Ohio EV drivers enjoy a cheap charging rate

Data: Stable Auto; Note: Does not include Tesla charging stations; Map: Erin Davis/Axios Visuals

Ohio is one of the cheapest states for charging up an electric car.

Why it matters: It turns out there can be big price differences depending on where EV owners are plugging in their autos, Alan Neuhauser reports for Axios Pro: Climate Deals.

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• Those gaps suggest EV charging companies are still figuring out how to price a top-off.

By the numbers: In Ohio, it costs an average of $0.38 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to charge an electric car at public charging stations — a price that makes us the 13th least expensive state in the country.

• The national average is $0.45 per kWh, per data gathered by Stable Auto , an EV charger software developer.

What's happening: Charging networks such as Electrify America, EVgo, and ChargePoint consider a host of factors in setting their charging price — not least the local electricity rate.

• Cheap electricity in America's Midwest, for example, may explain the discounts in Nebraska, Iowa, North Dakota and Kansas, which aren't exactly hotbeds of EV adoption.

Zoom in: Pricing may be less of a worry here than finding a public charging station in the first place.

• Nationally, we had the 15th fewest public charging stations per 100,000 residents, per a 2022 analysis by Governing Magazine. (And, you may recall, a charging desert on Interstate 75 in Ohio almost derailed our colleague Joann Muller's EV road trip last winter.)

What they're saying: "Prices are probably set incorrectly and don't reflect underlying supply-demand," Stable CEO Rohan Puri tells Axios.

• "There is still a lot of price herding in the industry with players, by and large, setting their prices based on what other nearby chargers have set their prices at."

What we're watching: By the end of the year, Ohio expects to have eliminated charging deserts along its interstates.

• Interstate 70, just west of Columbus, was the site of the first charging station funded by a $5 billion EV infrastructure initiative spearheaded by President Biden.
• And about two dozen more new public fast-charging locations are expected to go live this year, per the state — enough to satisfy federal rules that call for fast-charging stations at least every 50 miles along interstates.

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