Novel Efforts Underway To Feed EV Charging Deserts

Delivering electrons like pizzas, offering discounts and rebates, donating equipment—those are some of the moves utilities and private companies are making to create oases in what’s known as “charging deserts.” Those are places where electric vehicle recharging stations are not commonly available. Many of these under served areas are in low-income communities.

According to an April, 2022 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration there are only about 41,000 publicly accessible non-Tesla recharging stations across the 50 states compared with more than 150,000 gasoline filling stations.

To address that disparity and to promote sales of electric vehicles the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $5 billion to build a national EV recharging network in line with the Biden Administration’s goal of installing 500,000 chargers by 2030.

But as automakers are ramping up the introduction of more than two dozen new battery electric vehicle models, including several at lower price points. That’s making EVs attainable to consumers across a wider swath of the economy who will need places to recharge their cars’ batteries—especially those who live within those charging deserts.

That thirst for electrons is being filled in several novel ways.

Somerville, Mass.-based SparkCharge likes to describe itself as sort of a Doordash or Ubereats for EV charging. Through its Currently mobile app, an EV owner can order a recharge and a SparkCharge van is dispatched to the driver’s location, “the same way me and you get food and pizza delivered,” SparkCharge CEO Josh Aviv told Forbes.com.

Its portable Roadie hardware is basically a stack of batteries that can be wheeled right up the the vehicle. It’s especially useful for fleets, rental car companies or insurance roadside services. A stack of four Roadies can provide about 60-70 miles of range in an hour.

Aviv said many of the communities SparkCharge services are under served by what he termed “traditional charging companies,” so his company is making up the difference.

“We service 100% of the lowest income zip codes in San Francisco with EV charging. Areas like Los Angeles, 88% of the lowest zip codes, Dallas 80%. In San Francisco only 25% of the fixed charging stations are in those lowest income areas, Los Angeles 40%, Dallas, 15%,” said Aviv. “It means there is a large disparity when it comes to minority communities having access to EV charging but really, what goes deeper than that is the fact that these communities are essentially getting left behind.”

San Francisco-based Volta addresses the issue using both data analysis and a media/hardware combination.

Its PredictEV platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze a mix of demographics, driver behavior and local mobility patterns to help communities better target where to place Volta charging stations. PredictEV’s capabilities were recently expanded to analyze “economic data with respect to under served communities within our data driven planning tool to help stake holders and decision makers have a data driven understanding of where these areas are and where we should build charging,” explained Volta Chief Commercial Officer Brandt Hastings.

At the same time, Volta installs charging stations with 55-inch video screens showing ads from brands such as Netflix, Starbucks, Anheuser-Busch, Jeep and retailers like Albertsons and Kohl’s. They’re usually placed near stores, shopping malls or movie theaters where customers enticed by the ads they see while recharging their EVs can easily make purchases.

“The dual model of media and charging allows us to go into under served communities because we’re not solely focused on monetizing the sale of electrons to a driver,” said Hastings.“We know, when we build charging stations in with lower EV adoption it actually accelerates EV adoption.”

Blink Charging Co. has spent “millions” to fill EV charging needs in under served communities according to its founder and CEO Michael Farkas.

Most recently, the Miami Beach, Fla.-based company donated 10 of its Blink HQ 150 Level 2 chargers to the Tennessee Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development (SEEED), a non-profit that serves young adults and largely marginalized community members in the greater Knoxville area.

Farkas said it was an opportunity that “made sense” to the company but also falls in line with its history of stepping in to assist communities in need.

An example is Blink Charging’s 2020 takeover of BlueLA Carsharing program “on its own dime,” according to Farkas, replacing the program’s EV fleet, including lower-priced models such as the Chevrolet Bolt.

It was a typical Blink Charging move.

“We’re one of the only companies that went out there with out own capital and invested in deploying a charging infrastructure on our own dime in disadvantaged communities because no matter what, cars are going be everywhere and these EVs are ultimately going to serve all these communities of all kinds and we believed in trying to have a first mover advantage in these areas and working with these municipalities and cities and getting those chargers on the ground, on the streets where those people live in those communities and have access to charging,” Farkas told Forbes.com.

Michigan utility Consumers Energy is making chargers more accessible through two rebate programs aimed at homeowners, fleets and those looking to install chargers in public places such as gas stations.

Its PowerMiDrive programs offers homeowners a $500 rebate if they install a charger approved by Consumers Energy. For other chargers a $10 credit on the monthly electric bill is given if the user charges their EV during off-peak hours. DC fast chargers installed for public use can earn rebates around $70,000.

To date more than 2,000 residential customers have earned rebates and the company has installed 37 fast chargers with plans for another 100 in the next two years according to Sarah Nielsen, director of EV charging programs at Consumers Energy.

The utiility has also installed 220 Level 2 chargers over the last three years and plans for another 100 to be installed at “overnight” locations such as campgrounds, state parks, retail, apartment buildings and hotels to mainly serve those who do not have access to a home charger, Nielsen said.

“Our DNA as a utility is to serve all customers. We’ve been tactical with all those chargers, over 250 chargers in the last couple of months,” said Nielsen. “We didn’t just take the first 100 applicants. We were very much looking at let’s be geographically spread out. The focus was a lot on micro corridor charging but we didn’t just take the hot spots. We wanted to make sure with the public infrastructure we were rebating, that it was spread out geographically. We were turning down applications and specifically targeting some communities and saying we’ve got a gap here.”

For all the efforts to expand charging availability in underserved areas in hopes of boosting EV adoption, that may not necessarily be the key for either high or lower income consumers, contends Scott Painter, co-founder and CEO of electric vehicle subscription company Autonomy.

“I think a very good free market system that is going to provide enough charging options for EV users where even at the low end—there’s enough high-minded thinking going into federal incentives and rebates and credits on the EV charging side where it will be a good business idea for a lot of these charging infrastructure players to implement charging infrastructure in low income neighborhoods and enterprise zones…so I don’t think we’re going to have a real problem,” said Painter in an interview.

He believes subsidies for gig economy workers such as ride share, food or package delivery drivers using EVs would be helpful since, he says, they tend to be minimum wage earners.

Building a national recharging network that includes the charging deserts is going to take some time but SparkCharge’s Josh Aviv believes it’s a good start, saying, “what the Biden administrationis doing is wonderful. They’re really solving the pain point of owning an electric vehicle on a mass adoption scale. They’ve started out with the highways, I think the next step is to focus on the communities and cities.”

Michael Farkas at Blink Charging says in the interim, jumping in to turn those deserts into arable areas for EV adoption through charger donations and subsidies just seems to be the right thing to do, stating, “We try to do good.”