Wanted: Electricians to fix thousands of broken EV chargers

Electric vehicle adoption suffers from a giant black eye: There are nowhere near enough certified technicians to fix all the broken chargers.

Nearly 4,000 public charging stations with more than 7,000 ports were out of service as of early October, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That's an outage rate of more than 6 percent.

The DOE estimate may be modest. Here Technologies, which pulls real-time data from connected chargers, says 4,673 chargers were out of order, but it expects many more "unconnected" charge points were inoperable.

Thousands of unusable chargers could hinder EV adoption as frustrated drivers complain about searching for working ports to keep their cars running. One in five charging attempts failed in the first half of the year, according to research firm J.D. Power.

"We need this transition to be seamless for consumers," said Betony Jones, director for the office of energy jobs at the DOE.

Even with a high failure rate for chargers, the government and industry are working to make more of them available. The Biden administration has called for the installation of 500,000 fast chargers across the U.S. and half of new-vehicle sales to be zero emission by 2030. The administration said last month that it would provide $100 million in federal funding to repair and replace existing but nonoperational charging infrastructure as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program.

The private sector also is investing in charging infrastructure. BMW Group, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group and Stellantis said they will launch a network of 30,000 fast chargers. The first stations are slated to open next summer and will be available to any EV brand.

All of this will increase demand for technicians, both to install the chargers and to keep them operating. But there is a dearth of electricians to do those jobs. Electricians, training companies and installation providers all say the ambitious charger goals will make that labor shortage even more acute.

Finding a high-level electrician, called a journeyman, especially one trained on EV chargers, is a significant challenge, said Matt Trout, president of Trout Electric, which services and installs chargers and other electric equipment in Southern California.

"If you came to me right now with a journeyman that's been in the EV charging industry for the last couple of years, he'd be hired on the spot," Trout said.

That's why Patrick Lloyd has traveled thousands of miles from his office near Detroit to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the California coast, the deserts of Utah, the woodlands of Vermont and the southern bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana — all to fix EV chargers.

"When a charger goes down, they can't just call a local electrician," said Lloyd, president of charger maintenance and installation company Income Power.

The U.S. will need at least 142,000 more certified electricians by 2030 to support the country's electrification push, which includes EV charging, solar panels, battery storage, smart panels and more, according to Qmerit, a company that provides installation services for EV charging and other electrification technologies for homes and businesses.

"Public charging is competing for a scarcity of labor with these other demands," said Eric Feinberg, chief work force officer at Qmerit. Improving the public charging infrastructure will require creative ways to find and train electricians, he said.

Electricians are highly coveted across a wide array of clean energy services. Wind turbine service technicians and solar panel installers are among the fastest-growing occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the road to becoming an electrician is lengthy. Even without charger certification, an electrician typically needs four to five years as an apprentice before earning a license, the agency said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects electrician demand to grow 6 percent from 2022 to 2032, reaching nearly 812,000 workers.

That need will clash with a shrinking labor pool. The number of electricians will decline 14 percent from 2023 to 2030, according to a Qmerit analysis of data from Associated Builders and Contractors.

Even among the current roster of electricians, many are not certified to install and fix EV chargers.

About 1,000 technicians will handle 825,000 service calls this year. But the industry will need 17,000-plus charger technicians to address more than 14 million annual service calls by 2030, according to an analysis by training company ChargerHelp! and SAE International, the engineering organization.

Stakeholders are reacting with additional funding and training programs. Yet while expanded training is a step in the right direction, recruitment and certification efforts need to accelerate to meet the government's goals and to ensure that chargers are reliable, said Brent Gruber, executive director of the EV practice at J.D. Power.

"We're pretty late in the game," Gruber said. "There are going to be more growing pains before it gets better."

ChargerHelp! and SAE are developing training certifications for charger technicians. They have decided on the body of required knowledge and are writing the corresponding exam.

ChargerHelp!, which focuses on solving the computer issues at charging stations, has trained more than 1,000 charger technicians over the last 18 months, a tally likely to expand as it partners with SAE on certification.

"There is a hunger from communities across the U.S. to be able to participate in this space, to get good paying jobs," said CEO Kameale Terry. Traditional electrician skills will be necessary, she said, but so will software skills.

"If someone goes out to change the connector but doesn't understand the full breadth of the ecosystem, it's hard for them to know if changing that connector was good enough," Terry said.

The Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program, a nonprofit collaboration of automakers, EV service equipment manufacturers, utilities and educational institutions, has trained about 30,000 electricians over the past decade across the U.S. and Canada.

The initiative is designed to integrate charger work with other clean energy technologies, said Jennifer Mefford, co-chair of the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program. Many customers who want to install or upgrade chargers are also considering adding solar, energy storage and smart electrical panels, she said.

"We are in this historic moment of electrification of everything," Mefford said. "We are going to need a whole lot more electricians for a long time."