When President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021, he announced a goal to install 500,000 new electric vehicle chargers across the nation by 2030. The Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office has tasked the experts at Idaho National Laboratory to answer big questions surrounding this goal. One of those questions involves determining the true cost of electric vehicle operation to ultimately enable their widespread adoption.
“We had worked on a report last year where we analyzed charger-related costs mostly with data from one charger installation service provider,” said Jean Chu, an INL researcher who coauthored the paper. “Then we decided to expand upon that work and analyze costs of charging equipment more broadly.” “It was difficult to construct this complete figure because, across the data, we were comparing apples to oranges,” said Torrey Lyons, the lead author of the paper. “Instead, we represented all the common figures that we found, which required some additional analysis beyond the final measures presented in our sample of studies.”
Without that convention, it’s impossible to adequately use years of studies to evaluate how costs have changed over time. This will be essential for ensuring charging infrastructure affordability. A lot of policy decisions will require comparative understanding of cost data, which means the data first needs to be in a consistent format. Even as this convention for measuring cost data helps researchers and policymakers, it also helps future drivers.