The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 includes $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) across the country to encourage the switch to clean energy.
As reason In December, the company reported that none of the chargers funded through the program were operational, but now, six months later, the number of operational charging stations has grown to eight.
The news is Auto Week As I mentioned in my article earlier this month, in March The Washington Post Only seven have been built, according to the report.A charging station in Bradford, Vermont, opened in April and has four EV fast chargers.Public chargers are either Level 2, which use alternating current power and take several hours to fully charge an electric vehicle from empty, or Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) Superchargers, which use direct current power and can charge in under an hour.
Why has there been so little progress? Alexander Laska of the centre-left think tank Third Way said: Auto WeekJim Motavari of the EPA said the federal funding “comes with dozens of rules and requirements on everything from reliability to interoperability to where stations should be located to what certifications the workers who install the chargers need to have.” Laska said regulations are “mostly a good thing. We want to give drivers a seamless, convenient and reliable charging experience, but it adds up to a long timeline to address all of that.”
A spokesman for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which is managing $5 billion of the total $7.5 billion, told Motavari the delay was because “we want to do it right.”
Thankfully, federal subsidies aren't the only way to build charging infrastructure.
“U.S. drivers will welcome nearly 1,100 new public fast charging stations in the second half of 2023, a 16 percent increase.” BloombergKyle Stock of the Times reported in January that deep-red Idaho, not just big cities and progressive enclaves, “has 12 new [DCFCs] “Between July and December, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee will add 56 new fast-charging stations for the second half of 2023, increasing infrastructure by a third.”
While Stock noted that $5 billion in federal funding is due to be released soon, he said, “the vast majority of chargers added in the U.S. last year were by commercial companies betting on the future of battery-powered driving.”
The most prominent company is Tesla, whose Supercharger network includes more than 57,000 DCFC chargers worldwide, generating an estimated $1.74 billion in revenue in 2023 alone. In the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, the company will build 357 new stations, accounting for 3,783 charging ports.
About two-thirds of the public chargers in the U.S. are built for Tesla, but the company is also expanding its network for its competitors to use: By the 2025 model year, EVs from most major automakers will use the same charging ports as Tesla and have access to the Supercharger network.
Tesla competitor Rivian is also building its own DCFC network, with 400 chargers in 67 locations as of February 2024, and plans to expand, and like Tesla's Superchargers, Rivian plans to make its chargers available to other models as well.
To be fair, both Tesla and Rivian have benefited from government aid. State and local governments in Georgia have promised Rivian incentives worth up to $1.5 billion. And Tesla has received at least $2.8 billion in federal, state and local subsidies to date, despite CEO Elon Musk's professed aversion to government intervention in the economy. In fact, POLITICO A February investigation found that Tesla was the largest recipient of funding from the federal NEVI program, “winning nearly 13 percent of the act's EV charging grant funding and more than $17 million in total infrastructure grant funding.”
But these companies still provide the best template for expanding access to public chargers.
While advocates of federal regulation may defend the red tape that would come with a federal program, such as requirements for where charging stations can be located and what type of licenses are needed to install them, the private sector is already building a nationwide EV charging network that is accessible to most drivers.
