Enabling widespread electric vehicle adoption will require a substantial build-out of charging infrastructure. Currently, 48% of counties lack any public charging infrastructure and by our estimates, no county has sufficient infrastructure for widespread adoption1. However, current techniques for estimating charging infrastructure needs are limited and often require significant computational resources. We need a simple, robust framework for estimating infrastructure needs and evaluating the Infrastructure Gap – the difference between how many chargers are needed and how many are deployed.

Using Urban Scaling Theory, we’ve estimated the number of charging stations needed to reach parity2 with gasoline stations and created an interactive map of our estimates. For example, in Washtenaw County, Michigan3, we estimate an 83-fold increase in charging infrastructure is needed.

We’ve published our paper as an Open Access brief report on PNAS Nexus, and have publicly released a dataset of our predictions and the input datasets.

  1. Our estimates are based on data ending before December, 31st, 2020, and do not reflect more recent developments. ↩

  2. We’ve defined parity as the number of charging ports needed to enable the same vehicle miles traveled as a gasoline pump. ↩

  3. The home of the University of Michigan ↩

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Scaling behavior for electric vehicle chargers and road map to addressing the infrastructure gap has been published by PNAS Nexus as an Open Access Brief Rep...