BGE Fast Charger Status – October 20, 2026 – Plug-In Sites

Before and After – BGE fast charger removed from Gott’s Garage in Annapolis

The Failure of Charger “Uptime”

Since January 2019 when the Maryland Public Service Commission approved a multi-million dollar EV pilot program for utilities to own and operate EV charging stations, BGE has installed 90 public DC fast chargers plus hundreds of Level 2. Support for the ratepayer-funded program hinged largely on the promise that the utility would maintain their electric vehicle charging network to the same high standards of reliability as the electric grid. Early on, BGE boasted a 98 percent uptime “meaning the chargers are available and operational 98 percent of the time.”

“By owning and operating a charging network, we can provide that same level of reliability for the chargers as we do for our customers’ electric and gas service at their homes and businesses.”
(BGE Now – Dec. 14, 2020)

Charger Audit – October 3, 2025

A year ago, I conducted a virtual charger audit on October 3, 2025 of all the BGE fast chargers and reported their status in a filing to the Maryland Public Service Commission. I found that 32 out of the 88 fast chargers were reporting as OFFLINE or UNDER REPAIR in the app. This was more than a third of the BGE fast chargers in the ground at the time.

Charger Audit – October 20, 2026

As a follow-up to that October 2025 report, I recently performed another virtual charger audit. On October 20, 2026, between 7:15 AM and 9:00 AM, I opened the SWTCH app and methodically went down the list of BGE public fast chargers and noted their status. Three chargers, at the E-ZPass Office at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, were checked on the ChargePoint app.

The audit revealed that three more fast chargers have been decommissioned and physically removed in addition to the two chargers that had been removed before the 2025 audit. 37 of the remaining 85 BGE fast chargers were reporting as out of service or had only one connector working. This meant 43.5% were UNDER REPAIR or unavailable compared to 36% reported with issues on October 3, 2025.

Chargers Removed Others Condemned

The five BGE fast chargers that have been removed were two at Howard County Community College (around March 2025), one each at Gott’s Garage and Whitmore Garage in Annapolis and one of two DCFC at Upton Center in Baltimore. Many of the BGE fast chargers that I’ve observed in the past few months have a BGE “Charger Under Repair” tag and/or Maryland Weights and Measures “Condemned for Repair” or “Stop Use” tags affixed to them. Appendix B of my PSC filing of these findings contains supporting photographic documentation of those observations between August 12 and October 1, 2026.

Dozen Chargers Replaced

At least 12 fast chargers in BGE’s network have already been replaced. Many of those were “ripped and replaced” less than three years after they were originally installed. Some of those replacement chargers are on the list of non-operable chargers on the October 20, 2026 virtual charger audit.

PSC Filing

Below are the results of the October 20, 2026 virtual charger audit filed in Case Number 9478 with the Maryland Public Service Commission as a record to support the Commission’s goals of transparency and consumer participation.