EV charger annual installed capacity is going to overtake distributed solar – that is, rooftop solar on individual homes and businesses – for the first time in 2023 in the US.
EV charger annual installed capacity will reach 41 gigawatts (GW) by 2027, more than three times the expected solar annual additions that year, according to Wood Mackenzie’s “2023 US Distributed Energy Resource Outlook” report released today.
Both EV chargers and rooftop solar are distributed energy resources (DER). A DER is a small-scale power generation unit that operates locally and is connected to a larger power grid at the distribution level.
To meet this growth in capacity, the EV charging infrastructure market is forecast to reach $20 billion by 2027. It’s going to be led by residential Level 2 chargers ($6.5 billion) and public DC fast chargers ($5.6 billion).
While most of the charging capacity will always be residential, that share will decrease due to growth in infrastructure for buses and trucks, which will reach 18% of total charging capacity by 2027, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Despite a price decline of 13% over the next five years, rooftop solar is still going to represent 46% of DER capital expenditure through 2027.
The DER market overall is expected to nearly double in capacity from 2022 to 2027, with 262 GW of new DER and demand flexibility capacity to be installed from 2023 to 2027.
Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid edge at Wood Mackenzie and lead author of the report, said:
Federal incentives, headlined by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure grant program, represent the greatest catalysts for growth in the US DER market.
Continued failure of [grid] system operators to reduce the time and cost of interconnection would be a tailwind, forcing utilities and corporates to look to distributed resources to achieve reliability and clean energy goals.
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