That's the conclusion of a report released this week by the California Energy Commission, which found that charging infrastructure isn't being built fast enough in the state to meet its lofty transportation and climate change goals.
The agency's report found California risks having 54,000 fewer public and shared charging outlets than it needs by 2025. The state will need 250,000 chargers in about three years, according to its own estimates; it has only 73,000 today and funding to build 123,000 more.
Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to close the 2025 gap with money from the state's unexpected budget surplus. His budget proposes to set aside $500 million to help build electric-car charging stations to meet the goal.
But electric-car advocates said the state's difficulty building chargers in the short term is a red flag for challenges on the horizon. They said it's long been clear that infrastructure isn't being built fast enough to keep pace with electric-car sales.
Jeff Allen, executive director of Forth, an electric-car advocacy firm in Portland, Ore., said the finding that California, a national leader on electric cars, could fall behind on charging infrastructure, is a "wake-up call" for the country.
"We really need to get serious about what it will take to achieve this vision of electric transportation," he said. "We are orders of magnitude away from what we need to be doing."
About 9% of vehicles sold in the state today are electric models. But that number is expected to increase rapidly: Newsom signed an executive order last fall to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.
Electric-car drivers mostly charge at home today, but the need for public charging stations is expected to increase significantly as more apartment dwellers and urban residents without garages buy zero-emissions models. Plus, anybody traveling to Lake Tahoe for the weekend has to charge up en route home.
"The demand is going to grow exponentially in later years," said Gil Tal, director of the Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. "We need it today, but we will need it even more in the future."
To prepare for Newsom's deadline to stop selling gas cars, the Energy Commission projects California will need about 1.2 million public charging outlets by the end of this decade.
Assembly Member Phil Ting, D- San Francisco, carried a bill in 2018 that required the state to conduct the report. He said releasing the sobering data now shows the state how it needs to prepare to transition more drivers to clean cars.
"We are short of where we need to be," he said.
Ting said money isn't the only hurdle: Efforts to build charging stations have often been hindered by bureaucracy as state utility regulators have, in the past, prohibited utilities like PG&E from building stations.
Initially, the policy was meant to discourage utilities from competing with private companies that build electric-car chargers.
The state now allows pilot utility programs, but Ting said it's not enough. He said the state must unchain utilities, which often have money to invest in infrastructure, to build chargers on a broader scale.
"You have companies in the private sector ready to build stations that we need, so we shouldn't be slowing them down," Ting said.
Clean-car advocates say the potential infrastructure gaps could harm consumer confidence as electric cars are beginning to take hold. Range anxiety — the fear of being stranded with a dead car battery — remains one of the biggest hurdles for the electric vehicle market.
That said, experts say most drivers have little to worry about. Most people rarely drive more than a few dozen miles per day, and vehicle ranges have steadily increased in recent years.
Tesla's popular Model 3 has a standard range of 353 miles and Chevy's Bolt has a range of 259 miles.
Allen, the Oregon electric-car advocate, said building out charging infrastructure is a matter of equity. Many suburban drivers with garages have their charging needs met at home today, but buying an electric model can be a more daunting leap for lower-income people without garages or those in rural areas.
"If we want everyone to have access to electric vehicles, to electric mobility, we need to have a network of charging that creates that access," he said.
©2021 the San Francisco Chronicle, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
