You're driving your electric car on a cross-country road trip but no matter where your battery begins to run low, there is a convenient charging station that would work with any make or model.
How much would you pay for that kind of convenience? $19.99?
These miracle charging stations usually have a little store attached, so you'll have something to do while you wait for your car to charge.
How much would you pay for such a deal? $29.99? $49.99? One HUNDRED dollars?
But wait, there's more!
Someday — maybe not any time soon but in theory it just might happen! — these charging stations will dot our nation's highways, providing recharges to fleets of electric vehicles people aren't really buying any longer. When the chargers are working, that is, which won't be all the time.
Now how much would you pay?
One. BILLION. Dollars.
Presidentish Joe Biden's trillion-dollar "infrastructure" law (that spent just nine cents on the dollar for actual infrastructure — and even that is questionable, as you're about to see) included $7.5 billion in subsidies for a network of 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030, less than six years from now. Way back in December, I reported that exactly none had been built.
But these things move at the speed of government, so it was just eleven days later that I had to issue a semi-correction because one — count'em, one — charging station was finally in operation. Located near a freeway in London, Ohio, it appears to be little used.
Well, here we are, just five months later, and I'm here to report that Biden's EV charging station program has become a smashing success. According to an article in Monday's Oil Price, we're now up to seven spread across four states.
That comes out to an average of about one billion dollars per station. Not that they really cost that much, of course, but my ridiculous averaging is still a lot less ridiculous than Biden's so-called Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
My back-of-the-envelope math also indicates that building seven stations every two years will get us to Biden's goal of 500,000 no later than the year 144,881 AD. Assuming we're still using AD by then. 2030 doesn't seem that far away now, does it?
"Missed it by THAT much," as they say.
The reasons for the ever-so-slow rollout, according to Oil Price, include "Higher standards for new EV chargers, including 97% operational reliability, 150kW power, and proximity to highways, have contributed to the slow progress, along with permitting challenges and power demands."
Power demands. As it turns out, contrary to leftist belief, the electricity does not magically appear in the charging cable.
I should probably apologize for the absurd format of the first half of this column but it's one of those sorry-not-sorry situations. I grew up on all those old Ronco ads in the '70s for products like the Pocket Fisherman and the Inside the Egg Shell Egg Scrambler, and I will never get them out of my head.
Still, there is a big difference between a huckster like Ron Popeil and a grifter like Joe Biden: for three easy payments of just $19.99, in six to eight weeks, Popeil would deliver the goods — Biden, not so much. This is the guy who pushed through one trillion-dollar spending bill after another, and all we got was this lousy inflation.
And, if I'm being honest, seven billion-dollar EV charging stations.
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