The increasing adoption of electric vehicles in the United States and the industry’s positive forecasts regarding its future growth stimulated significant investments, InsideEVs reported.
Some of these investments include electric vehicle production plants, battery factories, and charging equipment manufacturing facilities.
Department of Energy data highlights
Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office data revealed that charging equipment manufacturers have already confirmed over $500 million in investments since 2021.
According to the report, these investments cover all charging equipment types, such as follows:
- Level 2 AC charging points
- DC fast chargers
- Some wireless charging systems
Impressively, the list of new factories, including those announced, under development, or planned, has now reached over 40 locations.
Announced American-made EV charger investments as of Sep 2023
Presented below is the visualization of the EV charger-related investments in the DOE’s Building America’s Clean Energy Future website:
As you can see in the map attached to the X post above, the investments include Direct Current (DC) Conductive, Alternating Current (AC) Conductive, Wireless, and DC and AC Conductive chargers.
Benefits
The DOE claims these EV charger-related investments will generate over 3,000 new job opportunities.
Notably, these jobs are only related to production site development. That said, the significant investments can potentially create more jobs for equipment installation and maintenance.
It is also worth mentioning that the EV charging industry seems to have started transitioning to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) that SAE will standardize.
The NACS has a strong potential to supersede the other charging systems for light-duty electric vehicles, such as J1772 for AC charging, CCS1 for DC charging, and older CHAdeMO for DC charging.
The surging number of electric vehicles on US roads poses a challenge to the government about the potential shortage of charging infrastructures to support all owners. Fortunately, the country managed to attract significant investments from established private companies to aid this e-mobility shift.
