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Thefts of charging cables in Houston, beyond pose yet another obstacle to appeal of EVs

In very large cities like Houston, charging stations typically contain an especially large number of plugs and cables, so thefts can be particularly damaging. Photo by Andrew Roberts/Unsplash

Just before 2 a.m. on a chilly April night in Seattle, a Chevrolet Silverado pickup stopped at an electric vehicle charging station on the edge of a shopping center parking lot.

Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.

The scene that night has become part of a troubling pattern across the country: Thieves have been targeting EV charging stations, intent on stealing the cables, which contain copper wiring. The price of copper is near a record high on global markets, which means criminals stand to collect rising sums of cash from selling the material.

The stolen cables often disable entire stations, forcing EV owners on the road to search desperately for a working charger. For the owners, the predicament can be exasperating and stressful.

Broken-down chargers have emerged as the latest obstacle for U.S. automakers in their strenuous effort to convert more Americans to EVs despite widespread public anxiety about a scarcity of charging stations. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they believe EVs take too long to charge or don’t know of any charging stations nearby.

If even finding a charging station doesn't necessarily mean finding functioning cables, it becomes one more reason for skeptical buyers to stick with traditional gasoline-fueled or hybrid vehicles, at least for now.

America's major automakers have made heavy financial bets that buyers will shift away from combustion engines and embrace EVs as the world faces the worsening consequences of climate change. Accordingly, the companies have poured billions into EVs.

Stellantis envisions 50% of its passenger cars being EVs by the end of 2030. Ford set a target of producing 2 million EVs per year by 2026 — about 45% of its global sales — though it has since suspended that goal. General Motors, the most ambitious of the three, has pledged to sell only EV passenger cars by the end of 2035.

Any such timetables, of course, hinge on whether the companies can convince more would-be EV buyers that a charge will always be available when they travel. The rise in cable thefts isn't likely to strengthen the automakers' case.

Two years ago, according to Electrify America, which runs the nation’s second-largest network of direct-current fast chargers, a cable might be cut perhaps every six months at one of its 968 charging stations, with 4,400 plugs nationwide. Through May this year, the figure reached 129 — four more than in all of 2023. At one Seattle station, cables were cut six times in the past year, said Anthony Lambkin, Electrify America's vice president of operations.

"We’re enabling people to get to work, to take their kids to school, get to medical appointments," Lambkin said. “So to have an entire station that’s offline is pretty impactful to our customers.”

Two other leading EV charging companies — Flo and EVgo — also have reported a rise in thefts. Charging stations in the Seattle area have been a frequent target. Sites in Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Pennsylvania have been hit, too.

Stations run by Tesla, which operates the nation's largest fast-charging network, have been struck in Seattle, Oakland and Houston. So far this year, Seattle police have reported seven cases of cable thefts from charging stations, matching the number for all of 2023. Thieves hit Tesla stations four times this year compared with just once last year, the Seattle police said.

“Vandalism of public charging infrastructure in the Seattle metro area has unfortunately been increasing in frequency," EVgo said.

The company said law enforcement officials are investigating the thefts while it tries to repair inoperable stations and considers a longer-term solution.

The problem isn't confined to urban areas. In rural Sumner, Washington, south of Seattle, thieves cut cables twice at a Puget Sound Energy charging station. The company is working with police and the property owner to protect the station.

Until a month ago, police in Houston knew of no cable thefts. Then one was stolen from a charger at a gas station. The city has now recorded eight or nine such thefts, said Sgt. Robert Carson, who leads a police metal-theft unit.

In one case, thieves swiped 18 of 19 cords at a Tesla station. That day, Carson visited the station to inspect the damage. In the first five minutes that he was there, Carson said, about 10 EVs that needed charging had to be turned away.

In very large cities like Houston, charging stations typically contain an especially large number of plugs and cables, so thefts can be particularly damaging.

“They're not just taking one," Carson said. "When they're hit, they're hit pretty hard.”

Roy Manuel, an Uber driver who normally recharges his Tesla at the Houston station hit by thieves, said he fears being unable to do so because of stolen cables.

“If my battery was really low, I’d have quite an issue with operating my vehicle,” he said. “If it was so low that I couldn’t get to another charger, I might be in trouble. Might even need a tow truck.”

The charging companies say it's become clear that the thieves are after the copper that the cables contain. In late May, copper hit a record high of nearly $5.20 a pound, a result, in part, of rising demand resulting from efforts to cut carbon emissions with EVs that use more copper wiring. The price is up about 25% from a year ago, and many analysts envision further increases.

Charging companies say there isn't actually very much copper in the cables, and what copper is there is difficult to extract. Carson estimates that criminals can get $15 to $20 per cable at a scrap yard.

"They're not making a significant amount of money,” he said. “They're not going to be sailing on a yacht anywhere.”

Still, the more cables the thieves can steal, the more they can cash in. At $20 a cable, 20 stolen cables could fetch $400.

The problem for the charging companies is that it's much costlier to replace cables. In Minneapolis, where cables have been clipped at city-owned charging stations, it costs about $1,000 to replace just one cable, said Joe Laurin, project manager in the Department of Public Works.

The charging companies are trying to fight back. Electrify America is installing more security cameras. In Houston, police are visiting recycling centers to look for stolen metal.

But it's often hard for the scrap yards to determine conclusively whether metal came from a charging cable. Thieves often burn off the insulation and just sell strands of metal.

The Recycled Materials Association, which represents 1,700 members, is issuing scrap-theft alerts from law enforcement officials so that members can be on the lookout for suspects and stolen goods.

Because charging stations are often situated in remote corners of parking lots, Carson suggested that many more security cameras are needed.

In the meantime, Electrify America said Seattle police are trying to track down the thieves in the video. And Carson said the Houston police are pursuing leads in the Tesla theft.

“We'd like to get them stopped," he said, “and then let the court system do what they're supposed to do.”

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AP Video Journalist Lekan Oyekanmi contributed to this report from Houston.

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A View From HETI

A key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, scientists say. Photo via Pexels

Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study released June 19.

The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year.

“Things aren’t just getting worse. They’re getting worse faster,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. “We’re actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.”

That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures.

In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said.

Earth's energy imbalance

The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said.

“It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere,” said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. “I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change.”

The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth’s energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said.

Earth’s energy imbalance “is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system,” Hausfather said.

Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. “It is very clearly accelerating. It’s worrisome,” he said.

Crossing the temperature limit

The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works.

That 1.5 is “a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies,” said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.

The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded.

Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world — unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms,” said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study.

Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn’t focus on that particular threshold.

“Missing it does not mean the end of the world,” Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that “each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts.”

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