Good day, fellow Battery Backer 💪🏻🔋

Demand charges are back in the spotlight this week, as an established name in charging looks to energy storage and management for additional revenue streams, while some charging startups are forced to cease operations because they had no way to mitigate large fees triggered by peak demand.

Batteries (or lack thereof) are the throughline, as the ability to shave peak demand and overcome grid capacity limitations attracts more attention. Upfront costs remain a barrier for smaller charging providers, however, leaving the lingering question of utility rate redesign for EV charging as another potential solution.

Beyond batteries and rate sheets, here's how EV infrastructure developed across the US & Canada this week ⤵️

News - PennDOT Secretary Mike Carroll shared a further $37 million investment in EV charging using the state’s NEVI funding, resulting from the first full round of community site awards. This phase focuses on deploying charging options away from primary travel corridors, in favor of cities, suburbs, and other community sites that lack EV infrastructure.

Numbers - 248 fast-charging ports at 43 sites and 267 AC ports at 28 sites are awarded in this round, for a total of 515 new ports across 71 locations. L2 awards are worth a little more than $5 million, or 13.5% of the total awarded, with more expensive DCFC installations taking the lion’s share at $32.3 million and 86.5% of round funding.

Nuance - Although it couldn’t quite claim the first NEVI site activation, the title for which went to neighboring Ohio almost three years ago, Pennsylvania is full of NEVI firsts. Those 54 locations opened to date put the state in a clear first place for activations, with more than double the number of second-placed Wisconsin (26). PennDOT is also the first agency to roll out a full statewide community charging RFP that includes L2 charging, based on a comprehensive FBO “Fully Built Out” certification for its Corridor Connections phase that has made traveling the state in an EV much easier over the past few years.

Next Up - Following the Southeastern awards announced this week, further community-focused NEVI rounds are split into three more areas: Western, Central, and Eastern. The Western round closes submissions this month, on November 20th, which probably pushes the next announcements into early 2027. Also watch for the L2 deployments, which haven’t typically been associated with NEVI funding until now. 86% of the L2 funds went to two familiar names, it’s electric and Voltpost, both of which will deploy curbside AC solutions around Philadelphia.

📊 Sunday Stat: 89% of respondents still want to see CCS1 connectors at non-Supercharger DC fast-charging sites, based on our dual polls (LinkedIn and YouTube) on the subject. Most suggest a 50/50 split is the best way to proceed, while those who prefer a hybrid site with more of one connector type also lean towards majority CCS1 (20%), not majority NACS-J3400 (14%).

Only 11% of 140 respondents favor ripping off the Band-Aid to get to NACS-only sites faster. Where do you stand? Have your say via the newsletter version of the poll below ⬇️

News - Blink Charging is now Blink Energy, as the veteran charging provider announced its name change and an increased focus on energy management services.

Numbers - 2,086 stalls at 702 DCFC locations across 46 states. Blink also operates a significant L2 charging network, with almost 21,000 ports at more than 5,500 sites. Blink’s latest product, EnergyConnect, was announced in August and is currently in place at 52 DCFC sites, half of which use the system’s load management capabilities to lower costs.

Nuance - At an early deployment site, Blink reports that its load management services cut peak demand bills by 23% in the first month of operation. EV charging continues to overlap with systems that send power in the opposite direction, although progress in the field has been limited, and promising early startups like FreeWire Technologies briefly shone bright before flaming out. Blink has been around the EV space for a long time, but its impact on the wider energy ecosystem remains to be proven.

Next Up - EnergyConnect will be made available to more Blink customers across the United States and Europe in 2027, as the company determines sites that could benefit most from BESS.

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News - L2 additions fell back after last week's rebound, making this the lightest week in over a month. ChargePoint still supplied more than half of the total, but a smaller share than a week ago, while ViaLynk and Red E both stepped up their pace and FLO slowed. Canada's contribution was cut roughly in half, though it reached into more provinces.

Numbers - 414 L2 charging ports were added to the Alternative Fuels Data Center this week, covering 25 states and 5 Canadian provinces.

Notable New L2 + AFDC Additions:

🔴 Tesla Charging provided a bi-weekly update on the Wall Connector for Business program, which added 415 ports at 59 sites across 21 states over the preceding two weeks. California (122) and our home state of Massachusetts (67) led the additions, although no Canadian locations made the list this time. One Harbor Shore in Boston, MA, brought the biggest cluster at 52, followed by The Modern Seattle Apartments in Seattle, WA (41), and the Law Library Garage in Los Angeles (40).

🟠 ChargePoint added 233 ports across 66 locations, with California (70 ports) and Massachusetts (28) topping the state list. The North Fork Mono site on Golden State Boulevard in Madera, CA, brought the biggest cluster at 32 ports, followed by Boston, MA, with 12 ports at 401 Park Drive and 10 at the Longwood Garage, and 10 at the Oneida County Nexus Center in Utica, NY. Aldie, VA (8), Sunnyvale, CA (7), and Eugene, OR (7), fill out the larger sites, along with 18 ports across Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Prince Edward Island.

🅿️ ViaLynk added 61 ports at 7 sites, roughly double last week's 30, with a 40-port EnerGroup site in Jamaica, Queens, NY, doing most of the work. Adelphi University's Post Hall in Garden City, NY, added 8 ports, and another Plainview, NY, school, Judy Jacobs-Parkway Elementary, brought 6. Smaller additions include 2 ports each at WSU Spokane and the Lake George Central School District, both of which also had DC fast ports in Fast Forward, plus a 2-port site in Clay, NY, and a single port in East Haven, CT.

⚫ Blink Charging added 15 ports at 5 sites, led by 6 ports on Ridgedale Avenue in Florham Park, NJ, and 4 at Head of Falls in Waterville, ME. A water treatment plant in Sherwood, OR, and the Durham County Main Library in Durham, NC, each got 2, with a single port at the Camelot West Owners Association in West Des Moines, IA.

⚜️ Circuit électrique added 10 ports at 4 Québec sites, 3 each at the Garage Municipal and Hôtel de Ville in La Conception, and 2 each in Montréal, on Avenue Gariépy and Boulevard Saint-Vital.

⚡ EV Connect added 20 ports at 4 sites, 15 of them at the Courtyard and Residence Inn property in Richmond Hill, GA. Coupeville and Tacoma, WA, each added 2 ports and also had DC fast ports in Fast Forward, while a single port came online in Muskegon, MI.

⭕ Red E added 28 ports at 6 sites, with Michigan accounting for 18 of them. Two 8-port sites led the way, at 2140 Ellsworth Road in Ann Arbor, MI, and 66 Park Avenue in Washington, NJ, followed by 4 ports each at the two Ferndale Apartments buildings on West 9 Mile Road in Ferndale, MI. The Washtenaw Trial Court in Ann Arbor and Whitehall Avenue in Mystic, CT, added 2 each.

🔵 FLO added 12 ports at 3 sites, 4 each at Boland Park in South Bend, IN, a Mavis Tire in Elmsford, NY, and a Mainway location in Burlington, ON.

🍁 ChargeLab added 4 ports at 2 Pitt County Cultural Arts & Recreation sites in Greenville, NC.

🏁 Rounding out this week's L2 activity: EVOKE added 11 ports, 9 at a garage on 3rd Avenue in The Bronx, NY, and 2 at a parking lot in Buena, NJ; OpConnect registered 10 ports at 4 Oregon sites; EVGateway added 4 ports at Benbow Lake in Garberville, CA; Rivian Waypoints added 2 ports at Holly Recreation State Park in Holly, MI; ZEFNET added 2 ports at two HP Ventures Group sites in Highwood, IL; and EVSTART added 2 ports in Toronto, ON.

News - Fast charger activations rose for a second straight week, the best showing in about a month, with a large batch of Tesla Superchargers accounting for almost half of the total. IONNA more than doubled last week's pace and kept its weekly streak going, while ViaLynk cooled off after last week's big haul. Canada also slowed, adding roughly half of last week's total.

Numbers - 395 DC charging ports at 62 charging locations were added to the AFDC, covering 26 states and 2 Canadian provinces.

Check out DCFCtracker.com to see a map of the latest AFDC additions in the US, which you can also filter by the past week, month, or quarter.

Notable New Locations + AFDC Additions:

🟠 IONNA energized 58 ports at 9 sites, extending its activation consistency to 17 weeks. The Rechargery Relay in Manteca, CA, is the largest, at 10 stalls, followed by 8-stall sites at Wawa stores in Florida and Virginia, and a Relay in Mendota Heights, MN. Four Rechargery @ Circle K sites (listed in the next section) and a Wawa-hosted site in Pennsville, NJ, close things out.

🟢 Electrify America energized 30 ports at 3 sites, including two 12-stall Target locations in Cumming, GA, and Tulsa, OK. A 6-stall Sheetz in Harrisburg, PA, rounds out the week for EA (and gives PennDOT NEVI site #54!)

🍁 ChargePoint added 8 ports across 4 Canadian sites, in Bancroft and Pickering, ON, and two sites in British Columbia. FLO also contributed to activations north of the border, with a 4-stall Tim Hortons installation that deploys two FLO Ultra units in Duncan, BC.

🔴 Tesla Charging added 167 ports at 15 of its own locations across 11 states, Washington, DC, and Ontario. The largest is a 24-stall site at the Brays Oak Crossing shopping center in Houston, TX. Among the many 8-stall sites are a Lowe's in Washington, DC, and a Circle K in Norwood, ON, the only Tesla addition in Canada.

🛒 Walmart EV Charging continued to activate new locations that didn’t make it into the AFDC numbers, with the latest sites now open in Mobile, AL, and Wylie, TX.

⚪ On the Supercharger for Business (SfB) side, 14 ports at 2 sites lit up this week: 8 stalls at a Quick Pantry in Orangeburg, SC, and 6 at a Petco in East Wenatchee, WA, which is owned by EVODS and marks the first of many sites that the company has planned under the SfB program.

⚡ ViaLynk added 16 ports at 4 sites, maintaining a streak of 15+ sites per month that stretches back to the middle of summer. The largest location this week is a 6-stall effort at the WSU campus in Spokane, WA, followed by two 4-stall sites and one 2-stall site in New York State.

🔵 EVgo added 24 ports at two 12-stall sites, an Epic Theatres in Clermont, FL, and a Kohl's in Raleigh, NC. We still await EVgo Superchargers in Q4 2026, but the deployment rate outside of the company’s California home market is starting to pick up pace.

⭕ Red E added 14 ports at 3 sites, topped by 6 stalls at Significant Other EV Charging in Las Vegas, NV. Two 4-stall sites in Michigan round out the set.

🟠 ChargePoint added 26 ports at 14 locations, none larger than 3 stalls. The biggest are a Chevron in Clovis, CA, and another in Ontario (shared above).

🔶 The Rivian Adventure Network continues to churn out NACS-only locations with more and more stalls, this week adding a 12-stall RAN site in Manchester, CT. The area northeast of Hartford is getting quite a lot of DCFC attention with Electrify America, EVgo, Mercedes-Benz High Power Charging, and a future Tesla Supercharger all adding options off this busy section of I-84.

🏁 Rounding out fast-charging additions this week: bp pulse opened 12 ports at the TA travel center in Santa Nella, CA; EV Connect logged 9 ports at 3 sites, including 4-stall locations in Coupeville and Tacoma, WA; ChargeLab added 6 ports in Orion Township, MI, and Logan, UT; Blink added 2 ports in Mansfield, OH; and ZEFNET added a single dispenser in Port Wing, WI (but it’s a good one, adding an Alpitronic HYC400 for Lake Superior shoregoers).

To see where the leading charging vendors are expanding, check out The Network Architect Channel on YouTube for weekly DCFC updates.

⭕ IONNA upgraded 4 sites to Rechargery @ Circle K locations this week, to reach 69% of the 85 identified sites now completed. A rogue non-Circle K Rechargery was clipped from our count midweek, so the newly upgraded sites in Mission Viejo, CA, Longmont and Monument, CO, and Northlake, TX, bring the total upgrade count to 59 locations at the end of October.

↔️ NACS conversions at existing sites via DCFCtracker (courtesy of AlejandroEV66). 10 sites added 23 NACS-J3400 connectors, the most by Shell Recharge with 14 handles across 6 sites. Most of those were in New England, including 10 at three Rhode Island sites in Newport and Cranston. Rivian added 6 NACS handles and made Gila Bend, AZ, a full conversion (all NACS), while Hays, KS, is now half NACS. EVgo added 3 in Los Angeles, CA, and Hoffman Estates, IL.

🚧 On the upgrade side, the following Electrify America locations currently offline to replace aging hardware are: Lake Zurich, IL | Portland, OR | Fredericksburg, VA

🔧 Tesla is expanding the V3 Supercharger in East Waynesburg, PA. It’s unclear how many more spaces the existing 8-stall Supercharger will receive, but speculation around two new power cabinets onsite suggests that site capacity could double.

🔶 Rivian permitting spotted by RANtracker identifies a new Adventure Network site coming to Denver, CO. With an initial 10 stalls, the site could eventually be expanded to a 24-stall site, if plans for the nearby vacant lot come to fruition.

📝 In Tesla permitting, MarcoRP shared new Supercharger filings for Manchester, CT, Ocala, FL, and an SfB site planned for South Jordan, UT.

❌ Unfortunately, the occasional site closure also enters this section, and this is one of those weeks. The Tesla Supercharger for Business site we covered back in edition 83, at a gas station and restaurant in Gorham, NH, now shows as a “temporary closure” on supercharge.info, which aligns with a PlugShare check-in this weekend. Whether or not the location will open again is unclear, but losses from monthly demand charges were significant and this is the second SfB site to close this year, after another in Belleville, KS, closed in September.

🪙 On the NEVI side, Oregon has confirmed that all round 2 grantees have signed contracts, covering 24 sites on travel corridors around the state. At least 5 are expected to open in early 2027, and ODOT’s first NEVI station is projected to open this year, at an Electrify America site in Gladstone, OR.

🛒 Walmart EV Charging has 360 sites in the pipeline across the US. 146 are currently under construction, based on numbers from Wattmart, and this week we’re watching the 7 in California that show as underway. Of that batch, Supercenter 1660 in Palmdale, CA, has Alpitronic HYC400 dispensers in the ground and construction fencing removed as of last week.

🟠 The EV Infrastructure Report identified new IONNA Rechargeries permitted for Carlsbad, CA, and Freehold, NJ.

🚧 Construction is underway at the following Supercharger sites, according to supercharge.info: Fort Collins, CO, and Lawrence, MA (an existing site that appears to be an expansion).

Is there an upcoming site in your area that the EV community needs to know about?

Reply to this email with the location and charging provider (if known), and we’ll add it to the next edition 🙌🏻

News - As the Tesla Semi project starts to gain real-world momentum and associated megawatt charging infrastructure ramps up, the nascent Megacharger network is significant enough to catch the watchful eye of our fellow EV obsessive, Walter at the Network Architect Channel. Watch the first episode of a new tracking series below.

Numbers - 5 Megacharger sites are currently open, with 11 under construction and many more in the pipeline. California shows an early lead in the tNAC analysis, with 25 Megachargers on the map planned or active, with Texas just behind the Golden State, on 20 proposed Megachargers. Peruse the full Megacharger tracking map from MarcoRP here.

Nuance - A Tesla Semi fire that closed down a major section of road in the Bay Area last week is under investigation. As usual, EVwire/eTruckwire has some of the most comprehensive coverage of this story and other commercial electric vehicle deployments, which should nicely round out tNAC updates on the Megacharger network as it expands.

Next Up - Walter reports 80 locations on the map, based on various sources, and we know that Head of Tesla Semi program Dan Priestley cited around 37 Megacharger sites open by the end of 2026. The urgency to electrify new sites only grows as more Semi units roll off the production line in Nevada, with SoCal, the Texas Triangle, and port routes around the Southeast the main areas to expect new activations so far.

Here’s a selection of news items we couldn’t squeeze into other sections, and interesting deeper reads we think you’ll want to know about:

IONNA reports damaged CCS1 connectors in four states, updates on repairs

Traveling California’s long road to improving EV charging reliability

RAN grows nearly 40% YOY, deploying more NACS-J3400 sites + Outposts

Mercedes-Benz High Power Charging names Madeline Ebert as new CEO

Canadian Climate Institute shares nationwide EVI requirements for 2040

RANH grant program for L2 chargers open in New Hampshire (ends 11/15/26)

CALeVIP has Window 2 for Fast Charge California Project still running

Wyoming’s first NEVI RFP is open now through 11/18/26

Colorado is currently running its latest DCFC Plazas Program funding round

Pennsylvania Corridor Connections NOFO windows are open across the state - Next regional deadline: 11/20/26 (Western)

Tennessee is running a TDEC rebate program for MFD level 2 charging projects

Efficiency Maine seeks qualified bidders for L2 charging (up to $120K per site)

California Clean Fuel Reward (CCFR) has enrollment for M-HDEV rebates

If you found this edition useful, please pass it on to a friend, colleague, or family member interested in electrification.

See you next week ⚡

Cheers,

Steve / Plug & Play EV

☕ ^{This edition fueled by: Cinnamon Spice Tea |} 📖 ^Reading: ❌

🎵 ^{Spinning: Wet Leg - Mangetout | 📺 Watching: Can an EV be an enthusiast car?}