According to research put together by S&P Global Mobility and shared by Automotive News, the number of public electric car charging stations in the US needs to quadruple between now and 2025 just to meet the growing sales demand for EVs. This comes as no surprise since we've known for years that the lack of a robust public charging network in many areas slows EV adoption.
Most EV owners charge their cars at home. One of the primary conveniences of owning an EV is not having to visit a gas station. However, if you ever plan on hitting the road and traveling further than typical commutes and daily errands, you will likely want the peace of mind that comes from having fast and reliable public charging stations on your route. If you plan to use your EV for family road trips, there's really no other option aside from charging at public stations.
Automotive News writes that EVs currently only make up about 1% of the 281 million cars on US roads today. However, a whopping 5% of new car registrations between January and October 2022 were for electric cars. EVs are catching on fast, and it no longer looks like that's going to change. S&P Global Mobility estimates that the EV market share will rise to 40 percent of all new vehicles in the US by 2030.
Meanwhile, getting that robust charging network in place is going to take plenty of time. S&P Global Mobility's Associate director of Auto Intelligence Stephanie Brinley shared:
"If it takes a decade to get a robust system in place, I don't think that's crazy. It's a big enough problem with enough players that it's reasonable that it will take time."
Based on S&P Global Mobility's data, there are over 125,000 public Level 2 charging stations in the US, but only ~20,400 public DC fast charging stations. Some 17,000 Tesla Supercharger stations aren't included in the count since they're not currently used to charge all brands of EVs, though that's supposed to change in the near future. Over the course of 2022, about 54,000 Level 2 stalls and 10,000 DC fast charging units were added to the mix, which is impressive.
That said, there could be some 8 million EVs on US roads by 2025 and nearly 30 million by 2030. When we're talking about around 2 million EVs today, it really puts things into perspective.
Ramping up public charging infrastructure by four times to account for four times as many EVs on US roads today may be a fair estimate of the potential need, though some owners will tell you that there's already a major shortage of stations today, at least in many areas across the country.
Based on S&P Global Mobility's predictions, it will be necessary to have around 700,000 Level 2 stalls and 70,000 DC fast charging stalls available to the public by 2025. However, by 2027, those estimates rise to 1.2 million and over 100,000. The company says that the goal should be over 2 million public Level 2 chargers and 172,000 public DC fast charging stalls in the US by 2030.
S&P Global Mobility research and analysis director Graham Evans adds:
"Developments in battery technology, and how quickly EVs can receive power, will be as critical to improvements here as how quickly and plentifully infrastructure can provide the power."
