Can you build it if I pay you?
That’s one of the questions the Biden administration should have asked itself regarding the electric vehicle charging infrastructure needed to realize its goal of an electric vehicle (EV) future.
One well-known infrastructure failure is public electric vehicle charging stations along U.S. highways, for which $7.5 billion was allocated by the Inflation Control Act, and this generous federal funding has resulted in only eight charging stations being built almost two years after the IRA was signed.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claims the US will need 500,000 stations by 2030. Building the remaining 499,992 stations would require building roughly 90,000 per year over the next five and a half years, or roughly 250 per day, or more than 10 per hour.
Perhaps sensing the absurdity of this pace of construction, Buttigieg argued that most people will charge their EVs at home. That may be true, but many states, including California and New York, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, have mandated that all large trucks that transport most of the products, including the food we eat, must also go electric. So in the envisioned EV future, a lack of public charging stations will not just be an inconvenience for vacationing travelers; in fact, it could become a matter of life and death.
The lack of public charging stations is just one aspect of the lack of needed EV charging infrastructure. The Secretary also said that building charging stations is “not just about burying a little device in the ground.” That’s right. There’s a lot more involved. Many of these are barely discussed..
For example, even if we could build enough new generating capacity to produce the electricity needed for EVs, we would also need hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines to deliver it, not just to public charging stations along highways but to regional grid operators that deliver power to homes and businesses. For comparison, just 500 miles of new transmission lines were completed in the US in all of 2022.
To handle the increased load caused by millions of EV chargers, the nation’s roughly 3,000 local power companies — the ones that operate the poles and wires that deliver electricity to homes, apartments, and businesses — will need to undergo major upgrades. That means rebuilding millions of miles of local power lines with higher-capacity wires; replacing most of the estimated 60 to 80 million transformers with larger, heavier ones; and erecting bigger utility poles to handle the extra weight.
To serve the power needs of every EV charging station, thousands of new transformer lines would need to be built along U.S. highways, each requiring as much power as a modern steel mill.
Transformers are perhaps the least understood of the power grid’s infrastructure components, yet they are the most critical and the most likely to hinder the development of EV charging infrastructure. Transformers regulate voltage. At power generation plants, transformers step up voltage so electricity can move along transmission lines with minimal losses. At the customer side, transformers step down voltage to the levels homes and businesses need to run lights, appliances, and EV chargers.
But there is a shortage of transformers, especially the larger ones needed for public EV charging stations. Some utilities have reported it could take up to five years for these large transformers to be delivered, most of which are manufactured in Asia, raising national security concerns. The shortage will only get worse as the Department of Energy requires new transformers to use new (and more expensive) specialized electrical steel sheets.
Transformers also require copper. (EVs, too, need nearly four times as much copper as conventional cars.) The U.S. already imports about 80% of its copper. The need for new transformers would require either a massive increase in domestic copper mining, which has been declining for years and is opposed by many environmentalists, or increased reliance on overseas suppliers. Either way, copper prices would rise.
Finally, electricians will be needed to upgrade systems in homes and businesses, and linemen will be needed to build new power lines and upgrade local distribution systems — workers who are already in short supply.
Maybe EVs are the future of transportation. If so, consumers will adopt them by choice over time, and the necessary infrastructure will develop in time, just as it did for cars a century ago. But putting EV mandates before the charging infrastructure horse is a recipe for expensive policies doomed to failure.
Jonathan Lesser is a senior research fellow at the National Center for Energy Analysis and the author of the new report,Infrastructure needed for mass adoption of electric vehicles“
