Recharging an electric vehicle in the United States is getting easier as more and more public charging stations are installed throughout the country. According to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the U.S. now has over 183,000 publicly available charging ports.
More than 13,000 were added in the last three months alone. Compared to January 2021, the number has almost doubled, but there’s more to the story.
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EV infrastructure gets better with time
With the continued investment from both private companies and the government, EV charging in the United States is much easier today than it was a few years ago. And it will only get better as more chargers are up and running country-wide.
The largest number of public EV chargers in the U.S. are Level 2 plugs–140,387, according to the Joint Office. These need a 240-volt connection and can provide between 6 and 19 kilowatts of power, so topping up an empty EV battery can take anywhere from 4 to 10 hours, depending on the capacity.
By contrast, DC fast charging stations amount to 43,166–three times fewer than Level 2 plugs. These are most useful on long trips, as they can provide hundreds of kilowatts of power, making charging stops much quicker than on Level 2 plugs.
However, among these, there are more than 9,000 chargers listed as temporarily unavailable–8,697 DC fast chargers and 775 Level 2 plugs. The Joint Office also lists 232 Level 1 charging locations with a total of 873 plugs. These work on 120-volt connections and provide less than 6 kW of power, making recharging a dead battery truly an overnight affair.
The official map embedded below can also filter results based on the type of plug. The most publicly available plus are of the J1772 variety (130,087 ports), followed by Tesla’s NACS (36,499 ports), CCS (16,925 ports) and CHAdeMO (8,687 ports).
The number of public EV chargers is poised to go up considerably in the following years as the Biden administration has pledged billions of dollars to install no fewer than 500,000 EV chargers across the nation by 2030 through its National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program. According to the Joint Office, a total of 36 states have released at least their first round of solicitations and 23 states have issued conditional awards or put out agreements in place for more than 550 charging stations that will have at least four DC fast charging ports each.
