Criminals are increasingly stealing cables from electric vehicle (EV) charging stations around the country, according to The Associated Press.
In a growing trend, thieves are targeting EV chargers to cut off their cables and take the valuable copper contained inside the wiring, often rendering the vandalized chargers useless until repairs can be made, according to the AP. Especially if they accelerate, the thefts could be another hurdle for the Biden administration’s major EV push, which has struggled to beat back consumers’ concerns about EV range and charger availability.
The amount of copper contained in one cable is generally could yield around $20, and the criminals targeting stations will often steal as many of the wires as they can at one site, according to the AP, citing an estimate from Robert Carson, a Houston, Texas, police officer who runs a unit focused on metal theft. Such thefts have been documented in Washington state, Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Pennsylvania.
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Electrify America, an EV charging company that runs one the country’s biggest charger networks, would face a cable cutting incident about twice a year as recently as two years ago, according to the AP. In the first five months of this year alone, the company has seen 129 of its cables cut, with one Seattle station having cables targeted on six different occasions over the past year.
“We’re enabling people to get to work, to take their kids to school, get to medical appointments,” Anthony Lambkin, vice president of operations for Electrify America, told the AP. “So to have an entire station that’s offline is pretty impactful to our customers.”
Seattle has proven to be an emerging hot spot for EV cable theft, according to the AP. The trend is also picking up in cities like Houston and Oakland, California.
“Vandalism of public charging infrastructure in the Seattle metro area has unfortunately been increasing in frequency,” EVgo, another company that operates EV chargers around the country, told the AP.
The damaged equipment can also be expensive to replace, as is the case with Minneapolis, Minnesota’s city-owned chargers, according to the AP. Replacing a single cut cord in Minneapolis can cost up to $1,000.
“[The thieves are] not making a significant amount of money. They’re not going to be sailing on a yacht anywhere,” Carson told the AP. “They’re not just taking one. When they’re hit, they’re hit pretty hard.”
The Biden administration is spending billions of dollars and promulgating stringent regulations in an effort to boost EV production and adoption, but adoption has not grown as rapidly as anticipated while manufacturers are losing considerable sums of money on their electric product lines. The administration’s recently-finalized tailpipe emissions standards for light-duty vehicles will require manufacturers to ensure that up to 56% of new light-duty vehicles they sell by model year 2032 are EVs.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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