(Photo Credit: Electrify America EV charging. Courtesy of Walmart)
Walmart plans to double its electric vehicle charging stations, adding several hundred charging stalls across operations in US 34 states, the retailer announced at its annual sustainability summit.
Once the expansion is completed, Walmart will have more than 1,000 electric vehicle charging units, making the retailer one of the nation’s leading EV charging station hosts, the company says. The effort is expected to create a national grid of electric vehicle charging availability at hundreds of Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations.
Each station will have super-fast chargers that can charge a customer’s electric vehicle in 10 to 30 minutes, Walmart says. The initiative is part of the company’s Project Gigaton, which launched last fall and calls for working with suppliers to reduce emissions from the value chain by a gigaton — one billion metric tons — by 2030.
The Volkswagen subsidiary Electrify America, created as part of the carmaker’s settlement with the US government over diesel vehicle emissions, says it plans to install electric vehicle chargers at more than 100 Walmart locations across 34 states by June 2019. VW agreed to spend $800 million in California and $2 billion nationwide on clean car infrastructure after admitting to diesel emissions cheating, Reuters noted.
Wayne Killen, Electrify America’s senior director for infrastructure, told Reuters that 80% of the Walmart charging stations will be at stores near highways, and the remaining will be located in metro areas.
In addition to EV charging, Walmart is expanding commitments on solar and wind power. The company says it plans to more than double the amount of renewable energy it uses in the United States, and increase the amount of global electricity needs supplied by renewable sources above the current 28%.
New solar and wind projects are expected to deliver over 1.6 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable energy annually to the company.
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