The first 10 years of the 20th century brought America its first gasoline filling station and paved road. Before that, fuel was dispensed at pharmacies, in five-gallon buckets. Within a decade, there were 15,000 gas stations in the U.S. and ten years later there were 100,000.
In 2016, the year before the Tesla Model 3 came out, there were around 17,800 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the U.S. By 2020, there were just over 96,000. Today, the U.S. has approximately individual 145,000 public charging points (plugs), a 50-percent increase in four years.
Like gas stations, public charging in the U.S. is dominated by a few companies: Tesla, ChargePoint, EVgo and Electrify America chief among them.
The Biden Administration’s U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the country will need more than 600,000 Level 2 public and workplace chargers by 2030. Level 2 (240-volt) chargers. To reach that goal, about 5,000 new charging points will need to …