October 1, 2010 - A Million Little Charging Stations

Entirely electric cars (and those hybrid gas/electric wanna'bes) are coming. The Tesla, the Leaf, the Coda, and the Volt are all humming quickly to dealers near you. The question remains though, with a current lacking - but growing - infrastructure; where are we going to charge these things?

Pike Research, a company specializing in clean technology markets, just released an interesting report (with the completely uninteresting title "Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment") that gives us a few educated guesses.

According to Pike's predictions, between 2010 and 2015, there will be a total of 4.7 million charge points installed globally. Of those, 974,000 will be in the United States. So we'll have nearly 1 million places to charge electric cars in America.

To put that in perspective, there are around 110,000 gas stations in the United States right now. (Of course, remember that a "charge point" is more analogous to an individual pump than to a gas station, and also takes a lot longer to use.)

Pike estimates that 64 percent of the new charge points in the United States—about 623,000 of them—will be residential. That's good news because it means Pike thinks the American consumer is going to be interested enough in electric cars to get charge points installed where they live. (And the nice thing about electric cars, as opposed to hydrogen or ethanol, is that you can have a fuel station at your home or apartment.)