There’s No Place Like Home
By John Higham, EVA Board Member
TL;DR
Driving electric and not having a place of your own to charge is not for the faint of heart, but it is doable. However, the shortest path to electric mobility is to provide the masses with the ability to charge where they sleep.
Nitty gritty details
My wife and I each own an EV and we have no ICE-mobiles in the family. We charge at home, and have solar on our roof. Tesla Powerwalls make our home blackout-proof and load-shift our energy consumption to something less demanding on PG&E (our utility) as well as being more rate friendly.
But. We haven't been home in months.
For over 3 months we have been at an AirBNB to be near our daughter and her family in the LA area, about 400 miles from our home in Silicon Valley.
During our time away from home, we've been using EA a lot since our cars came with free charging plans. I also installed a charger at my daughter's home, but due to work on her house and driveway logistics, it isn't always straightforward to charge there.
All this is to say I think I can say with some authority that living with an EV and not having home charging is not for the faint of heart.
Paying retail rate for charging would provide us with extra flexibility, but one I've used rarely in the last 3 months.
There’s No Place Like Home
Charging is the oxygen of EV adoption. More importantly, as the National Renewable Energy institute noted in its landmark 2021 report, when it comes to access for EV charging, there’s no place like home.
It is understandable if you’ve never heard of EV charging equity, at least by that name. Yet EV charging equity remains the largest barrier to EV adoption and unless something changes trajectory, it is likely to become a defining line between socio-economic classes for a generation.
Meet the New EV Tax
Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said, Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. The stage is being set right now for a huge transition to electric vehicles. Governments around the world have set dates beyond which all new passenger vehicles sales will be zero emissions; in California, it’s 2035. In response, auto manufacturers are investing billions in battery plants. All the while, left-leaning politicians and nonpartisan bureaucrats are thinking about the necessary infrastructure using last-century’s thinking, which, not unlike global warming, is a colossal problem unfolding on a glacial time scale.
Where is the Puck Going?
Think of EV charging in the following way. A smartphone is a pretty convenient aspect of modern life, isn’t it? And you likely have a place to charge yours. Probably several places. When it gets low on power, you just plug it in—it’s as thoughtless as breathing.
How would your smartphone experience change if every time your phone got low on power you had to take it somewhere special to charge it? Even if that special phone-charging place was just down the street, doing it every day or even every third day, would quickly become a dreaded chore. This will be the reality of millions owning an EV unless we stop applying last century’s thinking to today’s evolving charging infrastructure problem.
That “last century’s thinking” has a name—the gas station model. Your EV gets low on charge and you need to go someplace to charge it, which can take 20 to 90 minutes depending on various factors like what car you have, what charger you are using and how much charge you need. The gas station model contrasts sharply with plugging in your car when you pull into your garage, then waking up to a full charge in the morning. That contrast is the root of the problem in EV infrastructure policy. For those who haven’t experienced it, the simplicity of waking every morning to a “full tank” can’t be overstated. That contrast between those who can charge at home and those who cannot is also the basis of what I call “the new EV tax.”
If EV charging is a continuum, the two extremes could be described as “slow and at home” (destination) and “fast and on the road” (transit). Less than 10% of all charging is transit charging, and yet it gets an outsized amount of attention not only by the media, but also by policy makers and government budgets that allocate funding for EV charging infrastructure.
Make no mistake, transit charging is crucial to the electric vehicle experience, even if it does make up only 10% of all charging. But the infrastructure that supports transit charging (DCFC) isn’t the solution to “the other 90% of the problem,” despite policy makers hoping otherwise.
The current trend (pun intended) is to make transit charging (DCFC) the preferred solution for “the other 90% of charging?” That’s because policy makers are applying last century’s thinking (i.e. the gas station model) to EV charging.
The Puck Stops Here
Destination charging makes up 90% of all charging. The most obvious destination for charging is your own home, but other notable destinations could be your workplace, grandma’s house, the train station, and so forth. Destination charging is best served by slower Level 2 (or in some cases even slower, Level 1). In this scenario, charging speed isn’t important because parking at destinations tends to be several hours, overnight, or even days. What do Level 1 & 2 have going for them compared to DCFC? They have far lower cost of installation. And when charging stations are installed during initial construction, the costs are insignificant when compared to the rest of the structure.
Not having a destination of your own to charge is effectively a tax for any EV driver as they fall back to DCFC for their everyday charging needs. This unintended tax is not only a tax of money but also on time. It is little wonder then, that according to the California Energy Commission over 85% of EV owners live in single family homes?
Wealthy EV drivers can essentially buy their own destination, typically their own home, and install EV charging at their own discretion. But 31% of American families can’t do that as they do not “own” their home. Deploying DCFC for those EV drivers who don’t have a destination charger to call their own, policy makers are unwittingly creating an EV tax by forfeiting two very large benefits from driving electric for millions of would-be EV drivers: cost and convenience. This unwitting tax is a small problem today, but the impacts of that tax will be profound for disadvantaged communities in two decades' time when the sale of gas-powered cars ceases. This is the colossal problem unfolding on a glacial time scale referred to previously.
After convenience, the next best selling point to driving an EV is lower cost. Charging your car at home, depending on your utilities rates, can be 50% to 70% less than covering the same number of miles on gasoline. Both of these compelling features of driving electric are forfeited when drivers must rely on the local DCFC once or twice a week.
Higher costs may not be obvious when using DCFC vis-a-vis charging at home. Think of it this way—when charging at home, you're paying a retail price for energy. When charging at a DCFC, you're not only paying for energy, you’re paying for the access to it, and with that comes the cost of the network, touch labor to keep it maintained, the real estate that the parking space is consuming and so forth, not to mention profit for the network. Unless the cost of using DCFC is subsidized by some third party, good ol’ capitalism will guarantee it will be more expensive than charging at home. According to NerdWallet, charging at a public DCFC can be greater than 10x more costly than adding the same number of miles at home.
So then, where is the puck going? Where has it been? Simply put, we cannot continue to use last century’s thinking (the gas station model) to solve our 21st century energy needs for transportation. We need a reset in thinking about charging infrastructure that emphasizes the importance of charging at home. That includes the mind-numbing minutiae of building codes, as well as carrot and stick incentives to landlords to help tenants get access to charging.
EV charging at your destination, wherever that may be, is the oxygen of EV adoption and plugging in should be as thoughtless as breathing.