Turtles on a beach

Contributor

other

HANDOUT on 8/17/23

The Washington Post

handout

September global average temperature compared to normal

Color1008

HANDOUT on 5/20/14

U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Arizona

For The Washington Post

An illustration shows a military jet emitting an orange hued substance into the atmosphere.

Main image for climate geoengineering comic

1.5 promo image

Floating Solar Aims to Gain Ground in China's Coal Country

Stringer

Days with dangerous heat by mid-century

How climate change is impacting the world

Coronavirus Pandemic 2021 - Death Valley National Park

staff

FILES-BRAZIL-AMAZON-DEFORESTATION

Getty

TOPSHOT-GREENLAND-ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE CHANGE-ICEBERGS

Wildfires Break Out Across Boulder County In Colorado

Map showing summer temperature change in the U.S. comparing 2017-2021 vs. 1971-2000

EXTREMESUMMER PROMO

World Heat thumbnail

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

In photos: The scene in Houston after severe storms killed at least 4 people

Rep. AOC's 'people-first' approach

Rep. Delia Ramirez on organizing power and money

Bryce Harper, Joey Gallo and a bond forged by baseball since they were kids

Walter Johnson’s jersey from 1920 showdown with Babe Ruth is up for auction

A taco will always be a taco — no matter what we call it

Tariffs against China hamstring the transition to a clean energy future

The Post’s choices in Northern Virginia’s U.S. House primaries

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Miss Manners: Longtime friends lose minds over canceled dinner plans

Carolyn Hax: After holiday meals, guests rush the kitchen to claim the leftovers

Ask Amy: Retired couple misses social activities since the pandemic

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

Did Trump’s lawyers catch Michael Cohen in a ‘lie’? Let’s take a look.

Now playing off-Broadway: Trump’s synchronized sycophants

Trump’s courtroom enablers

Why this company’s biggest fans turned against it

These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real.

Even remote and hybrid work can burn you out. Here’s how to avoid it.

The world’s coolest hotels want to tell you a story

6 Airbnb red flags to spot before you make a booking mistake

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

No one is rocking in the ‘free world’

Kenyan president aims to attract green investment during U.S. visit

On Gaza, Biden is right and Netanyahu is wrong

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Elections 2024 live updates: Biden continues outreach to Black voters; Trump heading to Minnesota

At campus protests, ‘DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA’!

CNN gets a presidential debate — and a much-needed win

Trump

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Shelby Tauber

The nation’s largest public EV charging network was created by court order. In 2016, the year after Volkswagen’s “<a href="https://washingtonpost.com/business/economy/vw-emissions-cheating-affects-11-million-cars-worldwide/2015/09/22/30f59bca-6126-11e5-9757-e49273f05f65_story.html" target="_blank">Dieselgate</a>” emissions scandal came to light, the German carmaker agreed to make amends by spending $2 billion building electric car chargers and encouraging electric vehicle adoption. The goal was to compensate society for the air pollution created by Volkswagen’s faulty engines — and to pepper the nation with EV chargers.

In the years since, the company that arose from that settlement — <a href="https://www.electrifyamerica.com/" target=_blank>Electrify America</a> — has built thousands of charging ports across the country, from the visitor center of the Grand Canyon to Newark.

But advocates say many of those chargers, which are intended to help shift the nation to electric cars, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/04/13/electric-vehicle-charging-network-biden/" target="_blank">don’t work</a>. Those nonfunctioning chargers, they argue, are slowing the transition to electric cars — and violating the original purpose of the settlement agreement Volkswagen reached with the government.

“I consider this to be public money,” said David Rempel, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of a recent <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00187208231215242" target=_blank>study</a> on charger reliability. “There should have been more oversight on how it was spent.”

Volkswagen was an unlikely birthplace for the nation’s largest public EV charging network. In 2015, the company <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/07/volkswagens-pulling-the-plug-on-its-2016-american-diesel-cars/" target="_blank">admitted</a> to installing software that allowed its vehicles to cheat on emissions tests — only preventing the emissions of dangerous air pollutants like nitrogen oxide when the cars were being tested by regulators. In a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/27/volkswagen-agrees-to-pay-consumers-biggest-auto-settlement-in-history/" target="_blank">settlement</a> with the federal government and the state of California a year later, Volkswagen agreed to spend $10 billion fixing or buying back the faulty cars, $2.7 billion on addressing the air pollution it had caused, and $2 billion to build out a charging network and educate the public on electric cars.

Seven years later, Electrify America’s almost 4,000 chargers make it the largest fast-charging network in the country after Tesla. (A fast charge can take just 20 minutes to fill an EV battery to 80 percent, compared with slower charging, which can take hours.) And although Tesla has promised to begin <a href="https://ne.washingtonpost.com/interactive/4ANAYVQBEBFLDFACC2MWQ2YVIQ/main/" target=_blank>opening its charging network</a> to other vehicles, Americans with non-Tesla EVs largely have to make use of a much smaller set of fast public chargers dominated by Electrify America.

But the network has come under fire for its day-to-day performance. Almost all non-Tesla charging networks have significant reliability issues: According to the <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4077554" target=_blank>study</a> co-written by Rempel, only 72.5 percent of all fast public chargers in San Francisco Bay Area were operating at the time of the study in early 2022. The data analytics company J.D. Power estimates that just 80 percent of all charge attempts nationwide are successful.

But even among a group of struggling companies, Electrify America stands out. In a recent J.D. Power <a href="https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-electric-vehicle-experience-evx-public-charging-study" target="_blank">study</a>, the company ranked last in consumer satisfaction among fast-charging networks, scoring a 538 on a 1,000-point scale. (In comparison, Tesla’s network scored a 739.) The satisfaction survey is limited to users of the PlugShare app, which makes up the vast majority of non-Tesla EV drivers, but cannot be considered representative of all EV owners.

In the Berkeley study, researchers found that 7 percent of Electrify America’s stations didn’t have a cord long enough to reach the vehicle they were trying to charge.

Anthony Lambkin, the vice president of operations at Electrify America, says the network is working hard to improve reliability. “It’s inevitable that chargers break. It just happens,” he said. “There is heavy wear and tear.”

Still, drivers report massive frustration when attempting to charge on the network: broken screens, faulty payment systems and chargers that give much less than their maximum charging speed.

Ralph Megna, a real estate consultant and the owner of an electric F-150 Lightning, regularly drives his truck between Arkansas and California and has logged dozens of charging sessions across multiple networks. “Electrify America is the worst, they’re dead last — and by a wide margin,” Megna said in a phone interview. He recalls stopping in Albuquerque at an Electrify America station in a Walmart parking lot, only to discover after trial and error that each one of the four charging ports available were broken.

Megna has testified about the network’s reliability in front of the California Air Resources Board, one of the regulators that oversees the Electrify America plan. “My experience with Electrify America is that out of any four chargers, one of them is completely dead, one or two of them are downrated, and there might be a fourth charger that is working,” he said, using “downrated” to mean when a station switches to a lower charging speed.

Nancy and Bruce Bell, a retired couple living on Whidbey Island in Washington state, also recall problems of broken Electrify America chargers and cords that didn’t reach far enough to charge their Chevy Bolt. “I just feel like EA, they don’t care about what they’re trying to deliver and do,” Bruce said, using the company’s initials.

EV advocates say that as consumers begin to adopt these vehicles in larger numbers, network reliability is essential. “The game is really about consumer confidence,” said Carleen Cullen, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Cool the Earth. “Drivers need to know that they can get in their car and get where they want.”

That confidence is essential as more and more Americans adopt EVs and Electrify America serves as the foundation of the country’s public charging network. Its consumer charging sessions jumped from 268,000 in 2020 to 5.2 million in 2022, according to company data. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00814-9" target=_blank>Research</a> has shown that an estimated 18 percent of those who switch to electric vehicles end up returning to gas-powered cars — partly due to the inconvenience of charging.

Cullen points out that in Electrify America’s latest draft investment plan — which details how the company will spend the final chunk of the settlement money — the charging network acknowledges performance problems. The plan notes a “decline in consumer satisfaction with public charging generally, falling to its lowest level recorded during the first half of 2023.”

“They talk about maintenance, but there’s no performance requirements or guarantees or actions from Electrify America,” Cullen said.

Nam Y. Huh

In response to questions about adding performance requirements to its next investment plan, Lambkin said Electrify America was following the requirements of the original settlement agreement. “That’s what we use as the litmus of how we develop those investment plans for regulators,” he said.

The agreement reached by Volkswagen and federal and California state officials did include fines if stations were not maintained. According to the original agreement, penalties start at $2,000 and rise to $50,000 after 30 days “for each failure to implement the approved maintenance plan.”

Electrify America says no fines have ever been imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency or the California Air Resources Board. But consumers report seeing Electrify America chargers that are broken for months at a time.

Compared to Tesla, which has a vertically integrated system, Electrify America faces more challenges making sure its chargers operate with all types of vehicles, Lambkin said. Drivers also use the network heavily, which Lambkin argues adds to the wear and tear on the systems.

There is some evidence that the network is improving. EVSession founder Bill Ferro, whose analytics company tracks charger reliability, said his sampling data over the last few months indicates that Electrify America may be now be ahead of some of its peer companies. The company has recently replaced some of its stations, and “I’m starting to think that those replacements are having a positive effect on the health of the network,” Ferro said.

But advocates say the network should be held to a high standard since it was built with the public interest in mind. “There needs to be independent field testing of these chargers,” Rempel said. “There was no enforcement mechanism built into the settlement.”

Cullen said the company should commit to better maintenance plans in its final investment plans, which will be approved by the state of California and the federal government in early 2024. But Electrify America’s draft plan for California has no such commitments.

“It’s imperative that the new funding go toward maintaining the stations and replacing older stations,” Cullen said.

Lys Mendez, a spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, said in an email that the new plan includes $80 million for upgrading and replacing older stations. “Additionally, Electrify America must implement their maintenance plan for all stations over the full 10 years of the consent decree,” she said.

EPA spokesperson Remmington Belford, whose agency oversees the federal version of Electrify America’s plans, said in an email that the EPA’s role in overseeing the funds is “limited in scope.” “The company has already upgraded and replaced many chargers across the country in order to improve reliability and charging speeds,” he added.

For now, however, customers are frustrated.

“They’ve put a lot of stations in the ground and in a lot of the right places,” said Megna, the real estate consultant, pointing to large travel corridors across the country that are populated by the company’s chargers. “But that doesn’t matter if they don’t work.”

SEAL Award for Environmental Journalism, 2020 and 2021

Covering Climate Now Award for Emerging Journalist, 2022

Princeton University, BA in environmental science and environmental studies

University of Oxford, MPhil in geography

Shannon Osaka is a climate reporter covering policy, culture, and science for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was a climate reporter at the nonprofit environmental outlet Grist.

Shannon Osaka

washpost

This company was ordered to spend $2 billion on EV chargers. Many of them don’t work. 

the-washington-post

EVRACER

A photo of an EV charging station with the headline: A company was ordered to spend $2 billion on EV chargers. Many don't work.

Shelby Tauber for The Washington Post

A company was ordered to spend $2 billion on EV chargers. Many don't work.

Environment

Weather

Climate Solutions

Climate Lab

Green Living

Business of Climate

Climate

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/climate-environment&limit=20

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday.

Washington Post coverage of climate and environment-related issues.

prism://prism.query/tag,climate202&limit=3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-202-newsletters/the-climate-202/

prism://prism.query/site,/climate-environment/climate-policy&limit=20

Climate Politics & Policy

News and analysis of the movements shaping our climate and environment policy, with an eye toward the business of climate policy, legislation and change.