Technobarbarian wrote:
On Saturday, December 9, 2023 at 7:23:46 AM UTC-8, Technobarbarian wrote:
On Friday, December 8, 2023 at 5:58:37 PM UTC-8, Frank Howell wrote:
But none have been built.
tinyurl.com/3be8efmy
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Frank Howell
Most of that $7.5 billion has not been spent yet and the retrumplicans are trying to slow down the rollout of those chargers.
This is the original story your link is getting its facts from:
"Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change.
Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger.
States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be
sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers — let alone begin construction.
Consumer demand for electric vehicles is rising in the United States, necessitating six times as many chargers on its roads by the end of the decade, according to federal estimates. But not a single charger funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law
has come online and odds are they will not be able to start powering Americans’ vehicles until at least 2024.
Getting chargers up and running across the country is essential to reaching President Joe Biden’s goal of having half the vehicles sold in the United States be electric by the end of the decade — a key cog of his climate agenda. Americans
consistently say the lack of charging infrastructure is one of the top reasons they won’t buy an electric car.
Republican opponents are now trying to shut down the administration’s efforts to build a charging network by choking off its funding. And the sluggish rollout could undermine Biden’s EV-themed reelection messaging and increase the possibility a
Republican in the White House could roll back the charging network efforts in 2025."
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-chargers-billions-00129996
Two whole years and they haven't built a single charging station yet! I'm shocked I tell you, shocked that a Federal program is slow to get rolling.
TB
I've been sitting here scratching my head about this one. The speed with which they're building these charging stations is a minor issue when you start thinking about how crazy the whole idea is. If we want to jump start electric cars there are
a whole bunch of ways we could do it, without involving the State governments. I can only think of one reason for involving the State governments. This is pork barrel politics at it's finest. This is an expensive cheap trick. Biden got bipartisan support
for this turkey because all the congress critters can go home and tell everyone about the big pot of money they got to modernize their state. There probably wasn't any other way to get this passed because it really doesn't make any sense. Just for
starters, this is obviously a slow way to get any federal program moving.
On the one hand we have private industry, which is just notoriously inefficient and downright dumb, competing with the various state governments, who will be building stations at places determined by government mandate, instead of by market
forces. Oh yeah, this just has good idea written all over it. I could be wrong, but I don't think we have any State programs here that turn a profit. And that includes our very popular state parks. I assume that no one is building these billions of
dollars worth of charging station now because they don't expect most of them to turn a profit anytime soon.
I got to thinking about all the miles of interstate freeway here that go through a lot of country that doesn't have a lot of people living there. Outside of the Willamette valley the government is already spending more than we get back in taxes.
Most of our interstate system is outside of the valley. By a wide margin, most of our traffic is in the valley. At some point the state government is likely to be left holding the bag on locations that can't turn a profit. Who knows, since the Feds
subsidized those stations, we might be able to turn a profit, on paper, when they auction them off.
Here's a fun thought: This is yet another government subsidy for Elon. lqtm
TB
With so much news on unsold EVs pilling up at dealerships, this might be
a good thing. Another aspect of EV economics is the price of battery replacement. Thousands and more. Also will high prices eliminate lower
income citizens by the millions and those that live in apartments with
no possibility to having own charging station?
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Frank Howell
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