Congress provided $7.5B for electric vehicle chargers. Built so far: Zero.
Congress provided $7.5B for electric vehicle chargers. Built so far: Zero.
The sluggish rollout could undermine President Joe Biden’s reelection messaging promoting electric vehicles.
This is an incredibly lazy take from Politico. It's late so I'll just do a brain dump on things to consider. The last year has been very rocky for EV charging in the US.
- Tesla had, so far, outbuilt every other DCFC network combined and out-sold every other EV carmaker, combined. This put a lot of very weird tension on the process.
- Draft rulemaking from FWHA in 2022/early 2023 was only considering CCS as a funded connector.
- November 2022, Tesla threw a grenade, opened up their connector as NACS, and claimed it could support CCS signalling. Aptera joined as the second NACS adoptee so maybe NACS technically isn't proprietary since it's now on more than 1 brand? Realistically though, nobody cared.
- March 2023, FWHA's guidance drops. It standardizes CCS as the main connector to deploy, but optionally allows the deployment of "proprietary" connectors as long as the CCS requirement is met. By/around this point, some states like Texas and Washington decided they wanted to solicit bids for both CCS+NACS. Other states reasonably started this process only considering CCS.
- May 2023, Ford surprises everyone by being the first important not-Tesla carmaker to adopt NACS.
- In the background, several states were starting the process of planning locations and soliciting bids. CCS was pretty much still the primary consideration at this point when it came to figuring out equipment vendors.
- June, July, August rolls by. More carmakers switch to NACS.
- States are faced with having to figure out what to do with the bid process. Stick with the bid solicitation for CCS, or amend for CCS+NACS now that almost everyone's jumped over? Will the equipment vendors in some bids support NACS? Are they stuck on CCS? Is this even something some places are even aware is happening (lol)
- It's now Sept/Oct. The CCS rule is silly at this point because in 16 months, cars will start shipping with native NACS connectors, and this equipment is supposed to last 5+ years. Will all DCFC makers support a cable swap from CCS to NACS? Would a cable swap even be permitted with NEVI funds?
For much of this year we didn't have a solid answer about which connector was going to work, nor did we have much information about what the DCFC makers were going to do. We didn't really have a clear idea that cable swaps would be possible for a long while either.
For all the chaos above, the major slowness in this process is that some states are trying to plan for reasonably fair coverage in charger placement, and making sure they pick the correct places on travel corridors to invest NEVI funds in. A lot of work is needed to ensure that more than just the wealthy/populated areas would get chargers. For example, Virginia took several months just on this, and I appreciate it. I'd rather them take a few extra months to work out placement and consideration for supporting the general population than just the places with money.
I want to see this money create the best competitor against Tesla's Supercharger network, not rush to become the next Electrify America.
Excellent explanation, but the article title is also bullshit because both Penn and ohio have started building chargers already in the last month or so, they just aren't finished. These two are in the lead because they had largely done the ground work you describe for EV charger rollouts. The money is doing exactly what it needs to do: give states the capitol to start work immediately. Most states are still planning, but the moneys there to actually make the plans a reality.
Based on the white House statements, no one expected this to immediately happen. They all planned for it to take a while to sort, but once its sorted, to move quickly. Turns out infastructure is hard to do competently, but when you put smart people in charge of it and fund them, it actually gets done.
People can say what they want to about Biden, but the motherfucker had been hiring good people to do good things.
Fun fact: Ohio already has its first NEVI station up and running.
Were people actually expecting the construction to start immediately or something? There's absolutely wrenches being thrown at the process, and all of the planning and construction time on top of it all.
Were people actually expecting the construction to start immediately or something?
Especially right after COVID when equipment shortages were still a big issue! If these pundits wanted chargers available today, maybe they shouldn't have focused on churning out EV-skepticism for the better part of a decade.
Tesla's Supercharging network is practically the gold-standard of how fast deployments can be done, and even they need a couple months for each site. That timeframe is only possible after a decade of installations and spending hundreds of millions on process optimization. It's going to take some of these smaller firms some time to get the hang of it, and that's perfectly okay.
The plan all along was to complete everything by 2027, with construction starting in '24 and '25. Every state I've cared to look at has a published plan and timeline. 🤷♂️
It's going to be 90% planning and permitting. 10% construction. There's very little construction needed. (It may even be 99:1).
Crucially, the cable swap is a non-issue, because the chargers will all use the CCS communication protocol. NACS uses the J1772 pins for sensing and initiating charging, and CCS adds an extra communication layer which Tesla has built into their cars since mid-2019 or something when Europe switched to CCS Combo 2 as the EU standard.
I'm not personally a promoter of the NACS connector for lots of reasons nobody cares about, but I'm glad we've at least landed on the common communication protocol. If all these chargers started popping up in 2024 with CCS Combo 1 connectors, I wonder how many of these other brands would actually migrate to the NACS wand versus just continuing on with Combo 1 forever. I'm not convinced any of them really care either, and it's just a matter of convenience for customers. Without the necessity to rely on Tesla's charging network, that convenience sort of evaporates. Add in an adapter for NACS to CCS, and I think the whole issue goes away.
Yup, as the year progressed with further press releases it became a non-issue. However, for several months it was a question mark if most DCFC vendors would support this.
As far as NACS, effectively every carmaker has switched from CCS and the major DCFC vendors announced support for it (two major ones being ABB and Signet).
I guess if a bespoke dcfc manufacturer/operator kept going with CCS, they can, but it’d be a waste of money as we go from ~65% of EVs sold today use NACS to ~98% sold in 2025 (making the silly stretch assumption that sales ratio between carmakers remains relatively the same)
This is why I come to the comments. Thanks for this explainer!
They should definitely rush to spend 7bn so that the job is done poorly and everybody complains more about the ineffectiveness of our government. Especially with the changes in charging connection standards in the US.
Hasn’t it been over two years?
I'm not clear how the money was allocated. Is it for local governments or federal agencies to build them? It says along highways, and so I suppose it's for agencies, but I just wonder if the funds aren't going to end up as part of some bigger projects. And I also wonder if they're not using it as grants to developers. I dunno. But these things take time.
That all being said, it's definitely easy to see how certain interested parties might try to stifle this development.
NEVI funds are provided to each state (+DC+Puerto Rico), and (my understanding is that) each state is free to decide the process on how to allocate the funds as long as the funds meet the NEVI guidelines.
This is correct. The approach some states took (like Ohio) was getting stations placed on pre-existing AFCs (alternative fuel corridors) in order to accelerate the NEVI approval process since placing chargers on a highway not already designated as an AFC would require that road to be recognized as an AFC before any funds would be approved for that particular round of funding. This allowed states like Ohio to side-step some delays and red tape in the beginning so they could get to building stations more quickly and focus on filling out the gaps later.
Source: Participated in some of the NEVI meetings for my state.