Asaf Nagler, vice president of external affairs at ABB, a Swedish-Swiss company that builds and operates charging networks, is calling on the government for unification. “It brings people together who maybe hadn’t in the past to think about electric vehicle charging,” he says. Government agencies, electric utilities, automakers and more will all need to work together to make public charging networks ready to charge everyone, everywhere.

Poor service

Part of the challenge facing the United States is that the chargers that do exist are unreliable. Driver complaints about broken public chargers are common, and horror stories about electric road trips gone wrong make headlines. While it’s difficult to get precise data on how many chargers can charge an electric car at any given time, a Bay Area survey found that one in four public fast chargers are out of order at any given time.

The reasons are varied, but many of them are perhaps not surprising given that new technologies are being left behind in the elements. Cables break. The power electronics flicker. The payment screens go dark. Vandals block charging ports. Wasps find new, unexpected homes. “There’s a lot of discontent around the number of chargers that aren’t working at any given time,” says Dave Mullaney, director of the research and advocacy group Rocky Mountain Institute, which studies mobility.

In some cases, the companies that built and still operate the first charging stations have not had to commit to maintaining them. Anyone who wants to participate in the new programs funded by the infrastructure bill will have to meet certain maintenance requirements. Standards for maintaining a charger are still being developed by the federal government and the states that will build the projects. But any company that builds and operates a charger with federal money will have to submit detailed data on its usage, reliability and maintenance costs.

In fact, the federal government has required states that request money for public chargers to submit plans detailing how they will support a new workforce to serve them. “One of the things we’re most excited about is the continued focus on reliability,” says Walter Thorn, product manager at ChargerHelp, which provides operations and maintenance services to charging companies and governments. The company is working with the Society of Automotive Engineers, an international standards body, to define the skills needed to service chargers and create certifications for them. This is a first step toward training more electric vehicle charger repairers.

Construction crisis

In the meantime, many chargers must be buried. EVGo, one of the nation’s largest charging companies, says it currently has more than 4,500 chargers in its engineering and construction pipeline, the most in its more than decade history. And right now, the process of installing a new charger can take years.

Part of the delay comes down to a vital but annoying issue: authorization. Fast chargers, which can recharge a car battery in less than an hour, require significant construction work. The process for sinking them into the ground doesn’t vary much from location to location: it requires coordination with utilities, digging trenches, and then installing the equipment.