I didn’t expect much, but, I expected at least a few built. Mostly in low income areas where no one car afford an EV
Congress provided $7.5B for electric vehicle chargers. Built so far: Zero.
Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change.
Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger.
States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers — let alone begin construction.
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. But not a single charger funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law has come online and odds are they will not be able to start powering Americans’ vehicles until at least 2024.
Is anyone surprised in the least about all the bureaucratic BS that’s slowing this down? Meanwhile, Tesla started work on a bunch of chargers in Knightdale, NC out near the Lowe’s Foods, and it only took them less than a month. Perhaps there aren’t enough kickbacks being paid out?
Getting chargers up and running across the country is essential to reaching President Joe Biden’s goal of having half the vehicles sold in the United States be electric by the end of the decade — a key cog of his climate agenda. Americans consistently say the lack of charging infrastructure is one of the top reasons they won’t buy an electric car.
I suspect that even if there were enough chargers the sales would still lag, because most are not interested. Heck, even Joe doesn’t drive one. Nor do all those in his giant convoys. Kamala isn’t traveling in one, nor most of the high end, rich Warmists
In a June study, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory projected the U.S. will need 1.2 million public chargers by 2030 to meet charging demand, including 182,000 fast chargers.
Administration officials insist the pace at which they are rolling out the infrastructure law’s charging funds is to be expected, given the difficulty of creating a brand-new program in every state and marshaling the private sector to meet complex reliability and performance requirements for each federally-funded station.
Is that like how they were going to get the high speed train in California built quick, and now it is about a decade behind and costs over $100 billion more? Speaking of trains
Why? There's already Amtrak. How many people will take the train to Richmond? What is the actual full cost of this boondoggle?
— William Teach2 ??????? #refuseresist (@WTeach2) December 6, 2023
Why would most go to Richmond from Raleigh? I cannot think of one time I said “hey, I think I’ll go to Richmond!” I might be willing to take it to D.C., lots of cool things to see and do there, besides being mugged. And, hey, you can’t be carjacked if you do not have a car, right? I always take the metro and walk around when I visit there, sometimes a bus. Usually stay in Arlington. But, Richmond? And you know it will end up costing tens of billions and never, ever, come anywhere close to breaking even.
Consumer demand for electric vehicles is rising in the United States…
IF that’s true, expect a plateau followed by a precipitous drop. The only way demand continues to rise is if ICE cars are outlawed and/or EVs are mandated. My uber leftist, green weenie, east coast relatives rented an EV for a road trip last year. They won’t be doing that again anytime soon.
GOP Debate Live Stream – Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis & Vivek Ramaswamy
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2023/12/gop-debate-live-stream-chris-christie.html
The Feds have awarded $171 million to various projects in Pennsylvania.
Note that this is not a federal loan program, but specifically “federal grants,” for businesses to build commercial plug-in electric car charging stations, on which they hope to turn a profit.
One would think that, if people are buying plug-in electrics at a substantial rate, the private sector would build more charging stations, to meet increased. If the Feds have to provide grants for businesses to build these things, doesn’t that mean that private investors aren’t seeing enough demand to put their own money into it?
On Christmas Eve of 2021, that I spotted six Tesla charging stations at the Wawa at the junction of Pennsylvania Route 61 and Interstate 78. That particular junction is a popular place to refuel, roughly half way between Allentown, and Allentown traffic, and the junction with busy Interstate 81; I-78 terminates at I-81. Five of the chargers were unoccupied, while a sixth was blocked by a mid-1990s, gasoline-engine beater car, using the charging area as a parking space.
Funny how no federal money was ever needed to build gasoline stations all over America. Even the ones on turnpike lands are privately invested, built and operated as a concession.
Gasoline stations even installed diesel pumps at their own expense… right before VW single-handedly killed the auto diesel market in the USA. I wouldn’t blame them if they aren’t willing to follow another fad with their own money.
Silly people. That funding wasn’t for EVs. It was for purchasing a 3rd or 4th private estate at some exotic locale. I chose a Renaissance villa in Monaco.
That train to Richmond will then link up with the already built train to DC ?
You just don’t get it. Americans gave up on passenger trains because, regardless of how fast they are, they’re still slower than airplanes, with the same problems as air travel: you have to take a car to the train station, and then another car to get to your destination from the arrival train station.
Passenger trains work in our densely populated northeast corridor specifically because it is densely populated. But once you get out of the northeast, and cities get further apart, it doesn’t work as well. West of the Mississippi passenger rail becomes wholly impractical compared to air travel.
Amtrak’s Acela runs from DC to Boston at an average speed of only 70 mph, limited by other rail traffic and the aged infrastructure (tracks, bridges, tunnels). Acela is still a popular mode and accounts for about 30% of Amtrak revenue.
We’ve taken the train from Philly to NYC on occasion.
I’ve been watching “The Curse of Oak Island” for several seasons now and the ever increasing bureaucratic loads of crap they have to endure is astounding. Just one example: They have a metal detection expert scanning for artifacts. His MO is to go out and scan for targets, and when he gets a hit, he must plant a flag at the spot and then go get permission from an on site archeologist (required by local bureaucrats) to dig at that one particular spot only.
The search team had found a few pottery shards a while back – supposedly left by ancient natives centuries ago – and that’s all it took for the government to swarm in with their hordes of bureaucrats and reams of paperwork.
Everyone involved with their search is required (by these same governmental bureaucrats) to wear orange and yellow safety vests, helmets and safety shoes, and that’s just for starters. Just to dig a hole on the Island anywhere requires governmental interference – er, permission.
One can easily imagine they must need to submit a request to the local governmental stooges for a permit every time somebody needs to take a leak. The required bureaucratic paperwork needed to do literally anything is massive. Time lost, delays… the consequences of all this bureaucratic interference is massive, time-consuming and expensive,
I am willing to bet some faux money (federal reserve notes only) that if Rick and Marty do find any sort of real treasure, the government will swoop in and claim it all. The resulting court battles – in courtrooms filled with bureaucrats and lawyers (leeches all) – will be long-lasting and epic.
At that time the TV program may be renamed from “The Curse of Oak Island” to “The Curse of all those Damned Bureaucrats”.
My point? It’s those GD elected (and unelected) bureaucrats that are causing all the grief experienced by anyone trying to accomplish anything nowadays. That would most definitely include trying to build a few charger stations here and there.
But all that is just my personal opinion. That and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee at McDonalds, until the next price increase.
Free clue: All rail lines and bridges are owned by freight rail companies. Freight rail trains have priority using them. This is a gift of federal money to corporate America to improve rail infrastructure instead of freight rail companies doing it themselves out of their own profits.
The only thing Passenger-ish this could be spent on are platforms, Amtrak stations and parking lots, which already exist. You can already ride AMTRAC from Raleigh to Richmond.
Second free clue: All passenger rail looses money on every passenger they carry. All of them, everywhere on the planet (only exceptions are tourist trams and novelty railroads that don’t really go anywhere). You cannot break even with volume. Airplanes in the 60’s made passenger rail obsolete. It can only be kept on taxpayer-funded life support at this point. Even advocates and rail lovers are unwilling to pay the full cost their fares would be to make the rail lines break even. Lots of studies have been done about how to move people quickly around cities and busses on roads win cost per passenger mile every time, but activists and politicians keep dumping money on trains and metro lines.