Two years ago, Congress agreed to spend $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle (EV) across the U.S. at the Biden administration’s urging.
As of December 6th 2023 the program has not installed a single EV charger, Politico reports.
The delays are in part due to the new contracting and performance requirements that must be met to receive federal funds, according to states and the charger industry. Federal officials have approved more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to the states, but less than half of the states have begun to take contractor bids to build chargers or start construction.
Based on customer EV vehicle demand, chargers need to be deployed quickly. The rising demand requires that there be six times as many chargers as there are now by the end of the decade, according to federal estimates. Currently, no bipartisan infrastructure law-funded chargers are online, and there’s a chance that will remain the case until at least 2024.
There are currently about 180,000 EV chargers in the U.S., according to the Energy Department. That total includes 41,000 “fast” chargers. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projected the country will need 1.2 million public chargers by 2030 to meet demand, with 182,000 being fast chargers.
Despite the stall, administration officials believe the pace at which the infrastructure law’s funds are being deployed is to be expected, Politico reports.
The administration noted that it’s difficult to create a new program in every state as well as marshal the private sector to meet tough reliability and performance requirements for each federally-funded station.
“You have to go slow to go fast,” Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government’s efforts on EV charging said in an interview. “These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you’re done, it’s going to completely change the game.”
In what appears to be a Biden Administration gift to the Unions, the NEVI Program insists that all the electrical work is to be done by International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union or or be a graduate or recipient of a continuing education certificate from a government-registered apprenticeship program with a focus on EVSE installation approved by the U.S. Department of Labor in consultation with the FHWA. To date, no such program has been approved by the DOL and FHWA.
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