Just some information. Ohio received $14.1 million to build up to 360 stations in NW Ohio. That comes out to about $40,000 each. The stations will primarily be in 4 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
I wonder if we should add more value by keeping in mind the paucity of rehabilitating the land if the land it’s on is sold.
https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_Report.cfm?Lab=NRMRL&dirEntryId=96736
The remediation costs required at sites contaminated with petroleum-derived compounds remains a relevant issue because of the large number of existing underground storage tanks the United States and the presence of benzene, MTBE, and TBA in some drinking water supplies. Cost information was obtained from the Clu-In Database (http://cluin.org/), maintained by the U.S. EPA, and used to identify what an average or median remediation cost per site would be. One hundred twelve sites were identified that had at least some cost information provided. Ninety-five of the sites were service stations, eleven were public water supplies, and 6 were industrial sites. The mean (median) costs for these cleanups were $400,356 ($197,736) for all 112 sites, $243,299 ($180,000) for the service station sites, $1,026,591 ($240,000) for the public drinking water sites, and $1,907,000 ($546,000) for the industrial sites.
Granted, this is from 2004, and only gives us an idea of costs where such costs were reported. But using it as a guide, and assuming nothing installed at the sites for EV charging would require much remediation (possibly different if they add local power storage), that’s a huge comparative additional value. 
That seems shockingly inexpensive! And yes, far less remediation required if they shut one down versus a petroleum fueling station.
Do you have a link to an article? I’d like to know the power output of these stations. Thanks.
Not to mention that the more charging stations there are, the more sales of EVs will go up, and the higher sales go, the lower prices will go, which will send sales even higher still.
I have a fully electric vehicle (Nissan Leaf), and for the first 3 or so days I had it, I didn’t have charging at home, and keeping it charged was a headache.
Now that I charge it at home, there is just one day a week when I do enough driving that I need an extra charge, but 15 minutes on a DC fast-charge does it. There are just 2 that are even somewhat convenient to my route-- one is more reliable, but one is more convenient, so the weather, and the possibility that I might make it home with 2% charge left of the charger fails make the decision for me.
I have to think of all of that at the beginning of the day-- and on very cold days when the car doesn’t charge as well, or days when I have extra driving to do, I also have to plan ahead, and maybe even get up early to charge.
Not nearly often enough to match the money I save on gas, and I’m glad I have the car for environmental reasons as well, but gosh I wish my state were putting in hundreds of chargers.
It s possible that “charging station” means a thing you can plug an EV into. I found one at a park&ride that had one DC fast charger and a smaller unit that was probably level 2 (20~30 miles to the hour). $40K could be for the average cost of each plug-in unit, which they might be calling a “station”. A location could have 2 or 4 units together, or 10, but I suspect they are calling each one a station.
This article:
Electric vehicle infrastructure in northwest Ohio receives $14 million boost | wtol.com.
Mentions the dollar figure from the OP, and says “360 charging ports” so, that would be right around the estimate of 40k per “port”. I’m guessing that is indeed a single vehicle charger.
I’m pretty sure you are right about the use in the context of the paper, because that is in fact how EV owners talk.
A charging station is analogous to a gas pump, not to a whole filling station. There are lots of free-standing charging stations in parking lots of places like Kroger or JC Penney’s, so you can charge while you shop, and a trip to a store can be a net use of 0 miles on your car, especially if the station is free, which it usually isn’t, but it might be, or at least be cheap.
There are also regular gas stations with EV charging stations off to the side (it takes longer to charge an EV, so the charging are out of the general traffic.
Dealerships that sell EVs have the stations, of course, and most don’t object to people who bought cars there, or bought them when they lived elsewhere, but bring them to that dealership for service, snagging a free charge after hours once in a while.
Dealerships are even offering EV owners free charges while you wait for service. I blew out a tired recently, and for the new one (under warranty, so it had to be a specific tire), my wait was long while they shlepped in a tire from a different dealership, but in the meantime, they charged my car.
I suspect that EV stations are much easier to install than gas pumps, and while the electricity is not free, in does not have to periodically be refilled like gas tanks do, and generally, the maintenance of them is cheaper. Not to mention, a gas pump uses electricity to work, and a pump session may cost as much as an EV charging session. That’s a WAG, though.
There only real problem with an EV is the dearth of charging stations, but the more and more that pop up, the easier and easier owning one becomes.
By the strict numbers, not even close. A DC fast charge can deliver well in excess 150kW – sometimes twice that, which would probably be more than the average power usage of an entire filling station. Level 2 chargers, such as you might see in a store parking lot, are usually in the 20~50kW range, which is still a lot.
Dispensing one gallon of gasoline probably uses less than half a kWh. For that, the vehicle will get an average of around 20 miles. Half a kWh will get an EV between one and two miles, depending on conditions, the vehicle and driving style.
If you calculate the externalities – drilling, pumping, shipping, cracking, shipping, dispensing and engine inefficiency, the math would even out quite a lot. Many of the externalities do also pertain to EVs, as a large share of electricity is still produced from oil, but the average efficiency of EV motors is far greater than ICEs.
One study I read years ago suggested that removing all the subsidies from motor fuel would increase the retail price by six-to-fifteen-fold, depending on whether environmental effects were factored in. Imagine how attractive EVs would become if gasoline was fifteen dollars a gallon. (Some of those subsidies would also apply to EVs, but the price of use would not be anywhere close to parity with ICEs.)
Actually, I meant the incidental electric costs of a charger-- all the power it needs to dispense power, light it up, communicate with your phone, etc., but NOT the power dispensed.
In those terms, the dispenser logic itself is going to draw a similar power load. But, the liquid fuel pump itself (almost always a shared turbine down in the station tank, these days) will probably cost a couple hundred watts to get the fuel up out of the tank.
Electric charge delivery is going to incur some conversion losses. A level 2 AC charger puts that cost on the vehicle’s own charge unit, probably on the order of tens of watts (which would be spread out over the many hours it would take to fully charge the vehicle). A level 3 DC charger converts the power in a big box near the charge dispenser and probably loses a fair bit more than tens of watts in the conversion (but over a much shorter period).
Even so, it is wrong to ignore the cost of getting the liquid fuel into the station tank (by truck). Semis are somewhat efficient, compared to cars, but getting electricity to the charge dispenser is hugely less costly than shipping fuel by truck.
What if the semis are Teslas?
I’m running out of here now before someone hits me!
A lot less.
At the (more or less standard in the US) rate of 10 gal per minute, that would imply the pump is using 5kWh per minute, so 300 per hour - the equivalent of just over 400 horsepower.
Googling suggests typical gas pump power consumption is something like 250-300 watts - so pumping for one minute consumes about 0.05 kWh. At the US average cost of electricity ($~0.17 per kWh), pumping gas costs slightly under 0.1 cent per gallon.
That was an error on my part: I meant to write kW, not kWh.