Electric vehicle charging may get a jolt
Infrastructure bill would be first time U.S. made major investment in sector
Christopher Gilbert usually charges his Tesla using an electric vehicle charger installed in the garage of his Cypress home. But when the real estate developer goes on the occasional road trip, he relies on a patchwork of public charging stations to keep his Tesla running.
That’s where driving an EV gets a little dicey. Plugs at different charging stations aren’t always compatible with all vehicles. Charging speeds vary from station to station, and different payment methods often require myriad smartphone apps. And unlike gas stations, EV chargers — especially across Texas — can be few and far between.
“That part gets a little frustrating,” Gilbert said. “It could use a lot of improvement.”
The Biden administration is seeking to address the lack of public EV chargers in a $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill making its way through Congress. President Joe Biden, who ran for office promising to tackle climate change, is proposing to spend $7.5 billion to expand the nation’s EV charging network, particularly in low-income and rural areas. If passed, the bill would bring the country’s first major investment aimed at EV infrastructure and put a charge in an industry key to the energy transition.
Nationally, there are more than 42,000 public EV charging stations containing more than 102,000 individu
al outlets, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of Energy Department data. For comparison, there are an estimated 145,000 to 150,000 gasoline retailers.
In Texas, there are fewer than 2,000 EV charging stations, compared with nearly 11,400 gasoline stations, according to the Energy Department.
To be sure, most EV owners today, like Gilbert, charge their vehicles at home, reducing the demand for public charging stations. But analysts say building out a robust charging network is necessary if the EV industry hopes to attract apartment dwellers, workers with long commutes and road trippers, especially in a big state such as Texas.
“The average American really only commutes 35 miles a day, so that’s more than enough to charge at home,” said Sara Rafalson, vice president of market development and public policy for Houstonbased EVgo, the nation’s largest provider of EV fast-chargers. “But for those who don’t have access to charging at home, public and workplace charging is really important.”
Growing market
The EV industry has long contended with a chicken-and-egg problem.
Consumers were slow to adopt EVs because there wasn’t a robust charging network to support them. On the other hand, companies were slow to install chargers, because the vehicles represented 3 percent of the automotive market.
That’s starting to change as traditional automakers have begun to introduce a slew of all-electric models rivaling their gasolinepowered vehicles. For example, Ford this year unveiled the F-150 Lightning pickup, an EV version of the nation’s top-selling gasolinepowered vehicle. Nearly every automaker is either working on or producing EVs in response to tightening government regulations around carbon emissions and growing public concern about climate change.
Biden’s infrastructure bill also brought a lot of attention to the need to boost the number of public charging stations, which will likely increase investment as well, said Justin Wilson, public policy director for California-based EV charging company ChargePoint.
“When you see General Motors and Ford making these big EV announcements, that gives people hosting these charging stations a big vote of confidence that they can go out and make those investments,” Wilson said.
While many of the current EVs are pricier than their gasoline counterparts, industry leaders predict that their prices will become competitive with gasolinepowered vehicles in the U.S. as early as 2023. And when that happens, analysts expect that sales of EVs will soar, buoying demand for chargers.
More than 270,000 EVs have been sold nationally in the first half of the year, up 1.4 percent from the same period a year ago, despite the pandemic slowdown. Globally, EV sales are expected to cross the 6 million milestone this year, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. By the middle of this decade, 1 in 5 new vehicles sold globally are expected to be battery-electric, according to UBS estimates.
Texas has the third fastest-growing EV market in the U.S., with more than 25,000 new electric vehicle registrations in the 12 months ended June 30. The state has nearly 52,000 registered EVs, nearly a quarter of which are registered in Harris County, according to DallasFort Worth Clean Cities.
‘Like peanut butter and jelly’
Many private EV charging companies, such as EVgo and ChargePoint, view Texas as a prime market, because of growing EV sales.
EVgo, which started in Houston as a subsidiary of NRG, introduced the first EV fast-charger in the city a decade ago. Today, the company has 800 charging sites nationally, including 50 across Texas. The company announced a partnership with General Motors last year to expand EVgo’s charging network to 9,500 chargers by 2025, up from 1,500 chargers today. The company has 2,000 EV charging stations under development nationally.
“The relationship between EV charging and cars is almost like peanut butter and jelly,” Rafalson said. “As there are more vehicle sales, it’s a market signal to companies like ours that we need to build more charging, to show customers and give them the confidence that EV charging is going to be available when they need it.”
Retail electric providers are also keen to expand the EV industry to grow their customer base. Green Mountain Energy, which offers electricity plans from renewable wind and solar farms, is offering free installation of an at-home EV charger when customers purchase and install solar panels through the company. It also works with EV owners to automatically schedule EV charging to occur during offpeak and low-cost overnight hours.
Oil giants, such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total Energies, have also entered the EV charging market.
The dearth of public charging stations, however, is just one of the obstacles to mass EV adoption, even as automakers roll out more all-electric SUVs and trucks with bigger batteries, longer range and faster charging times,
The charging experience can vary widely. Tesla’s proprietary fast-charging station in Giddings can charge Gilbert’s EV battery to 80 percent in 15 minutes for about $7. At a Blink charging station in nearby Round Rock, Gilbert waited two hours to charge the vehicle to about a third of its battery capacity, and it cost twice as much.
Chargers are expensive. An athome model can start at around $600 to install and go upward of $1,000. A public station with a level-two charger, which can charge a vehicle four times faster than a standard wall outlet, starts around $8,000. The fastest chargers, which can charge a vehicle to 80 percent in 15 minutes, can cost $100,000 to install.
And there is no set standard for charge plugs and payments, unlike gasoline stations, which all feature the same fuel pump style and credit-card payment systems. The industry is working on standardizing the charging experience, allowing payments across different company platforms, Wilson with Charge Point said.
“We’ve built up the traditional fueling infrastructure over many years so people have a lot of confidence in that,” Wilson said. “EV charging is just a little bit different, so there’s some education that we as an industry are doing. But we view this more as an opportunity than a challenge.”
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for EV adoption in Texas may go beyond expanding the charging network. It’s how to persuade the state’s tens of thousands of oil and gas workers to let go of their gasoline-powered vehicles, which for decades have provided the basis of their livelihoods.
Daniel Richmond, manager of solar and EVs for Green Mountain, said EV adoption by Texas oil and gas workers is well underway.
“Go to a Shell or a BP or Exxon parking lot, and there are a good number of EVs there,” Richmond said. “People are adopting them because they’re a better choice and a better driving experience. They’re cheaper and easier to use. And no, these EVs aren’t going to put any of these oil and gas companies out of business, because there are other applications for petroleum, like plastics and long-distance transportation.”
Gilbert, who used to work as an oil and gas engineer before going into real estate, agrees.
“Change is coming. As EVs become cheaper and cheaper, it will be easier and easier to own an EV, and we need to have the charging infrastructure in place,” Gilbert said. “I’m a big proponent of oil and gas, but I like the idea that we’re not the oil and gas capital of the world. We’re the energy capital. We can use our knowledge of building gas stations to build electric charging stations.”