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Forty new Level 2 charging ports will be installed in Springfield, Illinois courtesy of a $629,000 grant from the Illinois Community Charging Program. The city’s electric utility, City Water Light and Power, received the grant and will own the new chargers. The utility also aims to continue expanding charging infrastructure after the 40 new ports are added.
At the moment, Springfield has about 190 charging stations, according to PlugShare. Believe it or not, 16 of them are free, according to the same website. Just under 40 are fast chargers.
On the surface, it might not seem that adding 40 new public EV charging ports is that newsworthy, but it is, because installing more new chargers decreases range anxiety in places where there aren’t enough and new installations are actually happening in many places. “Around 780 public high-speed charging stations opened across the country in the third quarter of 2025. By all accounts, that’s the largest such infrastructure boom on record, according to Department of Energy data reviewed by Bloomberg.”
Springfield has a population of about 114,000, and hundreds of thousands visit to experience the Abraham Lincoln-related sites each year. Many travel to Springfield by car. “Tourism is big business in Springfield, bringing in $536 million in 2023. Tourism is tied to 3,500 hospitality jobs in the city and $20 million in local tax revenue. That’s according to Visit Springfield Director Scott Dahl.” You wouldn’t think little old Springfield would have so many annual tourists, but it does, and more and more of them drive EVs.
Springfield is the Illinois state capital and is a population center for central Illinois, so it has visitors related to all the government activities too.
The whole state of Illinois has fewer than 150,000 registered EVs. Expanding public charging infrastructure can help with greater EV adoption, especially since federal EV purchasing incentives are no longer available.
Some people seem to believe EVs need to have 800 miles of range or more to solve “range anxiety,” but this is not true. What is needed is the expansion of EV charging infrastructure to decrease the distance between existing public chargers.
One example, which is not in Illinois, is the “West Coast Electric Highway, an extensive network of electric vehicle (EV) DC fast charging stations located every 25 to 50 miles along Interstate 5 and other major roadways in the Pacific Northwest.”
When there are plenty of public EV chargers every 25 miles or so, no EVs will need a huge amount of range.
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