**: Global Market Broadcast.
New energy vehicle charging operators in Michigan receive federal funding under the National New Energy Vehicle Infrastructure Program (NEVI), but may lose up to 30% of their funding due to poor reliability.
The $7.5 billion** funding to roll out charging across the country means that operators are likely to forgo payments if they have less than 97% of their charging stations running on average.
Currently, there is no industry standard for measuring this "uptime". Tesla, for example, claims that its Supercharger network has an uptime percentage of 9995%。But a detailed analysis shows that this is measured at the charging station level, meaning that even if half of the charging stations are not operating, the facility will still receive 100% points.
To combat misleading statistics and enforce uptime percentage requirements, operators who receive funding must submit uptime percentage data for individual charging stations, and states can reduce O&M payments if they don't qualify. In Michigan, these O&M payments account for 30% of the operator's grant funds and are split evenly over five years. All of these fee payments are likely to be cut, as annual payments will be reduced by 25% for every quarter when the percentage of uptime of the charger falls below the target.
Charging stations across the U.S. have been performing poorly so far, leading to concerns about whether uptime metrics can be achieved or enforced. Automakers and charging companies have switched to Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) chargers, citing reliability as one of the reasons. At the same time, companies such as ChargePoint are increasing network monitoring and the use of analytics** to identify and repair damaged charging stations faster.