Low-Energy Fridays: Why is it so hard for the government to build EV charging stations?
As Mike Tyson famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. He wasn’t talking about electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, of course, but the quote might as well apply to challenges the Biden administration has faced in expanding the nation’s network of EV charging infrastructure.
The administration started with big plans. In 2021, the federal government created the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program (NEVI) to help build fast charging stations for EVs at regular intervals along the nation’s highway system. The initiative aimed to address a major reason why some people are hesitant to buy EVs. A fully charged EV can travel between 110 and 300 miles before its battery is depleted. That’s fine for travel within a metro area, especially if the driver has a charger at home that can top off their battery at night. But for longer trips where a driver needs to stop and recharge, the lack of charging stations can be problematic.
Despite ample funding, little progress has been made in actually building the charging stations. After three years, only 19 charging stations have been built under NEVI nationwide. The slow pace of construction has drawn bipartisan criticism.
To make matters worse, many public charging stations often don’t work. In 2022, researchers took a comprehensive look at fast charging stations in the San Francisco Bay area and found that nearly a quarter of them were non-functional due to broken charges, computer problems, or other issues. This finding is backed up by a survey of EV drivers conducted by J.D. Power, which found that one out of five charging station visitors failed to charge their vehicle.
There’s no shortage of explanations for what’s gone wrong. While the money is federal, the program is administered mainly by state transportation departments, which lack experience with electricity-related projects. Federal law prohibits charging stations from operating at highway rest stops; instead, they must operate at privately owned locations within a mile of the highway, such as gas stations or convenience stores. That’s not necessarily a problem; but it can lead to complicated situations. For example, a charging station located at a gas station might be owned and operated by a different company than the one that owns the gas station, while the land is owned by yet another entity. All of this makes the negotiation and coordination process complicated. Permitting and multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions can also create delays.
And then there are the utilities. Electric utilities have been slow to interconnect charging stations to the grid. Sometimes this is understandable, as the electric demand required for fast charging is inconsistent with the design of rural grids, but it has still led to further delays.
The simple fact is that sometimes the federal government is just about the worst entity to be in charge of a large, nationwide project. In this case, the red tape that the federal government has wrapped around EV chargers is suffocating most attempts to create a useful network for EV drivers. However, there is already a nationwide network of EV fast-charging stations that has a high rate of functionality. While government and others have plodded along slowly, Tesla has built out its own system of charging stations and gives drivers advanced notice of when station chargers are occupied or non-functional. Tesla stations have traditionally been limited to Tesla EVs, but recently the company is opening them up to use by other EV models as well to take advantage of that demand.
Why has Tesla zoomed ahead on charging stations while the federal government has stalled out? No doubt a creative mind could come up with many specific reasons for this, but I submit that the big-picture reason is the difference in incentive structure. Ultimately, Tesla is in the business of making money. If it can’t navigate the regulatory and contractual hurdles necessary to build enough charging stations, or if the stations don’t work, then it loses out on the chance to make money. This is in stark contrast to the federal program, administered by state transportation offices whose primary focus is anything but the efficient deployment of funds for EV charging. Tesla also has an incentive to locate chargers where customers are most likely to use them. With federal rules on where EV chargers can and can’t be placed, it’s no surprise that federal deployment remains slow.