Charging station data

Systematic data on charging station prices has been largely unavailable. By routinely scraping prices over the past several months, I have built what I believe to be the most comprehensive panel dataset of U.S. charging prices, including nearly all Tesla Superchargers. Below are a few visualizations and background information, including time series plots.

 Some background:

It is difficult to find data on prices set at individual EV charging stations. While most large charging networks have interactive maps where you find information about individual stations, not all of these websites/apps have prices. This can be annoying for drivers wanting to compare prices across stations or networks, but can be (arguably) even more annoying for researchers wanting to learn about station prices.

While the DOE's Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) has information for nearly every public charging station in the United States, it has limited information on prices. If you download the data, you'll find an ev_pricing string variable describing the price at each station. There is unfortunately little consistency in the formatting of ev_pricing, because most of this data is pulled from individual charging network API's and there is no standard for reporting price. 

I am yet to find a study that analyzes or uses the price of charging stations across the country (likely because no one has this data). Being interested in studying how affordability affects charging behavior, I set off to hand convert ev_pricing into a quantified $/kWh value. This started taking too long so I quickly pivoted to writing an algorithm to automate the process. I extract any $/kWh value from the string, or convert flat rates or $/minute (or hour) to $/kWh using a set of assumptions. I also take into account any other pricing information,  such as if there is an initialization cost, if price increases after a certain period of time, etc. Two quick notes about the AFDC data 1) There are a lot of stations that either have missing ev_pricing information or something not quantifiable (like "paid charging - see front desk") and 2) there are a whole bunch of free stations.

To fill in many of the gaps, I turned to the largest EV charging station owner in the country - Tesla. After learning the basics of data scraping and unapologetically asking my favorite AI chatbot for help, I started scraping the Tesla "Find Us" webpage for Supercharger prices on a routine basis in early 2025. 

This work stems, in part, from a project I began working on with Resources for the Future last summer as an intern. We recently published a report discussing our progress thus far - a national comparison of the cost of public EV charging, home charging, and fueling gasoline vehicles.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the data, please reach out!