You might have read back in May that while the Biden-Harris administration provided a whopping $7.5 billion to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations (they're just like gas stations but with more pretense), only seven have been built.
The big bucks are split up with $5 billion coming from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program from the Inflation Reduction Act and the remaining $2.5 billion in Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary grant funding via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Both laws have such misleading names that if they were labels on products produced by the private sector instead of Congress, there would be lawsuits.
But I'm here to tell you today that those reports about the seven charging stations are all lies, or at least completely superseded by events. According to the latest figures I can find, the total is now up to eight. So that's eight down and just 499,992 to go. At the current rate of construction, Biden-Harris will achieve their goal no later than the year 144,881 AD.
But that's all old news. Let's get to today's news.
Two rounds of EV station funding worth about a billion dollars went out in 2022 and 2023 to virtually no avail. If you'd say that after a billion and just eight charging stations we could probably use more charging stations and maybe spend less money, I'd like to congratulate you for achieving VodkaPundit levels of snark.
But if you're a Democrat, the answer is always the same: double down on throwing money at the problem.
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To that end, the Biden-Harris administration just released the next $521 million in grants to 29 different states to build EV charging stations. And this time they swear it'll work. What the first two rounds of a billion dollars failed to accomplish the next round of half a billion surely must.
When I wrote, "throw more money at the problem," I forgot to include the fact that the problem is imaginary. Illusion. A lie.
The Verge reported in their version of today's THROW MOAR MONIES AT CHARGERS story that "the administration claims that there are now over 192,000 publicly available charging ports in the US, with approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week." Those are charging ports — like individual gas pumps, but with more pretense — not stations. But with a rough average of 10 ports per station, that's almost 20,000 existing EV stations and 100 new stations each week.
All without those Biden-Harris IRA dollars.
Nobody had to subsidize building out gas station infrastructure because everybody wanted a gas-powered car. There are enough EV cars on the roads — with more coming, albeit not as quickly as the Left would like, even with all those subsidies — to induce the construction of 100 stations per week.
Hardly anybody seems to want a taste of those Biden-Harris IRA dollars, with almost all of the $7.5 billion just sitting there, waiting to be claimed. Yet companies like Tesla and ChargePoint are happy to build them out by the thousands at their own expense.
The reason is those federal dollars come with federal rules. NEVI dollars have to be spent on charging stations placed every 50 miles along the nation's interstate highways. Unlike urban areas where there are chargers almost everywhere, the demand for them on highways just isn't there yet.
So the money sits there. Unspent. Congressional Republicans tried to eliminate the Biden-Harris EV slush funds, but nothing has come of it. If we want our $7.5 billion back, we're going to have to elect more Republicans.
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