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Many consumers are super charged up about electric vehicles becoming more available, but if the infrastructure doesn’t offer more rapid-charging stations sooner, the EV movement will roll to a halt.

The predicament of EV owners who want to take longer trips was illustrated firsthand by Ford CEO Jim Farley. He and his family drove an electric Mustang long distances to discover that high-speed chargers were often broken, already occupied or just not to be found. The trip spurred Farley to announce that Ford was adopting Tesla’s charging technology in a partnership with the well-established EV leader, which has a Supercharger network of about 17,000 stations.

And last month it was reported that seven of the world’s largest carmakers are launching a new electric vehicle charging network, with the goal of establishing 30,000 new high-speed fast chargers in North America. If that occurs, it would nearly double the number of fast chargers available in the U.S. today.

Although that is good news, urgency is still of utmost importance. No matter how much consumers want to switch to electric vehicles, do their part to reduce their carbon footprint and save on vehicle maintenance, if they can’t get from point A to point B without a lot of worry or inconvenience, EVs are not going to catch on as widely as needed to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act made money available to help households switch to electric vehicles, but no credit or rebate is going to replace peace of mind. There’s even a name for the EV travel worry: range anxiety.

States have received federal money to get EV programs going, and that includes Minnesota getting $68 million from the program over five years, along with a 20% non-federal match. Despite efforts to get charging stations up in the state, the going has been slow. As MPR News reported this month, long stretches in the state still exist with few or no options to power up. About 350 fast chargers exist in Minnesota today; 2,400 will be needed by 2030, according to a clean energy expert’s estimates.

Xcel needs to reconsider its recent action. The electric company had proposed building more than 700 charging stations across the state but withdrew the plan in June after the Minnesota Public Utility Commission reduced a proposed Xcel rate increase. Digging in their heels because they didn’t get what they wanted hurts the public and efforts to ramp up green energy.

Along with that, the state and the nation need to fast-track getting the rapid chargers installed as quickly as possible. Studies and surveys and bureaucratic processes could slow down the EV movement so much that it totally loses momentum and comes to an eerily quiet stop.

— Mankato Free Press, Aug. 28