The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 includes spending $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public electric vehicle charging stations across the country to promote the transition to clean energy.
as reason It was reported in December that the chargers funded by the program were not yet online. Now, six months later, the number of available charging stations has increased to eight.
This message comes from car week Article from earlier this month. March, Washington post Reportedly, only seven have been built; the charging station in Bradford, Vermont, opened in April and features four EV fast chargers. Public chargers are either Level 2 chargers, which use AC power and can take several hours to charge an all-electric vehicle, or Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) superchargers, which use DC power and can charge a full battery in less than an hour. electricity.
Why is there so little progress? Alexander Laska of the center-left think tank Third Way said car weekJim Motavalli said the federal funds “come with dozens of rules and requirements, covering everything from reliability to interoperability, where charging stations are located and what certifications workers who install chargers need to have. Laska said the regulations are “largely a good thing — we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience — but doing all this work does add time. “
A spokesman for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which manages $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, further told Motavalli that the delay was because “we want to get things right.”
Thankfully, federal grants aren’t the only way to build charging infrastructure.
“U.S. drivers will receive nearly 1,100 new public fast charging stations in the second half of 2023, a 16% increase,” BurundiKyle Stock reports in January. And not just in big cities or progressive enclaves: Crimson Idaho “opens 12 new [DCFCs] Between July and December,” while “Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee welcomed 56 new fast charging stations in the second half of 2023, increasing infrastructure by one-third.
While Stock noted that $5 billion in federal funding is expected soon, “the vast majority of new chargers added in the U.S. last year were bets by for-profit companies on the future of battery-powered driving.”
The most well-known company by far is Tesla, whose Supercharger network includes more than 57,000 DCFC chargers worldwide and generated an estimated $1.74 billion in revenue in 2023 alone. In the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, the company built 357 new charging stations and 3,783 charging ports.
About two-thirds of public chargers in the U.S. are made for Tesla, but the company has also expanded its network for use by competitors: By the 2025 model year, most major automakers’ electric vehicles will use The same charging port as Tesla can access the Supercharger network.
Tesla rival Rivian is also building its own DCFC network: as of February 2024, it had 400 chargers in 67 locations, with plans for further expansion, and like Tesla’s Superchargers, Rivian plans Let other models also use its charging piles.
To be fair, both Tesla and Rivian benefited from government handouts: Georgia state and local governments promised Rivian a series of incentives worth up to $1.5 billion. Tesla has received at least $2.8 billion in federal, state and local subsidies over the years, despite Chief Executive Elon Musk’s public aversion to government intervention in the economy. Actually, Politico February found that Tesla was the largest single recipient of funds disbursed under the federal NEVI program, winning “nearly 13 percent of all electric vehicle charging incentives mandated by law, totaling more than $17 million in infrastructure grants.”
But these companies still provide the best template for expanding the use of public chargers.
While proponents of federal regulations may defend the red tape involved in federal programs requiring where charging stations can be placed and the types of permits people need to build them, the fact is that the private sector is already building a system that can be used by large A nationwide electric vehicle charging network used by most drivers.
