RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/bidens-7-5-billion-ev-charger-plan-backfires-spectacularly/

At 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.