For years, Nate Golubiewski looked forward to buying an electric vehicle. He wanted to do his part to combat climate change and loved the idea of charging his car while he slept.
“For me, home charging is actually the number one benefit to any EV,” said Golubiewski, an Adobe software consultant who lives in South Philly. “You come home, you plug your car in, and then the next time you get in your car you have essentially a full tank of gas. You’ve got another 200 to 300 miles and you’ve never had to go to a gas station.”
In 2021, he finally found an EV he could afford — a Tesla Model Y — that could make a round trip on a single charge to the Lehigh Valley, where he has family.
“There’s so many positives to it that I have no need or desire to go back to a gas car,” he said.
Yet for all that, he’s never been able to capitalize on the promise of home charging.
Like many urban EV owners, he doesn’t have a garage or driveway where he can run a power cable to his car. Some people try running a cord out a window, but that’s against city regulations, could pose a safety hazard, and tends to annoy the neighbors.
He’s not enthused either about spending thousands of dollars — and navigating the city’s permit bureaucracy — to hire someone to break up the sidewalk in front of his house and install a curbside charger that he wouldn’t even have reliable access to, given the tight parking situation in his neighborhood.
Instead, he’s gotten used to charging a little bit here and a little bit there. He gets his groceries at Mom’s Organic Market in Center City, or the Giant on Columbus Boulevard, so he can top up with the chargers in their garage or parking lot while he shops.
He doesn’t drive that much, so he doesn’t have to charge often, and he’s adjusted to the mindset of filling up when he can. Still, it’s not an ideal situation, he says. And it isn’t a good way to encourage city residents to buy EVs and reduce the number of exhaust-spewing gas cars on the road.
“It would be really nice if we had public chargers available on our streets where it’d be easy to find them. We don’t have a ton of that around today, so it does require a little bit more mental capacity for me to figure that out,” Golubiewski said. “We need to find a way to allow other people not to have to think about that drip charging — ‘How do I go from 20 to 30% throughout the day?’ — as they park their car.”
EV numbers climb, but chargers, not so much
EV charging is a problem a lot of people are thinking about these days, given the growing number of electric vehicles in Philly and the urgency of the global climate crisis.
“These chargers are few and far between outside of Center City,” said Councilmember Nina Ahmad, an EV owner who recently authored a city law mandating maintenance of charging stations. “If we are really going to have equitable use of electric vehicles — and now their price point has dropped, so more people will be able to afford them — we need the chargers near them or around them.”
As of January, there were 6,615 all-electric vehicles and 3,149 plug-in hybrids registered in Philadelphia, according to data from the state Department of Transportation (PennDOT). Combined, those represent 1.3% of the city’s nearly 767,000 registered vehicles. That doesn’t include cars used by the many commuters and visitors who drive into Philly every day.
To fully charge a typical EV on a standard Level 2 charger, the owner may have to leave their car parked there eight hours, which means there need to be more chargers per EV than gas pumps per gas car.
Yet Philly has only 145 publicly accessible charging stations with 378 charging ports, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. Most of the stations have Level 2 chargers, but 13 of them have Level 3 or DC Fast chargers, which typically charge a car in an hour or less, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity and other factors. Pennsylvania as a whole has 1,785 public stations with 4,598 ports.
In addition to being scarce, public chargers have had issues with breaking down and technical issues that make charging something of a crapshoot.
Ahmad said it’s very common to see on a phone app that a charger is available, only to drive there and find that the credit card interface isn’t working, the cable is broken, there’s chewing gum in the plug, the electrical system is having problems, or there’s weather damage that has rendered the device unusable. It can take weeks for the charging company to fix the problem.
“People are still buying these cars. It’s still a surging part of our automobile space,” she said. “We have to give people a better experience.”
A long wait for federal investment
The number of chargers is expected to gradually rise as the federal government pours billions of dollars into building networks of publicly accessible stations across the country. The city, SEPTA, and the Philadelphia Parking Authority are applying for federal grants to help pay for chargers on lots and in garages they own, particularly in high-poverty areas.
“They’re not just in Center City,” PPA executive director Rich Lazer said, referring to the agency’s 40-plus community parking lots. “They’re in every neighborhood, they’re near major highways, they’re in the middle of dense parts of the city.”
Companies with names like Invisible Urban Charging and Itselectric are also eyeing Philly with interest, hoping to find government or private property owners who will help them install potentially hundreds of chargers in convenient locations around the city.
It could be a while before that happens, though.
The federal government’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program has rolled out slowly. In Pennsylvania, so far it is mostly subsidizing chargers along highways outside Philly, in order to enable long-distance EV driving. Only one approved location is in the city, at a PPA lot on 6th Street near Girard Avenue in Northern Liberties. Construction of that station is expected to begin sometime next year.
Pennsylvania might start getting access to the next round of NEVI funds, which are meant specifically for in-town or “community” chargers, in 2026, according to Colton Brown, the alternative fuels infrastructure coordinator at PennDOT. The city, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, and other regional partners are also preparing an application to a different federal source, the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program.
If one of those grants come through, it could subsidize more than 20 chargers, both Level 2 and Level 3, at PPA lots and at SEPTA parking facilities such as those at Torresdale, Fern Rock, and Fox Chase stations, Lazer said.
Philly’s existing, more-or-less publicly accessible chargers were largely installed by private companies like Blink and Chargepoint, or by parking lot or garage operators like Parkway Corporation, in some cases with help from federal tax credits.
More of those could be coming, but so far they have tended to pop up mostly in Center City, miles away from most residents’ homes, with just a few scattered around South Philly, University City, Temple University, and a couple other areas. Some of those are in gated lots or garages that are not truly accessible in the way a curbside charger would be.
A tricky financial proposition
EV ownership has been increasing rapidly. In Gallup polls, the percentage of Americans who say they own an EV climbed from 4% to 7% between 2023 and 2024. The number of EVs registered in Pennsylvania has climbed from 29,000 in 2019 to more than 64,600 now, per federal data.
Given the growing need for public chargers, why are there still so few of them in Philly?
Part of the reason is the sheer newness of widespread EV adoption, according to PennDOT’s Brown. As with other new technologies, EVs (such as the first Teslas) were initially luxury items, and they were owned mainly by wealthy people with garages, he said. It’s only in the last year that used electric cars selling for less than $20,000 have become widely available and thus more common in urban centers.
“There hasn’t been historically a strong demand for charging in those areas,” he said. “It costs money to put in charging stations, so [charging companies] need to see they’re going have some usage.”
The U.S. is now in a transitional or “chicken or egg” phase, Brown and other experts say. People living in dense neighborhoods or multifamily buildings are looking for chargers to appear nearby so they can buy EVs, and charging companies are looking for EV ownership to increase enough to justify their installation and operating costs, which can be quite high.
Operating a DC Fast charger can be so expensive that it’s impractical for some property owners, like gas stations with convenience stores. That’s partly because utilities often require the owner of the device to pay a high minimum fee, called a demand charge, even if they end up not needing that much power. That’s less of an issue in Philly because PECO has a discount program for owners of fast chargers, which it hopes to extend through 2030.
However, putting in a DC Fast charging station still costs hundreds of thousands of dollars due largely to the significant electrical infrastructure requirements, which can include a new transformer. The NEVI grant for the PPA’s planned charging station on 6th near Girard, with two DC Fast stations that can charge a total of four cars at once, is $815,120. That’s expected to cover 80% of the total cost.
It can even be difficult for the owner of a Level 2 charger to break even, because of its high fixed costs for credit card processing and other features, compared to the small revenues earned from providing slow trickles of power.
“It’s definitely a challenging business model. I would say even most of the major charging companies are not at a place where they are making a net profit systemwide,” Brown said. “Certainly they have specific locations that may be.”
Commercial property owners with space for chargers have also been stymied by the high interest rates of recent years, which have made them reluctant to lay out cash for installations, said Nigel Broomhall, CEO of Atlanta-based Invisible Urban Charging.
Broomhall, who spoke at a Philadelphia City Council hearing on charging infrastructure in April, said that’s now beginning to change as the property owners start to see chargers as an amenity their tenants want to have.
Entrepreneurs are eager to install chargers
Despite the challenges, a wave of young companies are finding ways to install large numbers of chargers that they say work financially and will boost the virtuous circle of accelerated EV adoption and better charging infrastructure.
Invisible Urban Charging, for example, is hoping to interest local governments in its charging-as-a-service model. Its investors provide funding for initial capital costs and the company charges the site owner a fixed fee, Broomhall said. The owner then decides whether and how much to charge the EV users, and keeps any profits.
The company is installing chargers across several European countries, has a deal with real estate giant CBRE to install a million units in U.S. commercial buildings over five years, and has talked to officials in Philadelphia, Georgia, and Florida about putting in public chargers for their residents.
“The big benefits we see for mass rollout of EV charging across cities and states is really around clean air and being able to reduce, over time, the cost of mobility,” Broomhall said in an interview. “For cities, it’s really important as to how they can locate chargers so that they’re easily accessible for as many people as possible.”
He said it will be important to install a relatively large number of chargers per location — at least 10, and maybe 20 or more — rather than the one or two that are typical in places like supermarket parking lots. That way the site can serve multiple types of customers simultaneously, such as residents, delivery companies, and rideshare drivers, Broomhall said, and prepare for future higher demand.
He said Invisible Urban Charging is interested in installing chargers on PPA and city lots — but it’s unclear who would pay the installation fee.
Federal funding could conceivably help fund such a project, if it meets federal guidelines. Lazer noted that the planned 6th Street charger will get some funding from a partnership between PPA and the city, suggesting some local money is available for charging infrastructure.
But Philly’s former sustainability director, Christine Knapp, said in a 2022 interview that the city would not directly invest in chargers, since enabling people to own electric vehicles would not provide any benefits for traffic safety or reduced congestion.
“Cities aren’t gas stations,” Knapp told Grid Philly, “and so why would a city with limited funding and many problems to address prioritize those limited dollars for private vehicle charging?”
Other cities take the lead on curbside charging
In another new business model, some companies are beginning to install curbside chargers throughout cities, following the example of some European countries.
New York recently partnered with a company called Flo to install 50 curbside chargers, each with two ports, and passed rules reserving those parking spots for EVs. The Brooklyn company Itselectric recently announced it got funding from Uber and other investors to install curbside chargers in seven cities, including Jersey City, Boston, Alexandria, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Itselectric says it’s overcome many of the obstacles to curbside charging by designing a sleek, minimal device that ties in to a home’s or business’s power supply relatively easily, rather than requiring a pricey utility company connection that takes a long time to negotiate and build.
To avoid common technical failures, there’s no cable on the charger — the company supplies each registered user with their own cable — and there’s no credit card slot, just an app and a place to swipe an RFID card.
Boston asked for curbside charger proposals and gave two bidders, Itselectric and Greenspot, permission to install chargers at no cost to the city. The plan calls for them to install 250 of the devices, with the eventual goal of making sure every household in the city is within a 10-minute walk of a charger.
“It really starts with the city creating their pathway for this,” said Tiya Gordon, Itselectric’s co-founder and COO. “Not only is it the permitting pathway, but what is the regulatory pathway? Once the chargers are in, how are these spots regulated? Are these private or public? Can they be reserved?”
After an early experiment, caution prevails
Philadelphia once had a program that let residents install a curbside charger, and then reserved the spots exclusively for EV parking. Council ended it in 2017 due to complaints about essentially privatizing public parking spots.
Gordon applauded the city for being far ahead of the curve on curbside charging, at least for a few years. She noted that Philly resembles Boston in having narrow, old sidewalks with varying designs, which she said Itselectric chargers could accommodate. The company often gets requests through its website from Philadelphians who want the company to bring its devices here, she said.
“We get a lot of inbound from Philly,” she said. “Philly wants charging, they want curbside, and we’d love to pilot there.”
If the city’s federal grant applications are approved, it could potentially use some of that money to build curbside chargers, said Anna Kelly, senior policy advisor for electric vehicles and parking in the city’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems.
But there’s no sign that the city plans to put out bids for a citywide curbside charging initiative, the way Boston and New York have done. Kelly cautioned that curbside charging is a “nascent industry” in the U.S., and said companies are still trying to figure out the best way to make it work.
“One of the challenges is thinking about how you can make sure that you’re keeping bus lanes free, making sure that bike lanes can be installed. Balancing all of the uses of the curb that happen every day is just a little bit more complex than, say, you have a parking lot and you want to install a charger,” Kelly said. “There’s fewer factors to think about when you’re thinking about a surface lot, versus charging in the right-of-way.”
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