As electric vehicle demand increases, county, region will need more chargers
Frederick County and the rest of the Washington region will have to significantly increase the number of charging stations as the number of electric vehicles increases, according to a regional planning organization.
Developing infrastructure to support the use of electric vehicles is important to meeting regional goals to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, according to a plan from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Transitioning the region's vehicles from fossil fuels to clean fuels is one of the best ways to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, Kanti Srikanth, the council's deputy executive director of metropolitan planning, said at a meeting Wednesday.
The number of electric vehicle charging stations is not keeping up with the number of EVs in the region, he said.
As of April, Frederick County had 5,513 registered electric vehicles, according to the COG report.
The number had increased to about 6,300 registrations by August, said Logan McSherry, a project manager with the county's Division of Energy and Environment.
The number of registrations had grown by nearly 4,000 vehicles from 2020 to 2023, and the increase is expected to continue, according to the COG report.
The county is projected to have anywhere from 23,459 to 54,146 electric vehicles registered by 2030, depending how quickly registrations increase, the report said.
Public chargers typically come in so-called Level 2 chargers, and direct current fast chargers (DCFC), which provide significantly faster charging times.
To meet the demand for the projected number of EVs by 2030, Frederick County would need anywhere from 707 Level 2 and 25 DCFC chargers to 1,773 Level 2 and 69 DCFCs by 2030, according to the COG report.
As of April, the county had 101 Level 2 chargers and 10 DCFCs, with most of the faster chargers concentrated in commercial corridors along Md. 355 and Md. 85, the report said.
The county passed a requirement in 2022 that new single-family homes, duplexes, and townhouses with on-lot parking have at least one EV-capable space.
The COG plan is a starting point for local jurisdictions to work with their planning staffs to determine what types of chargers they need and where they should go, Srikanth said.
The county worked with COG in developing the report, to make sure that its plans lined up with regional priorities, said Shannon Moore, director of the county's Division of Energy and Environment.
The next step will be using the COG information to decide where public charging stations should go, she said.
There are plans to add Level 2 chargers at several local libraries, as well as public DCFCs at the county's Prospect Center facility on Himes Avenue in Frederick, near a county facility on Montevue Lane, and at the Frederick County Courthouse in downtown Frederick, she said.
The Level 2 chargers at the Myersville and Thurmont libraries and the three DCFC locations will each allow four vehicles to charge at once, McSherry said.
While the county is trying to lead by example in building public charging stations, most electric vehicles are charged at home or at private businesses, he said.
The county's Community-wide Electric Vehicle Readiness Plan released in December says: "A variety of policy actions can be taken to accelerate EV adoption and complement supportive state policies to accelerate the transition to a zero-emission transportation system," including strengthening building codes to provide EV-ready infrastructure, providing incentives for installing EV chargers, and developing parking and zoning ordinances that support adding charging stations.
The county's plan is a first step in meeting the demand for new charging stations, McSherry said.
He's hoping to look further in the coming months into how the county can improve its building codes and ordinances to provide more options for people looking to add chargers.
"We really want to remove bottlenecks for the private sector," he said.
