Here’s How Electrify America EV Chargers Are Evolving

• VW Group's charging arm has focused on upgrading existing stations to modern hardware, among other efforts, and has introduced its next-gen charger that can deliver up to 350 kW.

• The new chargers are estimated to require 80% fewer on-site maintenance visits than older units, and feature a smaller footprint, in addition to other improvements.

• Electrify America is working to introduce Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) to the network in 2025.

There's range anxiety, and then there's arriving at a non-working charger anxiety. And just like the former continues to be an issue no matter how frequently automakers whisper to us in a soothing voice that range anxiety is a figment of our imagination, the latter is not showing any signs of going away, either.

In fact, the hardware installed years ago is not particularly shiny and new anymore, and as we all know older electrical items tend to develop issues after a few years (unless they're a piece of Sony video or stereo equipment from the Reagan administration, in which case they're still working).

What is Volkswagen Group's charging network doing to address what has snowballed into a larger, industry-wide problem?

The first step, as in many programs, is admitting you have a problem.

"Legacy hardware is aging and, in many instances, is now charging the same number of vehicles in one week as it once charged in an entire year," Electrify America noted in its report to CARB this month. "Accordingly, these older chargers require more dispatches for on-site maintenance and ultimately must be replaced."

In fact, Electrify America hasn't opened a single new station in California in the second quarter of 2024.

Rather, it has been working on upgrading existing stations over the past few months, and installing hardware that is estimated to require 80% fewer on-site maintenance visits than older chargers.

The next-gen chargers that EA is rolling out deliver up to 350 kW and feature a new exterior design with a smaller footprint, in addition to a liquid-cooled connector cable with a new cable management system that can stretch to just about any point on an EV, no matter how it's parked. The next-gen chargers also feature a brighter 15-inch screen that is less susceptible to glare from the sun.

Electrify America notes a couple of other trends when it comes to charger usage.

More than 20% of electric-vehicle charging sessions in California were activated via Plug&Charge, which does not require card or app-based activation. And only 9.09% of sessions in the state were started using the card reader at all, with California users preferring app activation compared to other methods.

Plug&Charge capability is still the ideal and most futuristic method of initiating charging sessions, even though it is taking Tesla's competitors in the charging sphere some time to catch up.

Work is under way to introduce Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) to the EA network, with the NACS J3400 connector slated to become an option for visiting EVs in 2025.

And other strategies—some of them painfully overdue—are being implemented as well.

"These strategies include increasing the number of chargers at existing stations to accommodate increasing vehicle volumes, deploying the NACS J3400 connector once it is standardized, and continuing to add new and larger stations to the network," the company says.

Earlier this year Electrify America opened the first indoor charging hub of its type in the US in San Francisco, with 20 hyper-fast 350-kW chargers inside. The charging hub is staffed, assuring greater charger reliability and amenities, though for now it is the sole EA station of its type.

And EA is in the process of adding new stations in California, where it currently has some 250 locations, with 32 currently under development.

Despite the popular image of California as some kind of EV utopia, adding new stations in California is far from easy.

"It costs 26% more, on average, to design and construct an Electrify America station in California than it costs to build a station with the same number of chargers in another state," the company noted in its report to CARB.

"This higher cost per station results in California receiving fewer stations per dollar invested by Electrify America, and these higher costs are primarily driven by permitting delays and utility site energization delays."

One way around the issues associated with permitting and grid energization has been the addition of off-grid chargers to the network, built by Beam Global. To date, EA operates 60 solar-powered Level 2 chargers at 30 locations in the state, primarily in the Central Valley— that aren't really hooked up to anything.

The chargers feature 4.28-kW sun-tracking solar arrays and a small battery energy storage system (BESS) that holds 32 kWh of juice.

Independence from the grid has its benefits when it comes to station reliability, though by their nature these are slower Level 2 chargers, and there's a good reason most of them are in California's Central Valley. So these probably won't be too effective in the snow belt in the longer term.

There is one major lesson in Electrify America's experience in building stations over the past few years: Station owners and operators cannot assume that once built, an EV charger will remain up-to-date and operational until The Great Asteroid of 2064.

Will EV owners want to see larger EV stations in coming years, complete with staffed convenience stores, or are stations largely fine as they exist today? Let us know what you think in the comments below.