To Charge or Not To Charge

$7.5 Billion and 2.5 Years Later, Only Eight Charging Stations Have Been Built

Rick Moran - June 1, 2024
PJ Media

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act appropriated $7.5 billion to build 500,000 charging stations across the U.S. That's roughly half the number that would be needed if the government achieves its goal of half of all new car sales by 2030 being EVs.

How much has that $7.5 billion purchased? How many of the 500,000 charging stations have been built? There have been 8 charging stations across the country built with that $7.5 billion.

There are actually two kinds of chargers. The first uses a plain old alternating current and takes several hours to charge. The second is called Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) and can send an EV car on its way in about an hour.

Why the slow pace of building charging stations? If you took "Federal Spending" for $500, you'd know the answer is...

Building a charging station "comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have," according to Reason.com.

Alexander Laska of the center-left Third Way think tank thinks the regulations are just grand.

Laska says regulations "are largely a good thing—we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience—but navigating all of that does add to the timeline."

"Add to the timeline"? Why do leftists think that by downplaying massive government interference it somehow doesn't make it look so bad?

Taking 2.5 years to build a lousy eight stations isn't "adding to the timeline." It's indicative of a project bogged down in red tape and regulations. If we're going to be tooling around in EVs in five years, wouldn't it be a good thing if, you know, there was a place to plug it in so we didn't have to push the car for ten or twenty miles just to get a charge?

Hopefully, the private industry will come to our rescue.