Where exactly does Joe Biden plan to install 550,000 electric vehicle charging stations?

There has been a lot of talk today about President Joe Biden’s Day 1 Executive Orders. A long-promised OCOM paves the way for mass adoption of electric vehicles. Joe has campaigned on a $ 5 billion plan to install half a million new electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. If that happens, it will certainly help alleviate range anxiety and improve range. provide the network that consumers and automakers need to be able to rely on. emission-free driving.

Of course, an executive order has no teeth without a budget to fund it, so it will need congressional support to do so. As one of the hubs of this administration’s plan for the future, electric vehicles and clean energy are likely to receive serious support from Congressional Democrats, and could earn bipartisan favor with the pledge. new jobs. Biden’s plan calls for the creation of about 1 million new clean energy jobs.

In the United States right now, there are an estimated 111,000 gas stations. This number is lower than I thought, because gas stations are practically everywhere. Most gas stations have between 4 and 16 pumps, right? Our current EV charging infrastructure includes 28,726 individual stations, although only 4,336 of these stations include DC fast charging, which is required for long-distance travel. Of these DC fast stations, Tesla is barely a quarter of them and cannot be used to charge non-Tesla.

Electric charging infrastructure is pretty solid these days, as you can easily grab an EV across the country or commute to almost any major city. I live in Nevada, and there are large parts of the state that are inaccessible by electric vehicle. And for people who don’t have the ability to charge at night, such as anyone who lives in an apartment building or anyone who needs to park their car on the street, this is not all-round technology. made viable for daily driving.

The main advantage of gasoline right now is the ability to steer your vehicle in just about any direction and now you are going to get to where you are going because there are gas stations virtually everywhere. Even in the most remote parts of the country, you can count on a gas station nearby enough that when your low fuel warning light comes on, you can move on to the next one.

As many have stated in the comments section of dozens of blogs I have written, the only thing stopping them from buying and powering is the lack of charging infrastructure. Well, 46 is calling you to fall asleep or shut up.

Because Biden’s plan doesn’t specify, I’m going to assume that the number 550,000 means individual chargers rather than places to charge, because I’m not sure it would make sense to have five times as many places to charge. connect that fuel. to the top. So we’ll assume that Biden is looking to match our gasoline infrastructure by installing something like 5 individual chargers at 110,000 different locations.

The current charging infrastructure is largely based on parking lots for shops and restaurants, which is good enough. Until we resort to replacing all of our gas stations with charging stations, everything will probably be fine. However, to truly bring about lasting change, Biden’s policy would have to focus on low-income neighborhoods, multi-family housing facilities, and parking lots for business and industrial parks. Anywhere a car is forced to sit for hours at a time, this is a good place to charge. Equip streetlights with EV chargers. Equip parking meters with EV chargers.

One of the things I really love about driving an electric vehicle is that I rarely have to go all out to charge because I can “fill up” at night while I sleep. The only time I needed to use fast charging was on long car trips. In this case, our interstate infrastructure is already fairly well developed by private companies. Given the opportunity, I would like to see Biden’s plan continue to expand charging infrastructure into rural communities and small state roads.

As it is, you can access most places with the existing EV infrastructure that we have, but if you’re trying to get to your cousin’s house in rural Idaho or North Dakota , you are going to have a hard time. Hopefully, by making electric car chargers as ubiquitous as gas stations, this issue of range and usability anxiety will go away altogether. With more charging stations, we can shrink the so-called electron deserts.

With virtually all automakers leaning hard towards an electric future over the next decade, this infrastructure expansion will drive the demand needed to support not only incoming electric models, but growth beyond. Biden has expressed a desire for the United States to be competitive with China when it comes to electric vehicle adoption, largely outside of supporting the many automakers with manufacturing facilities based here. China already has half a million public electrical outlets in place, so this expansion plan for 2030 would only catch us up from China’s 2021 levels.

Obviously, the better the plan is to force all Americans to live in mega-cities and invest in high-speed train technology and moving walkways. But this is not a utopia, and people are not ready to give up their personal mobility, or the opportunity to exacerbate climate problems by living in the wild-urban interface (this is the WUI, seek- le), then we have to play by the rules of the existing system. If you absolutely have to keep your cars and your ridiculously long and traffic-cluttered journeys, and your desire to roam the wild and empty lands of this country by car, then let’s take it clean. And why not create a whole bunch of jobs along the way?

When it comes to keeping a promise to increase our charging infrastructure over the course of a decade, there is no murder like an overkill. Are 550,000 new chargers weird and impossible? No. Is it ambitious? Just the right amount.