With the expanding electric vehicle market in the United States, tens of thousands of additional public charging stations will be needed over the next five years. New EV sales are expected to grow to 21% by 2028, said the Transportation Energy Institute in a press release.

Currently, over 33,000 publicly available direct current fast charging (DCFC) are available, and estimates show that 210,000 public DCFC ports will be needed by 2028. 

The Transportation Energy Institute (TEI) and the Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) are partnering to deliver data analysis and insights on the optimal locations for charger investments. As part of the new Charging Analytics Program, the Institute will license CSE’s Caret software suite of EV and EV infrastructure forecasting, planning and charger data analysis tools. These tools will help business owners determine where chargers will get consistent use and achieve the best return on investment (ROI).

“Electricity is an important and growing transportation fuel,’’ said Transportation Energy Institute Executive Director John Eichberger. “Teaming with CSE will make valuable data, planning and analytics tools and expertise available to business owners to help them make sound decisions about EV charger investment, which will make more charging available to support the transition to electrified transportation.”

This new program will continuously evaluate market conditions throughout North America to help businesses determine when conditions might be optimal to enter the charging business. In addition, the program will analyze charger utilization data from existing facilities, creating business profiles to help guide decisions regarding the station characteristics that might result in a successful charging station investment.

The Caret software suite includes:

• Caret EV Planner – forecasts EV demand based on incentives in the market and deep, data-driven understanding of consumer behavior.
• Caret EV Infrastructure Planner – pinpoints where EV charging should be sited to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) and the clients’ unique goals and objectives based on blending multiple databases mapping 80+ factors, including traffic volumes and patterns, existing EV charging, utility infrastructure, registered EVs, and proximity to commerce, amenities and multifamily housing.
• Caret EV Charging Knowledgebase – securely aggregates and analyzes anonymized EV charger session and interval data to understand such factors as dwell times, utilization rates and peak demand periods to support future investment decisions such as where to place charging and how many chargers per site.