I & I Editorial BoardAt a Rose Garden event this week, President Joe Biden bragged that “Thanks to my Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re building a network of 500,000 charging stations all across America.”
This is about as believable as the story of his uncle’s cannibalistic demise.
The truth is that Biden’s five-year, $7.5 billion effort to jump-start the development of electric vehicle charging stations is doing the opposite. The money has so far produced only eight new charging stations in two years. The overall growth rate in EV charging stations has slowed since he signed that bill. And earlier this month, Tesla gutted its EV charger efforts, dealing the entire scheme a huge blow.
In other words, this is shaping up to be a massive waste of taxpayer money.
The slow rollout of the Biden-approved EV stations is in part due to cumbersome rules and regulations required to access the money. That’s no surprise.
But it’s actually having a broader negative impact, slowing the growth of EV stations overall.
In the two years before Biden signed that infrastructure bill, the number of EV charging stations grew by roughly 20,000, according to data compiled by the Department of Energy. In the two years since, just 16,000 stations went online, even as EV sales accelerated. The result is that the ratio of charging stations to EVs is about half what it was in 2021. The administration says not to worry, because the buildout will soon take off. We aren’t holding our breath.
But even if the stations do start to roll out, these numbers don’t account for the large number of charging ports that aren’t working at any given time because of communication failures, power outages, software bugs, or other problems with the complicated tech.
A survey by J.D. Power found that almost 21% of drivers using public charging stations reported malfunctions. And when a Wall Street Journal reporter went around to 30 fast-charging stations in the Los Angeles area, she encountered problems at more than 40% of them.
Even the new ones Biden is spending $7.5 billion to install, which are supposed to meet 95% reliability standards, don’t work as advertised.
When Green Biz tested one of the new stations in New York in January – just a month after it was installed – it found that two of the four chargers had malfunctioning credit card readers, one had a blank screen, and the other was completely unusable.
There’s still another problem that EV zealots ignore. Because it takes far longer to charge an electric car than it does to fill up a gas tank, there would have to be multiples more charging ports than gas pumps to prevent massive lines from forming at charging stations.
Only 22% of all the ports today are “fast charging,” which despite the name still require about half an hour to charge an EV to 80%. The vast bulk of available ports are level 2 chargers, which require more than an hour to “fill” an EV battery. The remainder are level 1, which take more than a day.
“The average number of chargers per electric vehicle charging station should be significantly higher than the average number of pumps per gas station,” writes Joe Thomas in Medium.
Given that there are more than a million gas pumps in the country today, that means there’d have to be 10 times as many charging ports as Biden envisions for a fully electric fleet.
Biden has said that if consumers are to accept EVs, “electric charging stations have to be as easy to find as a gas station, and that’s what this will be.”
Sorry, Joe. That will never happen. No matter how much of our money you throw at it.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Biden and progressives conjured up a problem and skipped straight to their preferred solution (the one where the government must be heavily involved and dictatorial) whereas most thinking people want to define the actual problem first. I can’t see that EVs solve anything. If the claimed problem is that vehicles emit CO2 then maybe the better approach — the one where everyone keeps their current vehicle — is to look at carbon neutral fuels. And even that’s assuming everyone can agree CO2 is some sort of problem.
There is a well-defined actual problem that CO2 emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect, and it’s not something that “Biden and progressives conjured up.” It’s been well known by everyone in the transportation field for many decades.
Given it’s a problem, EVs are always going to be a lot more efficient than carbon-neutral fuels because internal combustion involves a lot of energy loss. Everyone already replaces their vehicles over a cycle of a few decades, so “everyone keeps their current vehicle” doesn’t seem like a real requirement. And government has always been a big factor in transportation, because it impacts shared resources like roads and the environment.
It seems to me the only strong point you made above is “not everyone recognizes that CO2 emissions are a problem.” That points to the need for better scientific communication and education around this issue.
>>“not everyone recognizes that CO2 emissions are a problem.” That points to the need for better scientific communication and education around this issue.
Too late. It’s long been clear that talk of CO2 has been conjured as an excuse to apply solutions in search of a real problem, and what you think of “better scientific communication and education” sounds to me like “more propaganda.”
In my experience, it’s generally the old stations that aren’t working. And it’s only the new stations that take credit cards (old ones typically require you to get the vendor’s exclusive app). That’s because one of the conditions of the federal funding is that they have to take credit cards. It’s true that we need to build a lot more charge stations.
But these facts don’t seem to support the article’s conclusion that “funding more charge stations with standardization requirements is a waste of money.” The new stations are the ones that work. The standardization makes them take credit cards instead of making us install half a dozen apps. And we need a lot more of them.
One thing I haven’t seen in this discussion is the percentage of EV owners are expected to have chargers at home, a factor that will mitigate, to some extent, the number of required public chargers.
Too many people are “in the know,” and the Democrats can’t hide that EVs are charged by burning coal and SEVERELY taxing “the grid.” Add to that LOOOOONG
refueling times and the environmental NIGHTMARE caused by manufacturing new and disposing of discarded batteries. It’s a joke to anyone with an iota of critical thinking ability…
Those are good points that we also need to decarbonize our grid and improve battery technology, but we’d have to compare this with what happens if we stick with our current gas-powered vehicles. Once you look at that, it’s hard to agree “it’s a joke to anyone with an iota of critical thinking ability.”
Lots of Republicans buy and use EVs too, and it would be sad to turn this important topic into just another cultural wedge issue.
>>it would be sad to turn this important topic into just another cultural wedge issue.
Too late. It should be obvious to anyone with working eyes that those who shout the loudest about the idea that carbon is a “problem” (which it manifestly is not) do not and will not subject themselves to the same limitations they will insist on the rest of us.
I agree the $7.5B is a boondoggle. However, we do NOT need more public EV chargers than gas pumps because most EV charging is done at home, overnight.
That’s true only if you are a homeowner. People who live in apartments or don’t have easy access to a suitable outlet will have to rely on public chargers. As will anyone traveling.
OK, but roughly 70% of Americans do live in single family homes, and most people drive less than 50 miles per day. There are definitely use-cases there where an EV might make sense economically.
For apartment dwellers, it’s a different story. Charging an EV at a public charger is often more expensive per mile than fueling a regular car, so it makes little sense for anyone who can’t do the bulk of his charging at home to buy one.
The presence of EV chargers outside the home increases the effective range of the vehicles. You can take a trip and deplete the battery below the halfway point, park at charging stations, go about your business, and then return home with the battery charged up.
Why anyone would think this is an acceptable substitute for being able to refill a tank of gas inside five minutes completely escapes me. Are you going to carry a bucket of electricity when it dies on the road or during a traffic jam in a snowstorm?