America’s EV-charging network is getting bigger

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced $623 million in new federal grants to help build an EV charging network across the country. The grants will go towards building 47 EV charging stations across 22 states and Puerto Rico, which will include a total of 7,500 individual EV ports.

The funds come from a pool of $7.5 billion that Congress approved in the 2021 infrastructure law to meet the White House’s goal of building 500,000 public chargers by 2030, mostly on high-traffic highways and in densely populated residential areas.

Big picture: Over the past three years, US EV sales have more than quadrupled to reach 1+ million/year, while the number of publicly available EV charging ports has grown by nearly 70% to 168,426.

But, much like toilet paper, not all EV chargers are created equal. The vast majority of US ports aren’t DC fast-chargers, which typically take between 15 and 45 minutes to go from 10% to 80% capacity. Most public EV chargers in the US take at least three hours to achieve the same result.

• It’s currently unclear how many of the new EV charging stations appropriated by Congress in the 2021 infrastructure law will be DC fast-chargers.

💬 Worth mentioning: The two biggest barriers to EV adoption today, according to consumers, are – 1) high prices and 2) range anxiety due to the lack of a public charging infrastructure.