The Biden administration plans to spend $100 million in an effort to aid America’s electric car drivers by repairing and replacing thousands of chargers people use for their vehicles.
The funding for the work comes from 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — which allotted $7.5 billion for charging — and will attempt to fix or replace roughly 6,000 chargers classified as “temporarily unavailable.” Power issues, routine maintenance, or damage from vandals could contribute to the unavailability of the chargers, The Wall Street Journal reported, noting that roughly 150,000 public charging ports already exist publicly.
The Biden administration wants a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers by 2030.
Elon Musk’s Tesla, which has its own network, has a low failure rate of 4% of its charging stations, compared to 20% of other charging stations, according to an August study from J.D. Power. J.D. Power’s 2023 Electric Vehicle Consideration Study found 61% percent of shoppers were likely thinking of purchasing an electric vehicle; among people not considering an EV, 49% said charging station unavailability was their greatest worry.
While “most EV owners will say charging is one of the greatest benefits of ownership, because 85% of it is done at home,” Stewart Stropp, J.D. Power’s executive director of E.V. intelligence, stated, “it’s the exceptional use case—like a vacation road trip—that’s holding shoppers back.”
Meanwhile, Zooz Power, out of Israel, announced on Wednesday its first charging system available in the United States, located in Rock Hill, South Carolina. That system is intended to showcase the system, which converts electrical energy into kinetic energy. The company stated that the booster can fully recharge batteries within 15 minutes.
“This is a significant milestone as we accelerate our penetration into the US market,” Zooz CEO Boaz Weizer stated. “We recently announced a pilot installation at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and additional pilot projects with the New York Power Authority and a large car rental agency.”
Other solutions have been proposed and even worked on to combat the problem of energy for electric vehicles. Some developers have been working on electrified roads, where vehicles can charge while in motion or stopped. Electreon Wireless, an Israeli company, ran a Toyota RAV4 hybrid using only battery power on a partially electrified test track for 100 hours while traveling 1,200 miles. The company has partially electrified roads in Israel, Sweden, and Germany.