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Where Would You Put 500,000 Electric Vehicle Charging Stations?
How to supercharge American wanderlust
President Biden and Congress have developed a vision for infrastructure that will undoubtedly be critical to the future of sustainable transportation in the United States. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework includes the buildout of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers. This is good news.
“Build a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers along highways and in rural and disadvantaged communities. The largest investment in EV infrastructure in history, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework will accomplish the President’s goal of building 500,000 EV chargers.”
The framework calls for electric vehicle chargers along highways and in rural and disadvantaged communities. This is a good start to specifying where these 500,000 new chargers should be installed.
The current charging networks have gravitated toward installing chargers at gas stations (like Sheetz) and big box stores (like Walmart and Target). And, without some gentle guidance from our leaders in Washington, D.C., it is very likely that charging networks will take the path of least resistance, which will inherently mean more chargers at gas stations and big box stores.
There exists in every state an opportunity to supercharge tourism, small business, and outdoor recreation. As the funding becomes available for these 500,000 electric vehicle chargers, communities should demand that the installations be sited for the benefit of small businesses, art museums, state parks, and the like. This is the opportunity of a lifetime for America’s infrastructure to facilitate more traffic to the places that add cultural value to society.
I recently went on a cross country road trip in my electric vehicle from Virginia to Michigan and back. On the trip, I noticed a number of things about our current charging network that seemed like pain points at the time. I am now thinking of those pain points as opportunities. The most obvious pain point is the major gaps geographically between fast chargers. This will of course be largely solved by the installation of 500,000 chargers.
