The Biden administration has committed billions of taxpayer dollars to building electric vehicle (EV) chargers, but declining market demand and government red tape are standing in the way, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced Thursday that it is committing $150 million to modernize existing public electric vehicle chargers, just a week after awarding another $623 million in subsidies to states to encourage the construction of chargers for electric vehicles had announced. The FHWA grants are part of two EV charging programs established by the Biden administration in the November 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program Overall $7.5 billion was allocated to build and modernize chargers.
However, according to the Ministry of Transport, only two stations had been built as of December due to NEVI. Experts told the DCNF that a lack of demand, regulations and union demands are slowing construction. (RELATED: Democratic demands on automakers could negatively impact their own climate agenda and Americans' wallets, experts say)
Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF that federal regulations regarding the specific parameters of installation sites must be met before the projects can be completed, adding to the bureaucratic burden. Furthermore, the government's insistence on providing resources to specific constituencies that would improve the current government's electoral prospects has led to restrictions on the procurement of these assets.
“This is a key planning issue,” Lewis told the DCNF. “The subsidies exceed the extent of market demand. States complain about inflexible requirements regarding the distance of charging stations, the number of charging stations to be built per station, and the number of charging stations in disadvantaged communities. In addition, central planning and policy are closely linked, so labor must be certified by unions and materials such as iron and steel must be sourced from American companies.”
The introduction of electric vehicle chargers comes with a number of limitations that hinder progress in installation.
For example, there is an FHWA regulation that requires all electricians working on the project to be certified by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union's Electric Vehicle Industry Training Program or have received certification from a Department of Labor-approved certification program with charger-specific training.
Requiring certification or union recognition for the electricians who work on the chargers limits the number of workers available to tackle the installations, resulting in fewer workers being paid more, says Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at the institute for energy research, said the DCNF.
“The union probably won’t approve of certifying electricians who aren’t members of the union,” Kish told the DCNF. “So there you have paperwork; There is environmental injustice paperwork, which means they put it in places where the economy is bad and states are supposed to carve out areas that meet those criteria.”
The Biden administration's goal in rolling out electric vehicle chargers is for 40% of the benefits of federal investments to go to “disadvantaged communities marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” according to the FHWA. These are communities that generally do not have access to the disposable income needed to pay for an electric vehicle. According to CarEdge, the current price for a new electric vehicle in January 2024 is $50,798.
The push for electric vehicle chargers is part of President Joe Biden's broader goal of making half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 electric. To ease the transition, Biden has tried to lower prices by introducing a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles.
John “Private Jet/Climate Czar” Kerry:
Biden has a “very clear policy” on electric vehicles, but it has “unfortunately been attacked by people who engage in high levels of disinformation.” pic.twitter.com/FnZvEY1Ttj
— Project TABS (@ProjectTabs) January 18, 2024
“Thanks to record federal investment in President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, we are on track to build a nationwide network of 500,000 public chargers by 2026 – meeting the President’s campaign goal four years early,” said Robyn Patterson , deputy press secretary at the White House, said the DCNF. “Since he took office, the number of publicly accessible charging ports has increased by almost 70% and there are now over 170,000 publicly accessible electric vehicle chargers. Additionally, electric vehicle sales have more than quadrupled since President Biden took office, with more than four and a half million electric vehicles on the road.”
According to the Department of Energy, there are currently only about 60,000 unique electric vehicle charging stations in the U.S. that can have multiple chargers. While the number of electric vehicle chargers in operation has increased in recent years, the increase is largely independent of government funding provided by private companies such as leading electric vehicle maker Tesla, which built 6,000 fast chargers in 2023, and charger operators such as ChargePoint Holdings and EVgo Inc., according to Market Insider.
“It appears that President Biden's goal when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars on his green initiatives is more about getting the money out than getting results for our families,” said Larry Behrens, communications director for Power The Future, to DCNF. “The bottom line is clear: If the American public demanded electric vehicles and charging stations, the free market would deliver them, and Joe Biden wouldn’t have to spend billions of taxpayer dollars trying to build them.”
Although subsidies reduce costs for consumers, the market share of electric vehicles sold in the overall automotive market was only 3.6% in December 2023, compared to 3.1% in January last year, according to Cloud Theory. Despite only modest sales growth, the share of inventory in the US auto industry rose from 2.8% in January 2023 to 5.7% in December due to stimulus from the Biden administration.
“So these things are unlikely to meet the need, and the government can't determine what the need is anyway,” Kish told the DCNF. “You don’t have the ability to do that. Intrapreneurs, people who look at the market and say, “Hey, we should put in some electric vehicle chargers; “We can make some money on the side” would be the way to make this actually happen, but that is not what this program is about. This program is: “Give money to groups that help us get elected.”
Many have also raised concerns about the reliability of electric vehicle charging stations, as motorists in Chicago were unable to charge their electric vehicles in January due to freezing temperatures. The Biden administration has previously dismissed concerns that electric vehicle battery performance would be severely affected by cold weather.
“You're basically running into the reality of what it's like to get things done in the real world, as opposed to, you know, from a big office somewhere in Washington, D.C., where you think you can just prescribe to people “,” Kish told the DCNF.
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