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As we race to an electric future, slower charging is stuck in 2015.
Breaking news: America’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure continues to disappoint. In other news, water is wet, the sky is blue (unless it’s orange), and nine out of the 10 people who might occupy the White House in 2025 probably aren’t going to do a damn thing about climate change.
It’s been that way for years, so why is it still the case now? Besides Tesla’s excellent charging network, EV infrastructure hasn’t ever been up to snuff, but there’s a now baffling incongruency between that and the actual EV market. Despite some fits and starts, this year is expected to be a record one for EV sales. New electric cars are coming out all the time and across every part of the pricing spectrum.
Why does our charging experience feel stuck in 2015, back when EVs were few and far between on the roads and mostly driven by early adopters?
One area in particular that’s lacking is Level 2 charging. Faster than a wall outlet but slower than the DC fast chargers that can fill up a compatible vehicle in 20 to 30 minutes, Level 2 chargers can juice a car overnight or add some miles during daily errands. And they’ll be crucial to an EV future — even if drivers don’t quite think of it that way yet. (Level 2 chargers are the ones you can have in your home garage, by the way.)
DC fast charging gets the lion’s share of attention in part, I believe, because so many new EV drivers are used to the gas station model. To them, getting gas is getting gas; there’s really only one way to do it and it takes about five minutes, tops. Adding more DC fast chargers, in theory, will not only enable longer trips but also ease that charging anxiety by making EVs more convenient to own.
But the truth is, we’ll need both fast charging stations for road trips and quality Level 2 charging for when our cars are parked at the office, shopping malls, movie theaters or anywhere else we might go. For starters, a gas car can’t get energy while it’s parked, so a good Level 2 charger is an immediate upgrade in convenience from internal combustion right now — if you can find one.
Second, there’s the energy consumption issue. Besides being expensive and labor-intensive to build, DC fast chargers use a staggering amount of electricity to charge cars quickly. Matt McCaffree, the VP of Utility Marketing Development at Austin-based Level 2 charging company Flash, gave an example of a DC fast charger station with 16 ports where each offers at least 150-kilowatt charging.
“If you multiply 150 times 16, then you end up with 2.4 megawatts of energy being pulled from the grid,” he said. “That’s the equivalent of about two 14-story buildings.” Put two such stations together, McCaffree said, and you get energy use on par with some landmarks in Denver where he lives: “That's the equivalent of a stadium,” he said. “That's the equivalent of Mile High or Ball Arena downtown.”
(By the way, relying too much on fast charging is bad news for your battery, too; that’s a ton of heat that can degrade performance over time, so it’s best not to use these on a daily basis.)
Given the fact that EVs are meant to solve energy and climate concerns, you’d think someone would step up and make Level 2 chargers better by now. But you’d sadly be wrong.
A study released last week by auto industry marketing and research firm J.D. Power and must-have charging app PlugShare reveals that even with much wider EV adoption, the problems around charging aren’t getting better. According to the firm’s data, it’s actually getting worse. Customer satisfaction with public Level 2 charging in particular is at its lowest point in the three years the study has been conducted. Fast charging fared better overall. But even in California, where charging is ubiquitous for the country’s biggest EV market, a staggering 25% of respondents said they found public charging unreliable.
If California can’t get this right, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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What’s going wrong here is nothing new. Many Level 2 chargers are still hard to find, shoved off to the sides of parking lots or other inconvenient places. Then you have the challenges of uptime, whether they’re actually working or not; the question of who’s responsible for fixing them, the charging company or the owner of the property where they sit; and the abundance of apps to pay for different charging networks, often through depositing money into a digital wallet before you can begin.
If gas cars were a new invention in 2023, and gas stations worked this way, we’d still be a horse-centric society.
Level 2 charging also doesn’t seem to be a huge focus of the federal government; though there is a grant program to fund such chargers in certain communities, more than twice as much funding is going toward DC fast charging. “[Federal] funding is disproportionately focused on the roadside charging and on the transportation corridors,” McCaffree said. “Again, that is an important use case that we need to have out there. But it is not the only charging solution that we should provide.”
To make matters worse, the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program that offers grants for public chargers has rules around uptime. Specifically, grant recipients have to guarantee their chargers will be functional 97% of the time. But those only apply to the DC fast chargers — grants for Level 2 chargers are under a separate program and have no such strings. This means that while the federal government will require DC fast chargers to get better, Level 2 chargers may only do so if “the market” forces things that way via competition.
Of course, no businessman screams out for more regulation, but McCaffree thinks the whole charging industry would do well to follow those DC charging uptime rules on their own as a “baseline” for how to operate. “If the industry starts to just say, ‘Okay, we're going to stick to this,’ then I think that that will be sufficient. And that's a standard that is very reasonable.”
There’s also Tesla riding to the rescue of the whole EV industry by opening its charging network to other EVs, including its Level 2 “Destination” chargers. “It may provide a boost in fast-charging satisfaction among owners of EVs from other brands as they begin to use Tesla’s Supercharger stations,” J.D. Power’s EV chief Brent Gruber said in a statement. Then again, as great as the Supercharger network is, I question the wisdom of relying on one company to solve what’s about to be a national infrastructure challenge — especially a company run by, you know, that guy.
So it’s clear that as EVs get cheaper, faster, better and more capable of driving longer distances, public Level 2 charging needs to up its game too. I have some ideas on how to start:
National uptime requirements and pricing transparency. I’d be in favor of bringing the federal hammer down here, even if most charging companies aren’t. So far, EV charging has been a barely regulated free-for-all; if the gas station industry can thrive under such red tape, so can the electron business. I’d like to see Level 2 chargers beholden to those 97% uptime rules, with prominent displays for pricing — people often don’t even realize this.
An end to the proprietary payment apps. Whether it’s credit card point of sale, digital pay accessibility or, hell, even cash somehow, the “every charging network has its own app” madness has to go. This is another federal grant requirement for DC chargers, though it’s unclear how it’s going to be implemented.
Better education. This comes in on the part of the federal government, the charging companies, the automotive industry — really everyone involved. We cannot have EV charging exist under the gas station paradigm forever, and that means teaching drivers what types of charging they need for different situations and where to find them. Otherwise, you’ll have waves of new drivers pulling up to an “EV charger” in need of immediate juice, only to find charging will take eight hours. (I’ve done that myself in the past; the learning curve is real here and it is steep.)
An industry focus on making this work. McCaffree said much of the EV charging market was, until fairly recently, a “land grab”: getting as many chargers out there with as much brand recognition as possible, and not focusing as much on quality and customer service. Those days are over. “I think we as an industry… now, we have to focus on creating that consumer confidence in what has already been built.”
If they can’t, they won’t survive what’s coming any more than a car company that refuses to invest in electrification.
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The administration argued in the name of national defense — but Orsted had receipts.
When the Trump administration ordered work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore wind project to shut down in late August, it cited national security concerns as the reason for the delay.
Within weeks, a federal judge had lifted the stop work order, allowing construction to proceed.
What happened in between matters. In its rush to stop a wind project, the Trump administration exposed the first cracks in its anti-wind policy agenda — a loss that may embolden companies targeted by the crackdown on renewable energy development to fight back.
Orsted, the Danish wind giant, was more than halfway done building Revolution Wind by August 22, the day the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate stop to construction. In a one-page letter explaining the order, the agency dedicated a single paragraph to the rationale behind its decision: “BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” it said.
Orsted filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government within days and asked for a preliminary injunction against the stop-work order. The Trump administration had acted arbitrarily when it halted construction on Revolution Wind, the company argued, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces the government to have at least some sensible reason for its decision-making.
There were urgent financial stakes to the court’s decision, the company said. On top of strict timelines for completing the project that were laid out in power purchase agreements, the cable installation company working on Revolution Wind has just a brief window before it is booked for other projects through mid-2028. Unless the judge acted quickly, according to Orsted, Revolution Wind could face “project cancellation and termination of the enterprise,” at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
After Orsted filed its suit, the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island — two of the three states designated to receive electricity from Revolution Wind — soon followed course. The Trump administration responded by doubling down on its claims related to national defense. Revolution Wind, officials argued, would negatively impact radar detection and result in dangerous electromagnetic emissions. They also asserted that Defense Department officials were overruled or ignored when they raised concerns about this matter in the review process for the project, which received its final permits in 2023. (It’s worth noting the Trump administration’s legal filings refer to the military as the Department of War, or DOW.)
The Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Adam Suess, told the court on September 12 in a sworn declaration that Revolution Wind had not fully addressed a host of concerns. Suess elaborated on the stop work order, asserting that it concerned the project’s “continued inability to reach certain mitigation agreements” with the military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suess stated Revolution Wind was not in full compliance with the terms of its construction and operations plan, which are subject to government approval. He also said there were outstanding issues with Revolution Wind’s coordination with military operators at sea, and that there was still “risk from distributed optical fiber sensing and acoustic monitoring equipment.
“The Department has been in touch with NOAA and the DOW to gather more information,” the filing said, somewhat cryptically.
Suess also acknowledged that the Trump administration is reconsidering its prior green lights for Revolution Wind, including its approval of the construction and operations plan, linking this to a broader all-of-government review of the offshore wind industry Trump ordered on Day One via executive order.
In response, Orsted called the government’s bluff. The company submitted sworn declarations from top company officials who had worked on Revolution Wind, attesting to the fact that before Trump came into office, the military and NOAA were saying everything looked A-OK.
“Mr. Suess’ declaration makes new allegations against Revolution Wind that were not mentioned in the stop work order,” Orsted’s attorneys wrote in their reply. “These new allegations are factually inaccurate and controverted by Revolution Wind’s compliance with project requirements.”
One of Orsted’s declarations was from Melanie Gearon, the company’s head of northeast permitting. Suess had claimed that Revolution Wind was far from reaching a critical agreement with NOAA’s Fisheries division, known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, to mitigate the effects of sea surveys on fishing vessels. But Gearon painted a completely different picture, detailing years of negotiations with NOAA and BOEM about how to handle the surveys.
These talks had apparently continued months into the Trump administration. Orsted submitted an email from BOEM to the company dated July 9, in which an official explicitly says that agency staff were discussing scenarios where Orsted could just “state that they are continuing to work with [the National Marine Fisheries Service] on a Survey Mitigation agreement, which could still be submitted at a later date.” Gearon said the company had received “updated cost modeling” from the agency as recently as September 9, days before Suess’ comments were submitted in court.
Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.
“To date, Revolution Wind has never received a notice or any indication that it has failed to coordinate with DOD regarding its offshore activities, or that the U.S. Navy or DOD has any concerns with the ongoing coordination,” LeBlanc stated.
It was after this filing that the justice overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, approved the preliminary injunction and lifted the stop-work order.
As long as offshore wind has existed there has been tension with the U.S. military over use of the sea, and it is true that turbines could hinder radar detection.
In 2011, the Defense Department established a “clearinghouse” to resolve any potential issues with ocean energy development of any kind, whether oil, gas, or wind power. The clearinghouse reviews more than 5,000 projects every year, and its activities include regular give and take with the Interior Department and Federal Aviation Administration. One of the many pieces of evidence Orsted submitted in the Revolution Wind case was a December 2024 letter from the clearinghouse stating the project “would not have adverse impacts to DOD missions in the area.”
Josh Kaplowitz, an environmental attorney who represents renewable energy companies including offshore wind developers, and who previously worked in the Interior Department solicitor’s office, told me: “There is not a single situation I am aware of where the Defense Department ever requested something and the approving agency said, ‘No, we’re going to do something else.’”
“There are some problems with coming in after the fact and coming up with post hoc national security rationalizations when the process of review was so rigorous,” Kaplowitz said.
Independent analysis has also cleared the military’s consultation with offshore wind permitting agencies of having any serious issues.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office — a quasi-independent watchdog under the control of Congress — released a detailed review of the offshore wind industry’s federal permitting process. The review was requested by one of the sector’s biggest adversaries in Congress, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been heavily involved in fighting offshore wind development in his home state.
Smith, a Republican, ultimately celebrated the review’s publication because it pointed out certain ways offshore wind could impact radar detection and military readiness. IIn his public statements, however, the lawmaker left out a key detail of the report — that it raised no issues with interactions between the military and offices involved in greenlighting offshore wind projects. In fact, it went into great detail on the lengths researchers and government officials had gone toward solving these potential problems.
“We didn’t have any recommendations there,” Frank Russo, director of GAO’s natural resources department, told me in an interview. “It seemed like coordination was going well, that DOD was satisfied with what was going on, and if there were concerns they could be mitigated.”
Russo said that Defense officials had for years been involved in offshore wind leasing, meaning that military staff from the Navy and Coast Guard had already weighed in on potential safety and readiness problems before companies even knew where they were allowed to build, and certainly prior to the project-specific permitting stage.
“At the very start of it, they know where their main concerns are,” Russo said of the Defense Department’s role in offshore wind development.
The Interior Department normally declines to comment on pending litigation. But I still wanted to ask Interior to comment on the assertions from Russo that the Interior Department and military were previously not properly handling the security implications of offshore wind. It felt especially important to ask them about this because Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month explained the Revolution Wind stop work order on national TV by claiming radar interference would leave the country vulnerable to “swarm attacks” from underwater drones.
Interior did not provide comment in time for publication.
Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.
And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – The attorney general of Arkansas is reassuring residents that yes, they can still ban wind farms if they want to.
2. Des Moines County, Iowa – This county facing intense pressure to lock out renewables is trying to find a sweet spot that doesn’t involve capitulation. Whether that’s possible remains to be seen.
3. Fayette County, Tennessee – This county just extended its solar energy moratorium for at least the next 18 months after pressure from residents.
4. McCracken County, Kentucky – It’s not all bad news this week, as a large solar project in Kentucky appears to be moving forward without fomenting difficulties on the ground.