Methodology & data

Every record on ChargeCensus comes from the Alternative Fuels Data Center — the US Department of Energy / NREL registry that is the federal reference dataset for alternative-fuel infrastructure. We ingest the full electric (ELEC) station list via the AFDC API (currently served from api.data.gov) and publish one page per station: 89,313 stations at the last refresh.

Fields shown per station: charging network, connector types (CCS, NACS/Tesla, CHAdeMO, J1772 and outlet types), EVSE port counts by charging level (DC fast, Level 2, Level 1), street address and coordinates, public/private access, station status (available / planned / temporarily unavailable), free-text pricing as reported to AFDC, facility type and open date.

Network roll-ups group stations by the AFDC ev_networkcode, exactly as reported — roaming partnerships are not merged. Known codes are decoded to display names (SHELL_RECHARGE → Shell Recharge); unknown codes render cleaned-up as-is. "Total ports" is the sum of the per-level EVSE counts.

City pages aggregate stations by the record's city field (as geocoded by NREL). Aggregate statistics (counts, port sums, growth by open year) are precomputed from the full table on every refresh.

Completeness gate: private and fleet-only stations, and rows without coordinates, are excluded from search indexing and sitemaps, though their pages remain reachable. City pages index only cities with 10+ stations.

The AFDC registry is comprehensive but not perfectly real-time: networks report on their own cadence, so brand-new sites can lag and "temporarily unavailable" reflects the last report, not live status. Port counts are per-station EVSE counts, not simultaneous-charging guarantees.

Residential chargers are out of scope. Open dates are self-reported and drive the growth rankings — treat those as screening estimates. Station counts differ from "charger" counts you may see elsewhere: one station (a physical site) can host hundreds of ports.

Underlying DOE/NREL data is public. ChargeCensus pages, aggregations and the network graph may be cited freely with attribution to "ChargeCensus (chargecensus.com)". For bulk or API access, contact kenny@hyder.me.

Machine-readable summaries: /llms.txt · /ai.txt · state aggregates CSV at /data/states.csv · sitemaps at /sitemap-index.xml.