State plans more than 1K public EV chargers

The EV chargers are coming.

Illinois, which has lagged in installing public EV charging stations, expects to add 1,000 fast-charging ports this year at locations such as shopping centers, hotels, truck stops and restaurants, according to Illinois electric vehicle officer Megha Lakhchaura.

In addition, more than 200 charging ports are slated to be installed on the state’s interstate highways by the end of 2025.

“You’ll see a whole lot of chargers,” said Lakhchaura, and they will be installed relatively quickly, “to make up for lost time.”

Lakhchaura spoke to the Tribune after the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade association, reported that Illinois came in 49th out of 50 states and Washington, D.C., in a ranking of charger access based on the ratio of EVs to public chargers.

Lakhchaura disputed that finding, saying that the actual number of EVs on the road in Illinois was lower than the number the trade association used.

But she acknowledged that Illinois wasn’t a top-10 state for public EV chargers in the third quarter of 2023, the time period the trade association considered.

“We need to do far better,” said Lakhchaura, who was hired a year and a half ago. The good news is that EV sales in Illinois are doing well. They grew 60% from 2022 to 2023, compared with 50% nationally, Lakhchaura said, with the total number of registered EVs in the state now at 94,000.

On the charger front, the state is awarding almost $40 million in grants for installation of 1,000 fast-charging ports.

That will essentially double the number of fast-charging ports in Illinois, Lakhchaura said.”Those charging stations are very critical to reducing range anxiety, because you can charge your car in 15 minutes versus 8 hours,” she said.

The nearly $40 million is coming from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s bipartisan Rebuild Illinois Capital Plan, the state’s 2021 climate bill and a settlement with Volkswagen over allegations of emissions cheating.

The state will fund another $93 million in grants for charging ports in 2024, according to Lakhchaura. That includes up to $50 million in grants to build fast EV charging stations along interstate highways, with the money coming from the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program.

Illinois is slated to get an additional $98 million for the installation of EV chargers from the infrastructure program.

Asked about Illinois’s poor performance in the Alliance for Automotive Innovation ranking, P.S. Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, said, “I would really take it with a grain of salt.”

The bigger picture, he said, is that with all the federal funding from the infrastructure program coming to Illinois, the state’s charging system will be built out.

Whether other states are a bit ahead of us at this point doesn’t really matter, he said. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, professor of electrical and computer engineering George Gross said that the lack of public EV charging isn’t just an Illinois problem, it’s a national one.

“This is still very much a chicken and egg story,” he said. “All the (charging) station owners say, we will build stations as soon as you buy cars, and all the would-be car owners say, we will buy cars as soon as you build stations.”

Illinois has set a goal of 1 million EVs on the road by 2030, up from about 94,000 today. To meet that goal, Illinois should grow the number of publicly available chargers from about 3,300 to about 33,000, Lakhchaura said.

Illinois is currently on pace to do that, Lakhchaura said, adding that the state won’t have to build all of those chargers by itself.

“What we are going to do is focus on building as many as we can, soon, using the funds that we have and create a basic infrastructure,” she said. “Then, as the (electric) cars grow, the private companies are going to come in and put more chargers out there.”