's Supercharger network uptime, and, basically, all the other charging networks, public or private.