Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The only real drawback to the columnist gig is that when you make a mistake, you make it in front of the whole world. One of my takes on Presidentish Joe Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act — really the Green New Deal Lite in drag — is a case in point.
On Dec. 5 I wrote a column headlined "You Won't Believe How Many EV Chargers Biden Can Buy for $7.5 Billion." This being the Biden administration, of course, the answer was "zero." I'm here to tell you today that I screwed this one up and that's why I opened this column with an apology.
Because, as Inside Climate News reported on Wednesday, Biden can buy a whole lot more than zero EV chargers for $7.5 billion.
He can buy one.
Obviously, now that the $7.5 billion program has gotten rolling, even in only some small way, many more stations will follow — not even a bureaucratically crippled program like this one can dangle that many dollars without finding takers.
But this is not where Paul Harvey would tell you that you know the rest of the story.
The very first Bidencharger is located at a truck stop in London, Ohio, that features "an Arby's, a Cinnabon, and plenty of merchandise for truckers," according to the Free Beacon. It opened on Friday, Dec. 8, just three days after I so recklessly claimed that the Green New Deal Lite hadn't built any EV charging stations. Please, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
But this being a Biden boondoggle, you have to know there's going to be a catch, and here it is: "At about 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, nobody was using the chargers," Inside Climate News Admitted.
This comes as no surprise. If I were spending my own money on EV chargers, I'd put the first one where there are plenty of EV drivers around to generate a return on my investment. A truck stop on the outskirts of Columbus seems like an unlikely place to find a Tesla charging in the middle of the day.
Or at most any other time, really, despite the presence of four charging ports with spacious parking around them.
Why, you might ask, is the first of many tens of thousands of taxpayer-funded EV chargers located at a spot on the interstate frequented by truckers?
The solution to the mystery can be found in two hyphenated words: taxpayer-funded.
According to the regulations laid down by the Green New Deal Lite law, you can't get the money for building EV charging stations just anywhere, like in California cities with tons of Teslas Model 3s, Chevy Jolts, or Hyundai Sparkys driving around.
As I reported to you previously:
Five billion is for chargers that are supposed to run at least every 50 miles along our interstates, with credit card readers and an uptime of 97%. A J.D. Power study from earlier this year found that only 61% of charging stations were working properly, but government-funded chargers are going to be much more reliable because everyone is on drugs.
Companies like Pilot that built the London, Ohio chargers aren't interested in generating a profit. Their motivation is to collect the subsidies, regardless of whether the EV charger location makes any sense for EV owners. The law, I never tire of reminding readers, is an ass. And this one is particularly donkey-ish.
The thinking, if you'll allow me to call it that, behind locating so many chargers along the interstate goes like this. "People won't want to buy EVs for road trips or other long drives unless they see plenty of charging stations along the way." And maybe there's some truth to that — around half of people surveyed asked why they won't buy an EV said that the availability of chargers was a concern.
But long highway drives are the worst use-case for EVs. I used to make the 750-mile drive between Colorado Springs and St. Louis two or three times a year. It was a long drive — about 11.5 hours, door to door. Add in two or three 30-minute charging stops and... fuggidaboudit, I'll take a greenhouse-gas-spewing airplane.
So keep this in mind, my gasoline-powered automobile-driving friend. Over the next year or two, you'll see more and more of these interstate EV charging stations popping up at your expense like taxpayer-funded mushrooms — mostly unneeded and mostly unused.
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