Stephanie Terrell acquired a used Nissan Leaf last autumn and was delighted to join the tide of drivers selecting electric cars to save on petrol money and minimise her carbon impact. But Terrell immediately met a bump in the road on her quest to clean driving: As a renter, she doesn’t have a private garage where she can charge up overnight, and the public charging stations around her are regularly in demand, with long wait periods. On a recent day, the 23-year-old almost ran out of juice on the road because a public charging station she was banking on was crowded.
“It was incredibly terrifying and I was genuinely concerned I wasn’t going to make it, but happily I made it here. Now I have to wait a few hours to even use it since I can’t go any farther,” she said while waiting at another station where a half-dozen EV cars circled the parking area, waiting their turn. “I feel better about it than purchasing petrol, but there are challenges I didn’t foresee.”
The major shift to electric vehicles is underway for single-family homeowners who can charge their automobiles at home, but for millions of renters like Terrell, access to charging remains a huge hurdle. People who rent are also more likely to purchase secondhand EVs that have a lesser range than the current models, making dependable public charging even more vital for them. Now, communities from Portland to Los Angeles to New York Local are striving to come up with novel public charging solutions as drivers drape power wires over sidewalks, prop up their private charging stations on city right-of-ways and queue up at public facilities.
The Biden administration last month accepted proposals from all 50 states to lay out a network of high-speed chargers along interstate routes coast-to-coast using $5 billion in federal financing over the next five years. But states must wait to apply for an extra $2.5 billion in local subsidies to fill in pricing gaps, especially in low- and moderate-income regions of cities and in communities with scarce private parking.
“We have a pretty huge difficulty right now with making it easier for people to charge who live in apartments,” said Jeff Allen, executive director of Forth, a group that pushes for fairness in electric car ownership and charging access.
“There’s a mindset change that cities have to make to recognise that marketing electric vehicles are also part of their sustainable transportation plan. Once they make that mindset change, there’s a whole lot of really practical things they can—and should—be doing.”
The fastest location to charge is a fast charger, often known as DC Fast. That charge an automobile in 20 to 45 minutes. But slower chargers which take several hours, known as Level 2, still outnumber DC fast chargers by roughly four to one, although their numbers are expanding. Charging an electric vehicle on a typical domestic outlet, or Level 1 charger, isn’t feasible unless you drive little or can keep the car plugged in overnight, as many homes can.
Nationwide, there are around 120,000 public charging ports with Level 2 charging or higher, and almost 1.5 million electric vehicles registered in the U.S.—a ratio of slightly over one charger for every 12 automobiles nationwide, according to the latest U.S. Department of Transportation statistics from December 2021. But those charges are not distributed evenly: In Arizona, for example, the ratio of electric cars to charging ports is 18 to one while in California, which has around 39% of the nation’s EVs, there are 16 zero-emissions vehicles for every charging outlet.
A briefing produced for the U.S. Department of Energy last year by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates a total of just under 19 million electric cars on the road by 2030, with a projected need for an additional 9.6 million charging stations to satisfy that demand.
In Los Angeles, for example, roughly one-quarter of all new cars registered in July were plug-in electric vehicles. The city estimates in the next 20 years, it will have to expand its distribution capacity anywhere from 25% to 50%, with roughly two-thirds of the new power demand coming from electric vehicles, said Yamen Nanne, manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s transportation electrification programme. Amid the surge, congested metropolitan districts are fast becoming pressure spots in the patchwork transition to electricity.
In Los Angeles, the city has placed around 500 electric vehicle chargers—450 on street lights and roughly 50 of them on power poles—to accommodate the demand and has a target of installing 200 EV pole chargers each year, Nanne added. The chargers are intentionally positioned in regions where there are housing complexes or near facilities, he added.
The city presently has 18,000 commercial chargers—ones not in private homes—but only approximately 3,000 are publicly accessible and only 400 of them are DC Fast chargers, Nanne noted. Demand is so great that “when we put a charger out there that’s publicly accessible, we don’t even have to promote. People simply notice it and start utilising it,” he added.
“We’re doing extremely excellent in terms of chargers that are coming into businesses but the publicly accessible ones are where there’s a lot of potential to make up. Every city is fighting with it.”
Similar programmes to install pole-mounted chargers are in place or being discussed in locations from New York City to Charlotte, N.C. to Kansas City, Missouri. The utility Seattle City Light is also in the early stages of a pilot initiative to deploy chargers in communities where individuals can’t charge at home. Mark Long, who lives in a floating house on Seattle’s Portage Bay, has rented or owned an EV since 2015 and charges at public stations—and occasionally charges on an outdoor outlet at a neighbouring workplace and pays them back for the cost.
“We have a tiny loading place but we all simply park on the street,” said Long, who wants to have one of the utility’s chargers installed for his floating village. “I’ve probably been in a couple of instances when I’m down to 15, 14, 12 miles and … whatever I had planned, I’m just instantly focused on obtaining a charge.”
Other cities, like Portland, are attempting to alter building standards for new construction to include electric parking spots for new apartment complexes and mixed-use development. A concept being developed now would require 50% of parking spots in most new multi-family buildings to include an electric conduit that might accommodate future charging stations. In complexes with six spots or fewer, all parking places would need to be pre-wired for EV charging. Policies that provide equal access to charging are critical because, with tax incentives and the emergence of a robust used-EV market, zero-emissions cars are finally within financial reach for lower-income drivers, said Ingrid Fish, who is in charge of Portland’s transportation decarbonization programme.
“We’re thinking if we do our job well, these cars are going to become more and more accessible and inexpensive for individuals, particularly those who have been driven out of the core city” by increasing prices and don’t have convenient access to public transit, Fish said.
The programmes replicate ones that have previously been adopted in other countries that are far further advanced in EV adoption.
Worldwide, by 2030, more than 6 million public chargers will be required to sustain EV adoption at a pace that maintains worldwide emissions objectives within reach, according to a new report by the International Council on Clean Transportation. As of this year, the Netherlands and Norway have already installed enough public charging to satisfy 45% and 38% of that demand, respectively, while the U.S. has less than 10% of it in place currently, according to the study, which looked at electrification in 17 nations and government entities that account for more than half of the world’s car sales.
Some European towns are well ahead of even the most electric-savvy U.S. cities. London, for example, has 4,000 public charges on street lights. That’s significantly cheaper—just a third of the cost of putting a charging station into the pavement, said Vishant Kothari, manager of the electric mobility team at the World Resources Institute.
But London and Los Angeles have an edge over many U.S. cities: Their street lights run on 240 volts, better for EV charging. Most American city street lights run on 120 volts, which takes hours to charge a car, said Kothari, who co-authored a paper on the possibility of pole-mounted charging in U.S. cities. That means towns contemplating pole-mounted charging must also come up with alternative options, from zoning adjustments to make charging accessible in apartment complex parking lots to rules that promote workplace fast charging.
There also “has to be a will from the city, the utilities—the regulations need to be in place for curbside accessible,” he added. “So there is quite a deal of difficulty.” Changes can’t come soon enough for tenants who already possess electric cars and are trying to charge them. Rebecca DeWhitt leases a property but isn’t permitted to utilise the garage. For many years, she and her boyfriend ran a regular extension wire 40 feet (12 metres) from an outlet at the home’s front door, over their yard, down a grassy knoll and across a public walkway to reach their Nissan Leaf on the street.
They switched to a larger extension wire and started parking in the driveway—also a breach of their rental contract—when their initial cord burned under the EV load. They’re still utilising their house outlet and it takes up to two days to completely charge their new Hyundai Kona. As of now, their best choice for a complete charge is a neighbouring grocery shop which might entail a lengthy wait for one of two fast-charging stations to start up.
“It’s inconvenient,” she remarked. “And if we didn’t appreciate having an electric car so highly, we wouldn’t put up with the discomfort of it.”
