I noticed that you didn't respond to the second part of my post, about the inability to find a single Electrify America charger live anywhere in the US. I was previously unaware about EA putting their CA work on hold. But what about their nationwide charging network in the other 49 states? Their first 30-month investment period will be half over at the end of this month. If you expect them to meet their June 30, 2019 rollout goal, wouldn't you expect there to be at least one charger live at the end of 14 months?
EA did give a bunch of money to EVgo to upgrade some existing 25 kW chargers to 50 kW and perhaps install a few new 50 kW chargers at existing locations on the east coast and around Texas. I think it was originally intended to be 50 chargers but ended up being 33 completed updates although perhaps a few more were installed since I last paid attention to it.
Basically, EA were starting from a small team of folks at VW and rapidly hiring people, holding initial discussions and bid meetings with equipment and service suppliers, working to write and finalize their first investment cycle plans.
They have figured out their initial approximate charger locations now and hired a company that specializes in doing deals with commercial property owners to arrange the final specific locations. They have also done deals with some existing charging providers like SemaConnect and EVConnect to deal with L2 AC community charging installations at the 17 metro areas they committed to (the yellow blobs on the route map) and with Greenlots for their billing and online charger management system.
Rolling something out like this requires a lot of planning, much of it needs to be coordinated and centralized. Once that is nailed down then various locations can be installed by electrical contractors in parallel.
In reality, all of the highway charging hardware is 150 kW or greater and these products are just becoming available for delivery from vendors like ABB and ChargePoint. The specification documents for the more powerful updates of CHAdeMO and CCS are still dribbling out of the standards committees.
Almost nobody has installed this new generation of equipment anywhere — even in Europe. I think Porsche has installed a couple of non-public sites and there is a first public site in Germany but it’s only 175 kW until it is upgraded at a later time. In the US, there is a non-public EVgo 175 kW ABB site in Fremont, CA and EVgo says they will open their first 350 kW site in Baker, CA within the next month or so. Even if EA had done all of the planning, secured all of the location deals and permits, and did all of the trenching and preparation work they still couldn’t have installed the charger hardware because it hadn’t shipped from the equipment vendors yet.
The CA first cycle plan supplement has an illustration in section 8.6 that implies that EA is trying to get all (or at least most) of the highway locations installed by the end of 2018 although they didn’t necessarily imply they would be fully complete and available to the public by then.
It will be fun to watch all of this roll out over the next year and a half like it’s been exciting to watch the Supercharger rollout by Tesla.
(Well bar the doors, which a sliding set up like the Caravan delivers for a fraction of the cost if you don't want the faux vanity of trying to claim it's an SUV not a minivan.).
