To Prepare for an All-Electric Future, Public Actions and Private Industry Must Join Forces
Electric vehicles are here, and rapidly accelerating their population across the country. The question is, can electrical infrastructure and charging stations keep up with that growth? Yes, but it will take multi-level collaboration, flexibility, and speed from the public and private sector.
According to Guidehouse Insights, by 2030 there will be over 6.3 million plug-in electric vehicles on the road in North America, which is a 735% increase from 2020. This growth will require an increase in charging stations of about 590% across North America, making the build-out of the national EV charging network a priority. The Biden-Harris Administration is gearing up to meet these demands with the passing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the call for collaboration by the National EV Charging Initiative.
Historically, EV charging leaders have work to enable this electric transportation transition through the strategic deployment of EV chargers where there is a significant or growing footprint of electric vehicles. At the same time, they are also looking to solve for the lack of charging stations when traveling across states and through rural areas. State and municipal level government grants have proven to be successful at the during the last few years by helping to install chargers along highways and high-traffic locations and to expand deployments to meet demand faster. As highlighted at the National EV Charging Summit, realizing a widespread, nationwide roll-out of an accessible EV charging network requires private companies to partner with the public sector to identify key corridor routes, rural locations, and urban charging deserts that require EV charging, and to work together to bring infrastructure to these areas.
Public private partnerships and federal funds for EV charging grants help to offset financial risk and strain that site owners may have to endure to deploy charging stations needed to meet future demand. It is up the EV charging companies to develop solutions that are seamless, user-friendly, and can serve multiple purposes. But most of all, flexible solutions that cater to the needs of each site are necessary from a product and operational perspective. The right solution can be leveraged to optimize the use of federal dollars. Blink, through its owner & operator model, is committed to spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 5 to10 years to drive forward EV adoption. This commitment, in addition to local, state, Federal, and utility grant awards allows the company to deploy more EV chargers, in more locations, accelerating the growth of the network nationwide.
The key is collaboration and flexibility. Working with businesses and property owners, EVSE providers and manufacturers, community groups and utilities, industry stakeholders, and all levels of government, opportunities to multiply each group’s efforts must be identified and leveraged.
In addition to understanding how to maximize the deployment of EV charging equipment, making the EV charging experience seamless for drivers is imperative, regardless of the location or network provider. This is where interoperability comes into play, a term used to describe multiple EV charging networks integrating systems to allow drivers, that are registered with one network, to use charging stations in other networks seamlessly. For instance, Blink is working to integrate ChargePoint equipment into the, soon-to-be-released, new Blink Mobile app. Starting with ChargePoint, communications between the two leading EV charging companies will happen behind the scenes, and drivers will be able to use the Blink Mobile app at ChargePoint stations and vice versa. Integration with SemaConnect and EVConnect will follow. Once these are completed, EV drivers will be able to use the Blink Mobile app to charge at tens of thousands of chargers across the US. Expanding on these efforts is a key component to driver adoption and success of the Biden-Harris goal of an additional 500,000 EV charging stations.
As a long-time leader in the industry, and the only fully vertically integrated EV charging infrastructure company, Blink understands that for widespread charging to become a reality we must identify the right application, at the right time at the right place. But also, that we must work together as an industry. One size does not fit all – a variety of products serving commercial, residential, fleet, and corridor charging must be deployed across a variety of locations while at the same time keeping the consumer front and center.
