• U.S. firm ChargePoint added 190,000 new charging stations last year. It wasn’t enough.
File this in the good-news-bad-news folder:
EV sales, despite some pretty strong turbulence in the last year, were up globally in 2025 (by 20 percent), led by Europe (33 percent growth); even in the U.S., where electrification has been a target of the Trump administration 2.0 since day one, 2025 was the second-best ever for EV sales. Unless you’re in the anti-EV camp, that’s good news.
Furthermore, EV charging infrastructure firm ChargePoint estimates that demand for its services climbed by 34 percent last year. As reported by InsideEVs.com, the company also estimates it installed 190,000 new charging points across the U.S. in 2025, including both Level 2 AC charging and DC fast charging points.That represents a 16 percent increase in supply, or less than half the increase in demand recorded.
And therein lies the bad news. All those new charging stations haven’t been enough to keep up with growing demand. According to ChargePoint, use of EV charging stations outpaced growth in the supply of them by 20 percent in the U.S. in 2025.
The company says it expects the supply shortage to get even worse in 2026. The rate of new stations joining the infrastructure will have to increase.
In Canada, while we likely face regional disparities, there’s reason to think there’s a similar gap between supply and demand when it comes to EV charging station availability. The Canadian government, which remains far friendlier to electrification than its U.S. equivalent, recently announced it was investing in the addition of 8,000 new public charging points across the country, but it acknowledges that that won’t be nearly enough given the current projected rate of EV adoption in the coming years.
As EV adoption spreads from higher income folks, who tend to own homes with garages and driveways that can accommodate at-home chargers, to the wider population, many more of whom live in apartments and condos, it’s expected that demand for public stations will skyrocket.