By Amy Fischbach – EC&M
Published October 21, 2025
As the demand for electric vehicles (EVs) worldwide continues to rise, electrical contractors are plugging into a new business opportunity in the EV charging market. Today, EV sales in the United States have increased to 1.6 million, and globally, to more than 17 million, according to IEA’s 2025 Global EV Charging Outlook.
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Systems that integrate EV charging, storage, and solar are still emerging, but the market is growing rapidly, said Tom McCalmont, co-founder and CEO of Paired Power, which specializes in solar microgrid charging systems for EVs and EV fleets. In fact, analyst reports predict that the market for integrated chargers will nearly double from 2021 to 2031, he said.
“Outside of a major expansion of the U.S. grid, integrating solar, battery energy storage systems, and EV charging is the most realistic way to expand EV charging infrastructure to meet demand,” said McCalmont, who co-founded the solar engineering firm McCalmont Engineering, and has 25 years of solar, storage, and EV charging experience. “With the push for transportation electrification combined with data center growth due to AI, there is huge demand for grid expansion that our integrated solar and EV charging system can mitigate.”
An integrated EV charging system can ensure that grid power is managed to reduce or eliminate demand spikes during the day, can time-shift solar power to offset peak time energy costs, or can bank solar power during the day for charging vehicles at night, he said. The storage and solar components of the system can also act semi-independently of the grid, providing a resilient energy source during blackouts or brownouts.
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