California has surpassed 150,000 public and shared private chargers installed statewide, including 137,648 “Level 2” chargers and 14,708 fast chargers. In addition to the public network, the state estimates that more than 500,000 private home chargers are installed across the state.
Of the 48,000 chargers added to the data set since the end of 2023, 24,202 new chargers were installed in the first half of 2024. The remaining 23,142 chargers were installed before 2024 and identified through new data sources, according to the California Energy Commission (CEC).
This announcement by Governor Gavin Newsom comes weeks after California posted its second- highest ever market share in zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) sales.
“When it comes to zero-emission vehicle infrastructure, California has no peers,” said Newsom. “The state is all-in on clean transportation, dedicating unprecedented investments to supercharge our transition. We’re building a bigger, better charging network – faster.”
The CEC approved more than $1 billion in funding this year for EV charging and hydrogen refueling projects for cars, trucks, and buses, including $390 million for electric school bus charging. The state is also expected to receive more than $380 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for building out chargers.
As EV drivers are aware, reliability and uptime of chargers is extremely important, and the CEC reports that it will soon have state EV charging reliability regulations that will track the publicly funded chargers. It is also collaborating with the University of California, Davis, on a field testing program that will catalog the reliability of chargers.
California has a rule, set by Newsom in 2020, requiring all new car sales to be zero-emission by 2035. As a result, more than one-quarter of all new cars sold in the second quarter of 2024 are ZEVs, with an average of 1,300 selling daily. CEC reports that 1,996,931 total ZEVs have been sold to date and the state now boasts that over one-third of all ZEVs sold in the United States are sold in California.
