The progressing expansion of the electric vehicle market and huge expectations about future growth have prompted massive EV-related investments in the U.S. Aside from new EV factories and a small tsunami of EV battery factories, there is also a significant wave of new EV charging equipment factories coming right now, an analysis of Department of Energy data shows.
The DOE's Vehicle Technologies Office highlights that since 2021, manufacturers have announced more than $500 million in EV charger investments. This includes all types of electric vehicle charging equipment, including Level 2 AC charging points, DC fast chargers and some wireless charging systems (but those are still rare.)
The list of new plants (either announced, under construction, or in the pipeline) already includes more than 40 sites. We can see a visualization of the investments thanks to the DOE's Building America's Clean Energy Future website, which generates interesting maps:
Announced American-Made EV Charger Investments as of September 2023
The report says that these investments will create more than 3,000 new jobs. As we understand, that's only for the manufacturing sites, while many more new jobs will be created to install and maintain the equipment.
The entire EV charging market is at a special point right now, because aside from the growing sales of electric vehicles, the industry is preparing for a major switch to a new dominant charging standard in North America: the Tesla-developed NACS, which will be standardized by SAE.
At some point in the future, NACS will replace other charging systems for light-duty electric vehicles (J1772 for AC charging, CCS1 for DC charging, and older CHAdeMO for DC charging), covering all scenarios in a single plug.
This means that all the manufacturers and all the new factories must develop new products, though they will be temporarily supporting the existing charging standards. But all of this is proof of how the electric vehicle revolution is going to mean more to America's economy than just new choices in cars.
