Biden Administration Announces 34 States and Puerto Rico to get money for Charging Stations
It isn’t often you get surprised on a media trip by a visit from the leader of the free world. It just doesn’t happen during Rocky Mountain Auto Press events in Colorado.
But, this year the President made the trip to Detroit to announce the spending of a lot of money on electric car charging infrastructure across 34 states and Puerto Rico. This is part of the spending bill passed in November 2021 that allocated close to $1.2 trillion for infrastructure.. This announcement is for $900 million of those funds in grants to the states to start building chargers across the country. The ultimate goal of the $5 billion that Congress approved to be used over the span of 5 years is to have 500,000 additional chargers across the country.
This dovetails nicely with money recently approved by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicle tax credits. Encouraging charging infrastructure as well as making electric cars more affordable are both part of a push in Washington to reach a 50% electric car (as sales) by 2030.
The way this money was allocated (and why only 34 states and Puerto Rico are getting money so far) was by calling for states to submit plans for how they will implement the charging infrastructure. Additionally, it set rules for key ways these charging points would be distributed. For instance, the plan calls for charging to be focused along major travel corridors with a secondary focus on making sure rural areas have chargers in place (to allow for not only local buyers, but also for drivers that pass through these rural areas to find charging opportunities (vs encouraging traffic to bypass these areas of the country). This is a double-whammy of creating jobs for building the stations and also to encourage economic activity in these rural areas.
The reason fewer than 50 states are seeing money as part of this announcement is because some states either have not submitted a plan or their plan isn’t approved yet. As the remaining state plans are reviewed and approved, they will see part of the funds as well.
Below you can see which states are getting money in this first round.
States with approved plans (as of September 14, 2022) to get federal funding for charging infrastructure improvements.
As we head at full speed toward an electric future, it is good to see work being done to make sure that those cars will be at least as useful as the current gas-fueled fleet.