Transportation
EV charging network insufficient to meet future demand
January 10, 2023
Supporters of vehicle electrification point to the more than 140,000 EV charging stations currently deployed across the U.S. — including Level 2 AC and Level 3 DC fast chargers and both public and restricted access units — as a sign that a budding system to support our transportation transformation is in place.
However, S&P Global Mobility data shows that the charging infrastructure is not nearly robust enough to fully support a maturing electric vehicle market, according to a press release on the data.
Even when home-charging is taken into account, to properly match forecasted sales demand, the U.S. will need to see the number of EV chargers quadruple between 2022 and 2025, and the number will need to grow more than eight-fold by 2030, according to S&P Global Mobility forecasts.
"The transition to a vehicle market dominated with electric vehicles will take years to fully develop, but it has begun," S&P Global Mobility analyst Ian McIlravey said in the press release. "With the transition comes a need to evolve the public vehicle charging network, and today's charging infrastructure is insufficient to support a drastic increase in the number of EVs in operation."
S&P Global Mobility estimates there are about 126,500 Level 2 and 20,431 Level 3 charging stations in the U.S. today, plus another 16,822 Tesla Superchargers and Tesla destination chargers. The number of chargers has grown more in 2022 than in the preceding three years combined, with about 54,000 Level 2 and 10,000 Level 3 chargers added during 2022.
To support that vehicle population, there will need to be about 700,000 Level 2 and 70,000 Level 3 chargers deployed, including both public and restricted-use facilities. By 2027, there will be a need for about 1.2 million Level 2 chargers and 109,000 Level 3 chargers deployed nationally.
Looking further to 2030, with the assumption of 28.3 million EVs on U.S. roads, an estimated total of 2.13 million Level 2 and 172,000 Level 3 public chargers will be required — all in addition to the units that consumers put in their own garages.
