Nearly 1 in 5 charging stations in the United States are considered faulty, and electric vehicle drivers are struggling with pricing models and finding stations in “charging deserts,” a new study outlines.
A study from Harvard University released last week outlines the various hurdles EV drivers face with charging infrastructure across the country. The research goes beyond outlining “range anxiety” (the fear that the vehicle won’t have enough power to reach its destination or find a station) and details further problems that drivers have, including regularly broken and malfunctioning chargers, erratic and non-transparent pricing, and non-accessible charging stations that are far away.
The study is based on an examination of more than a million charging station reviews by EV drivers across North America, Europe, and Asia over the last decade and gives further insight into EV driving struggles as the Biden administration looks to electrify the transportation fleet. While the White House has invested billions to build out chargers, rollout has struggled to keep up with sales.
Using artificial intelligence models, the study uncovers that 1 out of 5 U.S. charging stations don’t work, underscoring how the facilities are less reliable than gas stations.
“Imagine if you go to a traditional gas station and 2 out of 10 times the pumps are out of order,” said Omar Asensio, a climate fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society. “Consumers would revolt.”
There are more than 64,000 public EV charging stations in the U.S., according to the Energy Department’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. Experts, however, assert the number of chargers needs to be many times more than that in order to transition from gas-powered vehicles effectively and thus lower emissions.
The study also outlines a novel problem for EV owners: their frustration with gas car owners who steal parking spots reserved for EV charging.
Pricing models are also varied and unpredictable since the market is unregulated and non-transparent. Pricing can vary “substantially by facility, level of demand, time of day, and other factors, including the type of charger available,” the study reads. Furthermore, drivers rarely arrive with any information beforehand, as there isn’t a formalized way of advertising charging prices the same way gas stations post fuel costs.
Previous research from Harvard in 2021 showed that charging hosts have no incentive to share that data as they are typically privately owned, highly decentralized, are not well tracked, and have mixed patterns of demand and pricing. The lack of transparency, the study notes, blocks researchers and journalists from investigating trends.
Chargers that do exist, however, are not evenly distributed. Small urban centers and rural areas attract fewer public charging stations — and there are some areas with no facilities at all.
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Surprisingly, some states that rank higher in EV registrations have areas with few to no charging stations. For example, Washington state ranked fourth in EV registrations and sixth in public charging stations in 2023. However, Ferry County (an area outside of Spokane, Washington) had only one charging station for several years, and that sole charger no longer exists. Virginia, which ranks 11th in EV registrations and 13th in public chargers, also found that Wise County had no chargers available.
The Biden administration has pledged to build 500,000 electric vehicle stations in the U.S. by 2030, but a report by the Washington Post has outlined that while Congress has allotted $7.5 billion to build out the infrastructure, only seven charging stations have been operational across four states.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), a notable climate hawk, blasted the Biden administration last month for not deploying the chargers fast enough during a hearing, calling it “pathetic.” He also noted that his home state of Oregon did not have a single federally funded charger deployed.