Installing a public DC fast charger in the United States typically takes anywhere from six months to over a year once permitting, utility coordination, construction, and inspections are factored in. An EV charging company says it completed one in Oklahoma City’s Bricktown entertainment district in just seven days, a claim that, if verified, would represent a dramatic compression of the standard timeline and raise pointed questions about what is slowing everyone else down.
The company behind the project has not been independently identified in public regulatory filings or federal databases reviewed for this report, and the seven-day figure has not been confirmed by a third party. But the claim has drawn attention at a moment when the nation’s charging buildout is under intense scrutiny, and Oklahoma’s regulatory setup offers a useful lens for understanding why some states may be better positioned to move fast.
Why charging stations take so long to build
The federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, signed into law as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocated $5 billion to build out a national network of public fast chargers along highway corridors. Yet progress has been slow. By early 2025, only a small fraction of NEVI-funded stations had opened to drivers, according to tracking by the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.
The bottleneck is rarely the physical construction. Pouring a concrete pad, mounting the charger hardware, and pulling electrical cable can often be completed in days. What stretches projects to six, nine, or twelve months is the paperwork and coordination that bookends the build: local permitting, environmental reviews, utility interconnection agreements, transformer upgrades, and final inspections. In jurisdictions where approvals are split across multiple municipal departments, a single delayed sign-off can stall an entire project for weeks.
Oklahoma’s streamlined regulatory path
Oklahoma handles public EV charging oversight differently from many states. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) centralizes regulatory authority over publicly accessible charging stations within its Public Utility Division. Rather than requiring builders to navigate a patchwork of city and county agencies, the state routes compliance through a single body that defines what qualifies as a public fast charger, sets safety and grid-reliability standards, and processes applications.
A review of commission docket filings shows how past charging-station applications have moved through the OCC’s system, providing a paper trail for the state’s approach to evaluating compliance. That centralized structure can, in principle, shave weeks off a project by eliminating redundant reviews. Whether it was the decisive factor in the Bricktown project, or whether site-specific advantages like pre-existing electrical capacity or favorable zoning played larger roles, remains unclear.
What the seven-day claim actually means
Installation timelines in the charging industry can be measured from different starting points, and the distinction matters. A company might count from the first day of physical construction to the moment a charger powers on, excluding months of permitting and utility work that preceded the build. Alternatively, the clock might start when a permit is issued or when a utility grants interconnection approval.
Without a clear definition from the firm behind the Bricktown project, the seven-day figure is difficult to benchmark. If it covers only the construction phase, it is impressive but not unprecedented; experienced crews with favorable site conditions can move quickly once approvals are in hand. If it encompasses the full cycle from permit application to energized service, it would be an extraordinary outlier that demands supporting documentation: construction permits, utility agreements, and inspection records.
No such documentation has surfaced in the public record as of May 2026. The OCC’s filings do not reference a specific Bricktown fast-charger project matching this timeline, and the DOE’s station locator, while regularly updated as new sites come online, does not track how long individual installations took to complete.
The gap between building and deploying
The Bricktown claim highlights a tension that runs through the entire national charging buildout: physical construction speed and regulatory processing time operate on fundamentally different clocks. Even in a state with a streamlined framework, utility-side work such as transformer installations or service upgrades often depends on the local electric provider’s schedule and backlog, not on the charger company’s ambitions.
Cost savings from faster construction are also difficult to quantify without project-specific details. Shorter timelines generally reduce labor and equipment-rental expenses, but the magnitude depends on variables like trenching requirements, transformer needs, and whether the site required new electrical service or could tap into existing capacity. None of those details have been disclosed for this project.
For companies and site hosts planning new installations in Oklahoma, the OCC’s published guidance spells out what “public” means under state law and what compliance steps are required. Getting those definitions right early is the single most effective way to avoid delays, because misclassifying a station or filing with the wrong authority can add weeks regardless of how fast a crew can work.
Why the paperwork problem matters more than construction speed
For drivers in Oklahoma and neighboring states, the practical question is simpler than the regulatory debate: is the charger open, and does it work? The DOE’s station locator remains the most reliable tool for checking whether a new site is listed as operational, with real-time data on connector types, network affiliations, and availability. That database does not capture construction timelines, so it cannot verify speed-of-build claims, but it does confirm when a station is live and serving drivers.
As billions in federal and state funding continue flowing into charging networks through the rest of 2026 and beyond, stories about record-breaking installation speeds will keep surfacing. Some will reflect genuine innovation in construction methods or regulatory cooperation. Others will reflect selective accounting of what counts as “installation time.” The ability to tell the difference depends on documentation: permits, utility records, and commission filings that pin a specific timeline to a specific site.
The Bricktown project, whatever its actual timeline turns out to be, is a useful reminder that the charging industry’s biggest constraint was never the speed of pouring concrete or bolting hardware to a pedestal. It was always the paperwork. States that figure out how to compress the regulatory cycle without cutting corners on safety will have a measurable advantage in the race to build the infrastructure that EV adoption depends on.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
