Washington is building hundreds of EV chargers, but is it enough?

Washington in 2021 passed the Climate Commitment Act, which put a price tag on greenhouse-gas emissions. Fuel refineries are the biggest producers of such emissions.

The goal of the act is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Since it was passed, the state has used auction proceeds to begin construction on 575 new electric-vehicle charging sites, containing 5,780 new charging ports. Of those, 3,100 chargers are to be installed in apartment complexes around the state, the Department of Commerce said.

Charging stations have been built from Newport on the Idaho border to Pacific County on the coast.

The vast majority were so-called Level 2 ports, which require up to eight hours to deliver a full charge. Fast-charging ports can deliver a full charge in minutes, but cost a lot more to build, the Commerce Department said.

Level 2 chargers cost $5,000 to $10,000 per unit, of which the state pays $7,500, while fast chargers cost $75,000 to $150,000 per unit, of which the state pays $85,000, the Commerce Department said.

The Commerce Department pays 100 percent of the cost of charging ports in apartment buildings and tribal lands. It pays 75 percent of the costs of charging stations in other areas, with the remainder coming from a variety of sources.

But this progress may be halted soon because the Climate Commitment Act is under attack this election year. A group called Let’s Go Washington is pushing Initiative 2117, which seeks to repeal the act. Proponents of the initiative include builders, real estate and hospitality industries. Other businesses, including Microsoft, oppose the initiative.

They contend the CCA has resulted in gasoline prices that are 50 cents higher per gallon than the national average. Supporters of the cap-and-invest system counter that the factors that drive fuel costs up and down in Washington are more complex than just the program putting a price on carbon.

Another challenge standing in the way of widespread electric vehicle charging is the difficulty of keeping them operational. A recent study in California found that 25 percent of the fast-charge stations in San Francisco were broken. A study by J.D. Power found that 21 percent of electric vehicle drivers in the United States have driven to public chargers that were broken.

That’s a big problem, MacKenzie said.

“When public charging is unreliable, that reduces people’s willingness to choose an electric vehicle,” MacKenzie said. “That holds true for all groups.”

The reliability issue is “very important” for charging stations and is not adequately addressed in contracts issued by government agencies, MacKenzie said.

But electric-vehicle owners remain optimistic.

Brandon Hansen lives in Chewelah, 40 miles north of Spokane, and drives a 2023 Kia Niro.

He uses the car for his 30-minute commute to the Tri-County Economic Development District office in Colville.

He also drives to places like Wenatchee, Walla Walla and Republic for work.

“I just traveled to Cheney for a football game and back and it worked awesome,” Hansen said. “There is not a lot of uphill.”

Hansen has a charger in his house that fills the car every night.

Driving over the Cascade Range into Western Washington is more complicated. On a trip to Olympia in the winter, he noticed the car lost about 50 miles of range per charge.

“I was stopping an awful lot, and I was not confident that charging stations would be available,” Hansen said, adding his car has never completely run out of power.

Hansen is pleased with the state program to build more charging stations.“I’ve noticed a lot more stations have popped up,” he said. “A fast charger was installed in Chewelah. They’re still lacking in northeastern Washington, but it’s getting better.”

Zeski of Oroville said additional public chargers in places that already have them are great for driving around the immediate area, but for people traveling long distances, the state needs more chargers in remote rural areas that don’t have them now.

“Every time we get more chargers in places where we didn’t have them, that definitely helps with range anxiety,” Zeski said.

In urban areas, public chargers are more plentiful.

Steven Hershkowitz of the Department of Commerce, who heads the program to install more public chargers across the state, noted that the adjacent cities of Spokane and Spokane Valley have 399 public charging stations between them. That includes 52 fast chargers.

“That has enormous environmental benefits,” Hershkowitz said of the state program. But he acknowledged that the state program is not enough to solve the climate issues.

“If we are going to mitigate climate change … then we have to help the private sector get up and running,” Hershkowitz said.

Still, Hershkowitz said, the existing number of stations are enough for a driver to traverse the state, as long as they are working properly.

The 20 percent of charging stations that aren’t working at any one time is “not acceptable,” he said.

MacKenzie, the University of Washington professor, said public subsidies of charging stations will be needed for the foreseeable future, especially in rural areas where there are fewer electric vehicles. Pend Oreille County, for instance, has just 56 registered electric vehicles. Spokane County has 4,312 registered EVs.

“It’s not attractive for the private sector to invest right now,”  he said. “The least attractive of all is rural areas.”

But climate change will force those investments, MacKenzie said.

“We need to act like there is a climate emergency,” MacKenzie said. “When the ship is sinking, we need to launch lifeboats.”