An EV charger every 50 miles: Here’s the plan to keep them running

Uptime and “Buy American”: We look at Biden’s $7.5 billion charging plan.

The last few years have, after much inaction, seen a flurry of new policies informed by the looming threat of climate change. Among these has been the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which will spend almost $5 billion by 2027 in order to build out a national network of fast-charging stations along federal interstate highways.

But where are those chargers being installed, and will they be reliable when someone turns up and needs to charge? We spoke to Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which was created to oversee the government’s EV charging investment, to find out more.

Klein’s office is meant to act as a “front door” for the federal government for charging infrastructure. “We are made up of staff from DOT and DOE as well as in the national labs, and we are really focused on bringing technical expertise, alignment between government and the private sector, helping to facilitate industry standards, along with our partners,” Klein told Ars recently.

$5 billion

The way NEVI works is by allocating $5 billion to states (as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia) based on state plans that meet NEVI’s various objectives. This might have disappointed a small minority who had hoped for a federally owned and operated charging network, but it’s highly unlikely that would ever have been on the cards.

“The federal government is coming up with a minimum standard and the funding and so forth, but it’s up to state and local governments in a context-sensitive way to decide how to implement and where to implement,” Klein told me.

“The way formula funds have flowed to states since the DOT and Federal-Aid Highway Act has always been through the states or through the metropolitan planning organizations. So if you’re going to deploy formula funds, there’s a pretty set way that it works. Now with discretionary grants—and that’s the other $2.5 billion that’s coming for corridor and community charging—it does open up the ability for local jurisdiction, public-private partnerships, and so forth to apply directly to federal government, to US DOT for those funds,” he explained.

All 52 plans were received and approved by the Joint Office by last September and are all available online for those curious to see what might be in store for their area.

One big advantage of NEVI is that the money comes with conditions that will now create actual national standards for installing, maintaining, and operating DC fast charging stations (PDF).

“There was a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that creates the minimum standards for the charging network… This is how payments will be accepted; this is the interoperability of the system that’s needed; this is the data that needs to be transferred between operators or to the public in terms of how much it costs to charge; this is the minimum number of charging ports and the power level,” Klein said.

To start, that’s going to be at least four charging ports every 50 miles on each of the recognized charging corridors, with a minimum power level of 150 kW for each port, or 600 kW for the station.

What about uptime?

A big concern about fast charging for most EV drivers involves reliability, or a troubling lack thereof. At this point, just about every non-Tesla-driving EV driver has a horror story about broken chargers. The people who wrote NEVI weren’t ignorant of that fact, and funding requires maintaining a minimum uptime of 97 percent for each charging port.

(“A charging port is considered “up” when its hardware and software are both online and available for use, or in use, and the charging port successfully dispenses electricity in accordance with requirements for minimum power level,” according to the standards and requirements.)

“I mean, we hear that there are some DC fast charging networks that are only up two-thirds of the time or 80 percent of the time. Imagine if your phone only worked two-thirds of the time or 80 percent of the time, right? That wouldn’t work for your car itself, or gas stations,” Klein told me. “There are systems out there that are operating at 97 percent in this country and overseas, so it can be done.”

“The goal is to really simplify the charging ecosystem by defining standards to follow, allowing the industry to really concentrate and focus on innovation within the boundaries of these common standards so that they’re not constantly trying to figure something out. It’s very clear. And we don’t want chargers to be Christmas trees, right? With every possible ornament on them. We want them to work really well at their core functions of charging,” Klein explained.

Build new level 3 sites or upgrade existing level 2s?
Reliability might seem like the biggest problem from the vantage point of an EV driver, but for NEVI there are other headaches that have to be solved.

“Charging speeds have gone up from seven kilowatts many years ago to now 150 kW just being the norm, but most sites don’t have that kind of power available,” explained Arcady Sosinov, CEO of FreeWire, a company that makes EV chargers. “If you look at an average gas station or convenience store, the entire site uses 50 kW of power. And so to think that that site would have a spare 150 kW available—or, if you’re installing two or four chargers, 300 kW, 600 kW—it’s just not feasible. You get into the MW scale of utility infrastructure. And once you get into that scale, you’re looking at new build-outs running new power and new utility service to sites. And those projects can take 18 to 24 months and commonly do,” Sosinov told me.

“Few areas outside of major highway corridors have the electrical capacity to support legacy, Level 3 DC fast charging at scale. And, even if those cities or municipalities are willing to pay for the electrical upgrades that would be necessary, electricity providers are challenged by supply chain issues of critical components like transformers and switchgear,” concurred John Tuccillo, SVP North American Corporate and Government Affairs at ADS-TEC Energy.

Both FreeWire and ADS-TEC make battery-buffered DC chargers that obviate the need for MW-rated electrical upgrades. Instead, a 50 kW electricity connection trickle-charges a battery that can then discharge at a much higher power to fast-charge an EV. Since NEVI’s requirements allow for upgrading existing 240 V AC (level 2) charging stations to DC fast charging (level 3) if they meet the other NEVI criteria, it’s unsurprising that both companies have been more than a little busy of late.

Buy American?

There’s one more hitch for the charging industry. As with the new clean vehicle tax credit, NEVI was written to also spur domestic manufacturing as well as EV adoption. And so when the guidance was released at the beginning of February, it included a requirement that all EV chargers funded by the Infrastructure Act be built in the United States.

That obviously caused some consternation among EV charger manufacturers, and earlier this week the government tweaked its rules, temporarily waiving some of the Buy America component requirements until the end of June 2024.

“I think it’s the right rhetoric because it has forced some people to plan, to start moving. But it’s gonna take three years for really a domestic production around electrical infrastructure, or charging infrastructure, to really take hold,” Sosinov told me.

“The Joint Office is being very definitive without being overly prescriptive, the latter of which can stifle innovation. It is clear that the government is taking counsel, and this week’s update is a continuation of the ruling from February 7,” Tuccillo told Ars.

“Notably, two points haven’t changed since last week: One is that, “effective immediately,” final transformation of components into a productized charger must occur in the US. Also, “effective immediately” is that any steel or iron used for a charger’s frame, cover, or housing must come from the US. I am not sure whether the US has the immediate capacity to provide the materials necessary for the tens of thousands of units required this year and the hundreds of thousands incrementally extending to 2030,” Tuccillo said.