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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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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.