As an opening salvo against America’s green energy transition, President Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation (DOT) issued an order halting the federal government’s charger funding program. The order immediately suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, and said that previously approved projects were no longer valid. Whether that is even legal remains up for debate. But before we mourn the loss of NEVI, was it any good to begin with?
InsideEVs Contributing Editor and State of Charge host Tom Moloughney investigates the program in his latest video, with help from Bill Ferro. Ferro is the Chief Technology Officer at and Co-Founder of Paren, an EV charging data analytics firm that’s been tracking the NEVI program.
The hourlong conversation is an exceptional deep dive into the program, which has its fair share of detractors. After all, NEVI was part of the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law two and a half years ago, and its seeds are just now starting to bear fruit.
Paren data shows that though 1,000 projects have been awarded federal grant money through this program, only 57 stations are open today. Ferro notes that the projects are being managed by states, which are managing the program with varying levels of success. Most, he says, had no experience with state-backed charging stations.
The final rules for the program weren’t available until February 2023, so they’ve only had two years to spin up a program that’s unprecedented and significantly outside of many state DOTs expertise. And since the charging program did not institute federal-level or mandated permit reforms, the process of getting a station approved and working remains slow and arduous.
Ohio is a good example of the issues. The state I’m from (Go Bucks) leads the nation in NEVI-funded charger deployments at… 19. Yet despite the state being faster to the jump than its peers, each charger took an average of 448 days to open, per Paren data. That’s understandable for flagship charging locations with buildings, but a ridiculous time-table for throwing a few chargers into an existing rest stop or parking lot. Other states have faster averages, but far fewer stations.
Most states, however, have no stations at all. California, the leader in EV adoption by far, has no NEVI-funded chargers. Maybe it’s because the state’s charging infrastructure is already comparatively well-established but, as a current California resident, I can say that it sure seems to take a while to build anything here.
Florida also has no open stations, and its government has made it clear that its lack of progress is for political reasons. Despite the state already having money allocated to it, and despite this technology benefitting both taxpayers and tourists, Florida is saying no. Now, the federal government is, too.
Not a great showing two years in. But the pace is picking up.
Photo by: Paren
So where does that leave the program? Well, while critics may scoff at the slow rollout, much of the hard part is getting the program set up. Governments need consultants and a competitive bidding process to assign award money, and the NEVI program includes common-sense requirements (like real-time availability and pricing info) that charge-point operators have to design around. So that takes time, but once companies have figured out the process, the rollout should continue. And it’ll likely be a boon to local economies, which can build amenities and retail experiences around comparatively wealthy road-trippers who have 30 minutes to kill.
All of that is still possible, if it’s funded. But we don’t know if it is. Ferro notes that of the 1,000 awards allocated, 800 of them have already been obligated. That means the process is far enough along that the DOT may not be able to claw back that money.
Plus, the funding was allocated by a bipartisan act of Congress. In theory, the executive branch cannot simply cancel a program created via legislation, but generally, we’d expect Congress to be the force pushing back against that. So far, however, Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have declined to challenge Trump’s authority to kill government programs on a whim. It could end up in the courts, but that’ll likely take a while.
That leaves NEVI in a weird place. It’s a well-meaning program that got off to a slow and rocky start. It’s yet another victim of the new administration’s approach to cost-cutting: Kill first, question later. To some, it’s the epitome of government waste, given that two years after a $5 billion award there’s still so little to show. To others, it’s killing a tree after you’ve spent years watering it, but before it’s bore any fruit.
The sad part is that if this is truly the end, Americans may have lost their most ambitious clean transportation project before they even saw its benefits.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.
