Electrify America confirmed Thursday, on the sixth anniversary of its first fast-charger installation, that it’s planning a big expansion of its fast-charging network in 2024.
EA aims to reach 5,000 chargers by the end of the year, including larger charging stations and broader support for Plug & Charge payment tech.
In 2023 it expanded into North Dakota and Hawaii, pushing its total number of chargers over 4,000 by the end of the year.
According to the DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center, as of May 2, there are currently 931 Electrify America station locations and 4,182 charge ports; the latter corresponds to what Electrify America considers a charger. The expansion would constitute a roughly 20% increase over what’s currently available.
The charging network says that according to independently validated records it logged 10 million customer charging sessions in 2023, double the number in 2022. It also more than doubled the energy dispensed.
Also on Thursday the company noted that its 2023 expansion included “upgrading more than 680 underperforming legacy chargers to Electrify America’s next-generation charger.”
Ford F-150 Lightning at Electrify America
EA may have made that statement in response to claims that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) didn’t press the network for more charger-reliability fixes in its latest and final 2.5-year cycle. EA was established as part of a 10-year, $2 billion investment mandated as part of the Volkswagen diesel settlement. EA funneled $800 million of that to the California portion of the network plus California-specific projects.
EA’s rollout of chargers has made the federal government aware of the importance of considering reliability and uptime in the scope of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) buildout.
A 2022 study focusing on California’s EV-savvy Bay Area market found poor reliability and many nonfunctioning fast-chargers, with indications some of those were relatively new EA units. Separately, the network topped a survey looking at the EV charging user experience, reliability aside.
First Electrify America indoor charging station opens in San Francisco
Earlier this year EA opened a flagship urban EV charging station, a new template for indoor charging. VW has reportedly attempted to shop Electrify America around to other companies—including automakers—but as of yet its only outside investment is from the German supplier conglomerate Siemens.
Tesla’s Supercharger network has been consistently rated the best for customer satisfaction, but that might soon change with this week’s layoffs of Tesla’s entire Supercharger team.
