Electrify America just launched its first EV charging station in North Dakota – here’s why that’s kind of a big deal.
There are a lot more oil pump jacks than EV charging stations in North Dakota. As of December 2022, North Dakota had only 600 registered EVs, putting the state at No. 50 in the US for EV registrations. (For context, 614,300 gas cars were registered there in the same period.)
North Dakota also has some of the lowest numbers of EV charging stations in the continental US – as of November 2022, it had 139 ports, and 58 of those were DC fast chargers. It’s ranked 39th for EV charger density and has 18.2 EV chargers per 100,000 residents. (The state’s population is 672,591 as of 2023.)
But North Dakota is going to receive about $25.9 million from the Biden administration’s NEVI Formula Program through 2026 to build out its charging infrastructure. It wants to put EV charging hubs every 50 miles along the north-south Interstate 29 on the state’s eastern side and Interstate 94, which runs east-west.
Electrify America opened its first EV charging station in the state on Interstate 94. The inaugural EA charging hub is in Jamestown, west of Fargo. It’s at The Shoppes at Jamestown, 2617 8th Avenue SW (pictured above). The new station features six DC fast chargers that are capable of speeds up to 350 kW.
Another Electrify America charging station is coming soon to Grand Forks, near Interstate 29, and the EV charging company anticipates installing two additional stations in North Dakota in 2024.
To put it in the simplest terms, North Dakota is an EV laggard because of range anxiety due to long driving distances (because they need EV charging stations, of course), extreme cold in the winter (see previous point), the state’s robust fossil fuel industry, and politics.
But it also has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the US, so will more residents continue to make the switch to EVs there in the coming years? We’ll see.
Top comment by Ian Ollmann
Okay, so there are some other good reasons why there are few EVs in North Dakota. Since about 80% of EVs in the US are Teslas, we should look there and almost exclusively there:
1) the nearest Tesla dealer to North Dakota is in Minneapolis.
2) this means that the nearest service center for your Tesla is in Minneapolis.
3) it is quite reasonable to think that North Dakotans might think they have something of a special deal going with regard to bad weather, especially cold weather, and wonder if battery EVs are a good choice. Granted they may also believe they can’t turn off their diesel trucks from November to April, but at least the diesel doesn’t freeze (often).
4) North Dakota politics, about which the less said, the better.
5) Tesla doesn’t make trucks.
Read more: Electrify America, Blink to add Tesla’s NACS connector to their EV chargers
Photo: Electrify America
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