The number of publicly available EV chargers has doubled since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration with about 1000 public chargers being added every week, the U.S. Department of Energy said on Tuesday. But who owns these chargers?
What Happened: The department said in a statement on Tuesday that there are now over 192,000 publicly available charging ports across the country in rural, suburban, urban, and tribal communities.
The Biden-Harris Administration also announced $521 million in grants to build over 9,200 EV charging ports across 29 states, two Federally Recognized Tribes, and the District of Columbia on Tuesday.
However, the Biden administration has been under significant flak for the slow deployment of EV charging stations, including from Former President Donald Trump, despite committing $5 billion to build EV charging infrastructure under a 2021 federal program called National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program.
Who Owns Existing Chargers?: According to the DOE's data center, there are 196,063 public EV charging ports across the U.S. at 72,573 station locations.However, not all of these are available for use. While 1,907 ports have received permits or are under construction, over 11,000 ports are temporarily out of service or offline.
Out of the nearly 183,000 charging ports available for EV drivers to use, a majority, however, are privately owned. Nearly 63,000 charging ports are privately owned while only 79 ports are owned by the federal government. About 1000 ports are owned by state governments while nearly 4000 are owned by local or municipal governments.
About 27,000 ports belong to Tesla Inc's (NASDAQ: TSLA) supercharger network and about 10,000 to the EV giant's destination charging network. Blink charging network has about 18,425 ports while ChargePoint has about 64,000 ports.
Under the administration's National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, only 68 charging ports have been made at 19 station locations, the data center shows.