Congress Authorized $7.5 Billion for E.V. Chargers. After 2 Years, None Are Built.
More than $2 billion has been distributed, but only two states have even broken ground and most states haven't even submitted proposals.
President Joe Biden has made a transition to electric vehicles (E.V.s) a key part of his presidency, spending billions of dollars both to help companies build them and to help customers afford them.
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations across the country. Under the program, states can qualify for as much as 80 percent of the cost to build chargers and bring them online. But as Politico reported this week, not a single charger funded by the program is yet operational.
It's the latest setback as Biden attempts to change consumer preference by force rather than allowing the free market to innovate its way there.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that by 2030, half of all vehicles sold in the U.S. must be electric. This will require an enormous ramp-up in resources, especially around charging infrastructure. As Politico notes, "consumer demand for electric vehicles is rising in the United States, necessitating six times as many chargers on its roads by the end of the decade, according to federal estimates."
Other estimates are even more dire: In January, Stephanie Brinley at S&P Global Mobility wrote that "even when home-charging is taken into account, to properly match forecasted sales demand, the United States will need to see the number of EV chargers quadruple between 2022 and 2025, and grow more than eight-fold by 2030." As of this writing, there are just under 158,000 public chargers, meaning there may need to be more than 1 million to support the Biden administration's timeline.
The federal program is off to a slow start: Politico reports that while more than $2 billion has been given out, only two states—Ohio and Pennsylvania—have actually broken ground on chargers, while just six others have awarded contracts. Fewer than half of U.S. states have even submitted a proposal for funds.
What's the hold-up? "The slow rollout…primarily boils down to the difficulties state agencies and charging companies face in meeting a complex set of contracting requirements and minimum operating standards for the federally-funded chargers, according to interviews with state and EV industry officials," the article notes.
Even with federal funds, part of the problem may also be cost, because the chargers are quite expensive to build and maintain. The types of chargers mentioned in the law are either Level 2 or Level 3, also known as Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC). Level 2 chargers use alternating current electricity and take between four and 10 hours to charge an E.V., while DCFCs use direct current and can charge an E.V. in less than an hour.
Any long-term solution would prioritize DCFCs—no road-tripper will want to wait all day for their car to charge when fueling up a gas burner takes minutes. But DCFCs are considerably more expensive to install: A 2019 study by the Department of Energy found that while Level 2 chargers can cost up to $6,500 to install, DCFCs can cost as much as $40,000. Depending on factors like hardware costs, other estimates have put the price between $50,000 and $100,000.
Maintaining the faster chargers can be quite expensive as well. Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote in August 2022 that a single DCFC "requires electrical infrastructure equivalent to that needed for 10 homes."
And yet the Biden administration is plowing ahead, apportioning billions of dollars for states to build exorbitantly expensive chargers and requiring half of all cars to be electric by 2030, even as E.V. demand has softened in recent months. In surveys, consumers indicate that higher prices have eclipsed range anxiety as the primary source of their hesitation.
"Implementation is everything," says Bill Klehm, a former Ford Motor Co. executive who is now the CEO of e-bike manufacturer eBliss. Klehm sees "a lack of true coordination with industry and local government."
Contrasting vehicle electrification with the 1960s Space Race, Klehm tells Reason, "There is no overarching plan. You can't just say, 'let's just put charging stations in,' because that isn't the whole story. That is a piece of the other thing, but, how do you make the batteries less expensive? How do you innovate and get the range even longer?" Klehm says that just as President John F. Kennedy set a goal of going to the moon by 1970, Biden needs to inspire both consumers and the industry to jointly pursue vehicle electrification—leading, by extension, to less gas and oil consumption and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Ultimately, consumer choices will dictate the future of electric vehicles; if people don't buy them at their current price and with the current technology, then companies will either innovate or come up with something better. By merely subsidizing the current thing, the Biden administration is upholding the status quo and disincentivizing other innovations that could revolutionize the industry and make environmentally-friendly vehicles truly competitive with their gas-burning counterparts.
