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EV Charging & Alternative Fuel Stations

EV Charging & Alternative Fuel Stations

Overview

This dataset is the authoritative national registry of alternative fueling and electric-vehicle charging infrastructure in the United States and Canada, maintained by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR; formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory / NREL, renamed December 2025) for the U.S. Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC). Electric-vehicle charging dominates the registry — on the order of 280,000 charging ports across tens of thousands of charging stations — alongside stations for other alternative fuels.

Each record is a fueling or charging station with its name, geocoded location, street address, opening date, operating network, fuel type, access type, and operational status. For electric stations, the data captures charging levels (Level 1, Level 2, and DC fast) along with port counts and connector types. The dataset is delivered as monthly full snapshots, each tagged with the snapshot period, which allows researchers not only to study the current state of the network but to build station-level panels that track infrastructure buildout, network transitions, and station openings and closures over time.

Because a single snapshot cannot reconstruct how the network evolved, the panel of monthly snapshots is the dataset's distinctive research value — supporting analyses of EV-charging deployment, equity of access, corridor and policy evaluation, and the geography of the energy transition.

Data Description

Each record represents one station and includes:

  • Identity and location: station name, latitude and longitude, street address, city, state/province, ZIP/postal code, and country.
  • Fuel type: a fuel-type code distinguishing electric (ELEC) from other alternative fuels including E85 ethanol, compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied natural gas (LNG), propane (LPG), biodiesel (BD), renewable diesel (RD), and hydrogen (HY). Filtering to ELEC isolates EV charging.
  • Network and access: the operating network (for example, Tesla, ChargePoint, Electrify America), the access type (public or private), and the groups permitted to use the station.
  • Status: operational status (available, planned, or temporarily unavailable) and the station's opening date.
  • Electric-specific detail: charging levels (Level 1, Level 2, DC fast), counts of ports at each level, and the connector types present. Multi-valued attributes such as connector types are represented as structured (JSON) values.
  • Snapshot period: the month of the snapshot, enabling point-in-time selection or multi-month panel construction.

The mix is electric-dominant: of all alternative-fuel records, the large majority are electric, with the remainder spread across the other fuels listed above.

Coverage

The dataset covers the United States and Canada. The current registry contains roughly 100,000+ station records (counting all fuel types and access levels), of which the substantial majority are electric. Station opening dates extend back to the 1990s for the earliest infrastructure, while the snapshot panel itself begins with the first monthly capture and grows by one full snapshot each month.

Both public and private stations are included, as are stations in available, planned, and temporarily-unavailable states; the access-type and status fields allow researchers to filter to the population relevant to their question (for example, public, currently-available DC fast charging).

Methodology

The registry is maintained continuously by NLR for the U.S. Department of Energy. Station information is assembled from charging- and fueling-network operators, Clean Cities coalition coordinators, and direct submissions from station operators, then standardized and quality-controlled by NLR before publication through the AFDC. [Source: U.S. DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center]

Records are factual infrastructure attributes — locations, networks, port counts, and operational status — rather than survey or modeled estimates.

Additional Notes

Snapshot panel. Each monthly snapshot is a complete capture of the registry at that time, tagged with its period. Selecting a single period yields a cross-sectional registry; stacking periods yields a panel suitable for studying station openings, closures, network changes, and port-count growth. Note that a station's presence or absence across snapshots reflects both real-world change and any reporting updates to the registry.

Fuel filtering. Although the dataset is branded around EV charging and is electric-dominant, it includes all alternative fuels. Researchers focused solely on EV charging should filter to the electric fuel-type code.

Documentation links

Licensing and redistribution. This is public U.S. government data and is freely usable and redistributable. The station data is provided by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR; formerly NREL, renamed December 2025), operated by the Alliance for Energy Innovation, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy, under terms stating the data "may be used for any purpose whatsoever" (developer.nlr.gov/terms). The data are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, and the names DOE, NLR, and Alliance may not be used to endorse or promote any entity that adopts or uses the data.

Users are asked to credit the source and to carry the following notice with any redistribution or publication:

Source: Alternative Fueling Station Locations, Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC), U.S. Department of Energy / National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly NREL). The data are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind; the U.S. Department of Energy and NLR do not endorse any product, service, or entity, and their names may not be used to imply such endorsement.


Updated 3 days ago

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