Regular Charged readers are well aware of the parlous state of public EV charging. Fortunately, so is the industry at large, and efforts are underway at all levels to improve reliability and usability.

ChargerHelp, an EVSE operations and maintenance service provider, has conducted a new analysis of EV public charging infrastructure in the US. ChargerHelp Annual Reliability Report: The State of EV Charging and the Driver Experience offers a deep dive into the causes of the industry’s persistent reliability issues.

The report, published in June 2024, analyzed data from five primary sources: two complementary sets of first-party data from ChargerHelp’s direct EVSE O&M experience; third-party data from EV data provider Paren; and public data from the DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center database. In total, the report analyzed more than 19 million individual data points.

“After pulling data for four years from 20,000 chargers, we identified key areas where the public charging system can be improved to better meet the needs of today’s EV driver,” said Kameale Terry, co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp. “For the EV market to continue to flourish, we need to work to ensure true uptime is the norm through a standardized and more synchronized approach to data, maintenance and communication networks.”

“Researchers at the UC Davis Electric Vehicle Research Center have studied the charging experiences of EV drivers over many years, identifying charging reliability as a major barrier to creating a dependable network capable of supporting long trips, similar to gas cars,” said Professor Gil Tal, Director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, who reviewed and endorsed the report. “This study is an important step in understanding the technical difficulties and developing solutions to overcome them. ChargerHelp, a company specializing in the maintenance and repair of various chargers across multiple states, is well-positioned to evaluate the data and produce a reliable report with strong action plans for policymakers and the industry.”

The report cites a wide range of issues, but finds that “the overarching threat to system reliability” is “a startling lack of interoperability (the compatibility of key system components—vehicles, charging stations, charging networks and the grid—and the software systems that support them, allowing all components to work seamlessly and effectively).”

ChargerHelp is not just complaining—the company offers several recommendations aimed at improving EVSE reliability. Charging providers need to allocate O&M-specific funding to maintain and renew EVSE infrastructure, and they need to measure uptime effectively with standardized data reporting protocols (too often the uptime figures reported by CPOs are rosier than those reported by actual EV drivers). The industry as a whole needs to promote best practices, and expand technician training and certification.

Source: ChargerHelp