The challenge of EV charger infrastructure build out

[lakeguy55]

As I was driving through Portsmouth NH a few evenings ago, the immensity of the EV charger infrastructure build out struck me. Every quarter mile, I passed a gas plaza with typically 8-12 pumps. Most were at greater than 50% utilization, with the typical stop being 10 minutes or less. That's a LOT if infrastructure to replace if all those vehicles were electric.

Granted the ramp up of EVs is going to take some time, and hopefully the build up of the charging infrastructure can keep up. There's also the fact that most EV charging happens at home. Not an option for ICE vehicles. But still, thinking about it in this perspective, it's not hard to understand why this is such an enormous undertaking.

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[swajames]

Well I think you answered your own question to a great extent, it is going to take time and you can't look at utilization at gas stations without taking into account that you can't fill up with gas at home so your only option is a gas station. To the first point there's a lot of investment dollars going into infrastructure and to the second, you only have to look at say Tesla superchargers where there are often many times the amount of chargers than there are pumps at an ICE station to see how that compensates for the longer times at the charger compared to ICE fueling. So bigger is better, and the ability to locate more chargers than you could gas pumps in the same space will help make it work.

The biggest risk for charging for me is the rush to hand the keys to the kingdom to Tesla and their network. Competition is key, and the only thing that will keep Tesla (and most specifically the antics of Musk) in check is effective independent competition. For all the complaints about the likes of EA, they are generally cheaper than Tesla and provide an alternative. Without an effective alternative, we're all at risk of collectively relying on Tesla and we've seen what happens when Musk gets out of the wrong side of the bed or gets into yet another insane twitter spat. One day it's removing Disney Plus from Tesla vehicles, another day it might be kicking us all off his charging network for some equally insane reason.