| By Kyle Stock Andrew Rabbitt's at-home solar panels feed 5,000 watts of energy to a massive battery bank that electric-vehicle drivers across the West are using to charge their rides. He's far from alone. Rabbitt's 10-acre property in Winnemucca, Nevada, sits on a dirt road about 10 miles south of Interstate 80, near a Baptist church and just down the road from a ranch that raises and sells livestock guardian dogs. After juicing his house and vehicle — an Airstream trailer and a 2017 Ford Focus EV — there's still plenty of sun to go around. Rabbitt is happy for any passing EV driver to dip into the surplus. For those crossing the state, it's an electron oasis. Winnemucca, a city of 8,500 residents, wasn't even on the EV map until 2019 when four fast chargers switched on at the local Walmart. But when those units are occupied — or on the blink — electric vehicle pilots often limp down to Rabbitt's place. "In that first couple of months, I had four or five people use it," Rabbitt says, who installed his system in February 2021 and opened it to the public about a year later. "I'm friendly and I like talking to people, but a lot of people just sit in their car and nap, and that's fine, too." America's EV charging deserts have all but disappeared, yet the number of private homes offering do-if-yourself services across the US has surged in recent years. The network has more than doubled since 2020 to roughly 31,000 residences, according to PlugShare, a digital platform that maps public charging infrastructure.  A private homeowner offers his electric vehicle charger to the public in Phoenix. Photographer: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg Fueling the boom is a fast-growing crowd of first-time EV owners. Many have decided to put their own chargers on the communal map, simply because they love EV culture and want help fellow drivers, they say (although some will now qualify for a $1,000 federal subsidy). A lack of at-home chargers — especially in cities — is contributing to the demand. "It just goes to show how excited EV drivers are about the technology," says Alexia Melendez Martineau, senior policy manager at Plug In America, a nonprofit EV advocacy group. "It's not like you're going to walk up to your neighbor and ask for a liter of gas." A vehicle limping from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, South Carolina, can stop for some juice at the home of Robert Phillips, an electrician in rural McClellanville, a town with a Dollar General, a small fleet of shrimp boats and not much else. For drivers headed to Tucson, Arizona, from Fort Worth, Texas, there's John Gilkison's place just northwest of Las Cruces, New Mexico. On that stretch of Interstate 10, there's a 133-mile gap between public fast chargers and Gilkison's property sits in the middle of it. "We're a backwater here," he says, "but you got to travel through places like this to get somewhere." A little further up I-10, drivers can plug in at Aaron Lieberman's house in Phoenix, Arizona. The tech entrepreneur and former state representative bought his first EV in 2022 and put his home charger on the PlugShare map. "It was like having a gas station in the driveway," he says. Lieberman saw the dearth of at-home EV chargers as an untapped market and launched Buzze Inc. (pronounced "buzzy") in 2022, which allowed drivers to book charging time at people's homes. He was surprised to discover that his busiest hosts weren't in rural towns, but near urban centers, specifically close to apartment buildings and condominiums. In almost every case, the driver was living in a multifamily building that didn't have charging, Lieberman says.  The Buzze app shows a map of publicly available electric vehicle chargers. Photographer: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg At-home charging is still nowhere near the scale needed to meet the explosive demand for EVs. If every car and truck in the US today switched to electric, one in four wouldn't have a place to plug in at home, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Globally, only one in five people with a gas car have a suitable power outlet for charging, according to McKinsey & Co. "It's definitely something we think about quite a lot," says Martineau at Plug In America, "making sure EVs are not only available on the market but also available to more drivers." Buzze has since shifted its business model from plug sharing to helping landlords install modest, relatively slow chargers for their residents. Many have balked at the amenity, partly because it's challenging to track usage and charge accordingly. But Buzze promises an app that will handle all the laborious details. "We're trying to bring this whole group of folks into the EV revolution," Lieberman says. "Once they see the chargers, EVs start showing up." Back in Winnemucca, Rabbitt has seen fewer wayward strangers at his solar generators after another four fast chargers went online at the Pilot J in town, but his battery bank is still open. Gilkison, down by the Mexico border, says the town is filling up with EVs. "The infrastructure is a lot better now," he says. "Maybe EVs are so successful we don't need to do it anymore." Like getting the Green Daily? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to breaking news on climate and energy, data-driven reporting and graphics. | 
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