Governor signs bills creating EV charging station network across Wisconsin | Hacker News Reader

Governor signs bills creating EV charging station network across Wisconsin

apnews.com

76 pointstoomuchtodo69 comments

I hate how we are doubling down on car centric transportation. Whether it’s an ICE or EV. At the end of the day, it’s another car on the road.

We take one step further with reducing or zeroing out tail pipe emissions. But take 3 steps backwards because department of ~~~highway~~~ transportation engineers feel the need to expand the expensive highways to accommodate increased demand. Ignoring all historical evidence that widening interstate highways or state regional roads is not an efficient way to resolve the issue.

Let’s not forget the increased amount of tire wear particles released into the environment, brake dust, and eventually the e-waste when lithium based battery packs need to be changed out.

Also where are these vehicles going to be stored? More parking garages. Less walkable infrastructure. More subsidies for the suburban rat at the expense of cities. More heavier cars, trucks, and SUVs on the road means existing infrastructure breaks down must faster. Thus the need to replace more often or maintain more often. All of this at the expense of local cities and state budgets. Also most cities tend to ask voters to approve municipal bonds for such improvements. These are private financial instruments or loans that need to be paid back to private investors. Each new muni bond is one more step towards filing for bankruptcy (hello Detroit!)

Instead of spending money on the people. We are spending it on stupid car centric infrastructure. Forget mental health, social support, universal basic income, housing for everyone, easily accessible public transportation, improved paramedic, fire and police response times.

We wAnT mOrE eXpEnSiVe RoAdS aNd hIgHwAyS aNd fReE pArKiNg GaRaGeS!!111

I'm a transit activist. The infrastructure bill allocated more money for transit ($39 billion) and Amtrak ($66 billion) than EVs. The funding for EV chargers is a mere $7.5 billion. If anything, the angst should be directed toward the $110 billion allocated to roads and highways.

EVs are mostly just harm reduction. An important step but not the end goal in cities.

As someone who’s lived in Japan, immensely enjoys its train system, and wants to see an equivalent established in the US…

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way for it to happen in a timely manner. Even if everybody dropped everything and started working on public rail tomorrow, with all the red tape, obstruction from a variety of parties, and general glacial nature of construction here it’d be an uphill struggle to get even a quarter of the country’s populated regions thoroughly covered with rail in the next 50 years.

If given the chance I’ll vote for implementation of public rail and am happy to fund it with my taxes, but I think electric cars are unavoidable in the interim. It’s better than continuing to burn fossil fuels that whole time.

> Ignoring all historical evidence that widening interstate highways or state regional roads is not an efficient way to resolve the issue.

If the issue is transportation demand exceeds transportation supply for some portion of the day, and that portion is too high. I think you're right, there are more efficient ways.

Reducing transportation demand is much more efficient than increasing transportation supply. Departments of transportation should be engineering recessions, pandemics, or ground wars to reduce our societal demand for transportation to enable commuting. Alternatively, they should consider forciably relocating some residents our of their survey area and limit population growth.

That is an impressively shit take and piss poor reading of the comment you're replying to.

I would enumerate some of the many problems in your comment, but I can't believe you would take it in good faith.

These are not MOAR CARS these are replacing the existing cars to cut down on the CO2 emissions.

EVs do contribute to brake dust but they do not produce as much brake dust as ICEVs. Yes, there is mining now for lithium, but that has limits. As the car fleet is switched over, the lithium and other minerals in the batteries are very recyclable. There are several companies with pilot recycling programs in place already even though the volume is small.

Not sure about your area but in our city, they are just finishing a massive expansion of the light rail network with more planned. The busses are being converted to be EVs, too.

Massive changes to how most people think about anything in society are non-starters. Doubly-so with something as central to the American lifestyle like transportation.

I don't understand why this is so difficult for some people to grasp.

> Also where are these vehicles going to be stored?

I'd expect most people are going to store their new EV where they previously stored whatever car they traded in when they bought the EV.

> Also most cities tend to ask voters to approve municipal bonds for such improvements. These are private financial instruments or loans that need to be paid back to private investors. Each new muni bond is one more step towards filing for bankruptcy (hello Detroit!)

...

> Instead of spending money on the people. We are spending it on stupid car centric infrastructure. Forget mental health, social support, universal basic income, housing for everyone, easily accessible public transportation, improved paramedic, fire and police response times.

Wouldn't many of those things on your list likely need in most cities to be funded by bonds?

> We wAnT mOrE eXpEnSiVe RoAdS aNd hIgHwAyS aNd fReE pArKiNg GaRaGeS!!111

Yes, we want these things, because cars are overwhelmingly popular.

A wealthy society is not one where poor people own cars, it's one where they can afford to not to.

Go live in a city like Milwaukee then? 85% of the land area of Wisconsin has less than 100 people per square mile - it isn't clear to me at all how even the richest society could blanket that area with useful public transit.

We managed to blanket it with cars and roads despite them being unaffordable in the long term. We can do it just fine.

Wisconsin is bigger than England with 10% of the population. It’s missing the mass in mass transit. Wisconsin is middle of the pack for density in the US.

And not even England makes trains work unless you’re (basically) rich and in a city center, or need to go anywhere other than London.

Why do you think cars and roads are unaffordable in the long term?

Let me educate you on what Wisconsin actually looks like since I grew up there.

50% of the population lives in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, and Eau Claire. Those cities, respectively, are in the southeast, northeast, south-central, and north-central parts of the state. You could generously include Hudson and La Crosse in that list in the west and southwest parts of the state, respectively, if you wanted to add a couple of smaller-sized municipalities to tie the state together.

One more point of reference: Minneapolis/St. Paul in Minnesota lies ~40 miles west of Hudson and Rochester, Minnesota lies ~90 miles west of La Crosse.

I-94 connects Minneapolis/St. Paul, Hudson/Eau Claire then turns south through Madison and Milwaukee, then to Chicago. I-90 connects Rochester (Minnesota) through La Crosse then on through Madison and Milwaukee. Another interstate (I forget which) travels north/south and connects Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

There is enough traffic along I-94 to justify a rail connection from Minneapolis/St. Paul/Hudson/Eau Claire/Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There is also probably enough traffic to justify a rail connection from Green Bay to Milwaukee as well.

Remember when I mentioned that 50% of the population lives in those cities? The other 50% of the population lives in rural areas and is generally involved in agriculture, forestry, or tourism, or support for those industries, and there are 2000+ small towns of 1000 population or less geographically distributed across the rest of Wisconsin, each typically 10-50 miles apart from each other. The towns did not arise like this by coincidence! This spacing actually creates an optimal geographic spanning tree across the state for the purpose of efficiently transporting food and forest products from rural areas to urban areas.

Now, something has to actually connect the farms/forests to the towns and the towns to bigger towns and the bigger towns to the urban centers in order to transport the food and forest products (and tourists). Traffic along the very rural links is extremely low; it is not uncommon to travel one of those links for 40-50 miles and not see anyone else on the link. So let's assume for a minute that it would be reasonable to build rail links, and let's assume (generously) that there are no hills in Wisconsin and that we can lay it out in a grid across the 250 miles x 250 miles to cover the southern 2/3rds of Wisconsin, with parallel rails separated by 10 miles:

* We need to build 12,500 miles of rail. Cost to build 1 mile of railroad track is $100,000, so the total cost is $1.25 billion dollars. Ok, not the end of the world. * We need to build and operate the trains over these rails. Call it 100 trains. Data on the cost to operate a train is sparse, but call it $100/mile to operate a train. These trains would need to travel back and forth (conservatively) 4 times per day; 4 * 100 * 250 * 100 = $10,000,000 per day to operate, so the total cost per year just to operate the trains (disregarding maintenance) is another $3.65 billion dollars per year. _You can safely assume that the train operator - likely the state of Wisconsin - would lose $3 billion per year operating these trains_. Why? Remember when I mentioned just how lightly loaded the rural transportation links are? There would be some days those trains would operate with a grand total of 3 people on board. And oh, by the way, we still need roads covering the county in order to transport people and goods to the rail stations so we haven't eliminated the need for roads or vehicles, unless we're planning on increasing the rail grid by a factor of 10 each direction and now we've increased costs by 100x for both build-out and maintenance.

Also conservatively, we can estimate that the people in rural areas drive ~20,000,000 total miles per week across the whole rural population. (Farmers don't generally drive back and forth to town every day; maybe once or twice per week on a "busy" week.) Call it a $1/mile to operate a vehicle, that's $20,000,000 per week or about $1 billion per year to operate the vehicles that the rural people require anyway. Even if we built a 10-mile grid of trains the rural people would still need to drive that ~20,000,000 total miles per week to get back and forth to town, so this expense does not disappear.

Now, consider the fact that as soon as you travel more than 100-150 miles inland from the east or west coast the entire country generally falls into the situation that I described above, and repeat the exercise across ~2500 miles east/west and ~100 miles north/south to see how impractical it would be to blanked the country in rail.

Would it be feasible to replace highways with rail lines connecting SD/LA/SF/Sacramento? Absolutely. Amtrak should be operating rail along those routes and should be making a fortune doing so. Is it feasible to replace highways with rail lines across the US? There's just no way that can ever be economically feasible even if you factor in carbon externalities.

Public transport in Milwaukee is a fucking joke

I agree for the most part, but at least it is a tractable problem, unlike providing public transport for the entirety of Wisconsin including Milwaukee

> We wAnT mOrE eXpEnSiVe RoAdS aNd hIgHwAyS

You bet. Plenty of choo choo trains available to ride in Europe and Asia.

Not everyone is a socialist, or high density enthusiast. Personally I want the local government to only spend money in ways that result in people being more independent of a dense centre, that allows people to have more control over their immediate environment, and less impact from neibours.

Roads and highways are worth the expense, I am not convinced when it comes to many other public infrastructure or services.

Socialism?

The current transportation system is largely through taxes and no not gas taxes. The way it works is that gas taxes and Federal funds are used to pay for interstates, arterials, and collector roads in almost every state and MSA in the US (pretty much any municipality big enough to apply for transportation grants.) The Federal government then helps fund road construction while states and consequently cities take the maintenance burden on. Maintenance itself is paid for through a combination of gas and state taxes along with Federal grants which are also based on other taxes.

The current system is already largely funded through taxation. It's just a matter of whether you think those taxes should be spent on creating and maintaining roads or whether you think they should be spent on transit. The closest to use taxes we have is the gas tax and the Federal one hasn't been raised since 1993 (state taxes differ per state and have been raised more recently.)

If you really want to move away from "socialism" or whatever, then make infrastructure toll based in the US. You'll find though that toll roads are highly unpopular.

> If you really want to move away from "socialism" or whatever, then make infrastructure toll based in the US. You'll find though that toll roads are highly unpopular.

One example of this is Japan, where nearly all of the highways are privatized and tolled. To get to the nearest metropolis to me I can either drive for 3.5 hours and pay $60 in tolls+gas, or ride the bullet train for 1.5 hours for $70. (Now as soon as you have a family of people in that car, the train starts looking really expensive, but for business travelers it's a no-brainer)

You have a very unsophisticated comprehension if you are taking funded with taxes to be the same as socialism.

The part of the parents comment that was directed at was "Instead of spending money on the people. We are spending it on stupid car centric infrastructure. Forget mental health, social support, universal basic income..."

Choosing roads and highways are a form of central planning. Single Family Homes zoning and lack of mixed use zoning are a form of central planning. The government is intimately involved with regulating and encouraging car centric transportation.

Ultimately, using the term 'socialism' is a useless label especially when it is misapplied. It is better to discuss specific policies and details.

Did you read the comment I'm replying to? "Instead of spending money on the people. We are spending it on stupid car centric infrastructure. Forget mental health, social support, universal basic income..."

This is a classic socialist point, one I feel the need to call out.

Yes, there is a decision on what to encourage, and I think it's important to acknowledge that density inherently comes with more restrictions.

Single family zoning is inherently restrictive since you're forced to live a certain expensive lifestyle. Not being able to ride bikes safely is inherently restrictive. Being forced to spend money on car instead of being able to afford <insert-hobby-here> is a form of restriction.

Density can support things like live theaters. It's hard to support theater in the countryside. How about restaurants? Can't really have the plethora of options without a large population. How do you afford state of the art hospitals? You need a large enough population density to make supporting these hospitals viable.

If you say it's socialist or capitalist or <ideology> you're really only hamstringing yourself in discussion about urbanism, making the entire discussion nonsensical.

The specific examples given there may be "socialist", but they could just as well be 'national defense and border control' and the basic idea would be exactly the same.

Of course there has never been a self-styled socialist country with strong border control. Definitely can’t think of one… nope. Oh, wait [1].

(1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany

If anything is socialist about this scenario it would be the roads. You want other people to fund the lifestyle that you prefer and are fully willing to spend their money, time, and effort.

This ignores a few things. First, I pay taxes, and my perspective is that the wealth created by my labour ought to benifit me. Just because some of that wealth is given to the government to be directed more efficiently, does not mean that it magically becomes an abstract pool of other people's money. Second, we are in a democracy... In order for the outcome I want to come about the majority of people need to be in support of it...

I'll note that this is part of FHWA and DOE's Alternate Fuel Corridors program, and many states applied for and got similar grants.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/alternative_fuel_corrid...

https://afdc.energy.gov/corridors

Personally, I'm glad most of the money seems to be going to electric charging stations vs hydrogen and alternate hydrocarbon fueling stations. I would have preferred if the program had focused on installing charging stations at the ~1400 highway rest stations across the country vs giving grants to business to help them install stations.

Look where Tesla puts their Superchargers [1]. There’s a reason they go at businesses instead of rest areas. If you site them where they are at the whim of politics, your infra is in constant political/bureaucratic peril. Businesses are incentivized to keep customers coming.

Tangentially, the EV chargers are always out of order at O’hare and Midway airport parking lots. The Superchargers at the nearby gas station (ORD) [2] and the Target (MDW) [3] are always available. Tesla is incentivized to offer a highly available charging network (they don’t move EVs or receive revenue from other automakers otherwise); you want folks with an incentive to provide high uptime to own and operate these stations.

[1] https://supercharge.info/map

[2] https://www.tesla.com/findus/location/supercharger/chicagoil...

[3] https://www.tesla.com/findus/location/supercharger/ChicagoIL...

> where they are at the whim of politics, your infra is in constant political/bureaucratic peril

Whims like this: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-rest-stops-chick-fil-a-1...

Distinct issue. You’re serving transport infra, you do what the landlord says or make way for another business that will. People travel on Sundays and want to eat, regardless of your belief system.

Totally different than EV charging infra uptime and availability.

Regardless of their believe system, having a guaranteed day off every week is a nice perk in the fast food industry.

Not to mention Chick-fil-A is dang delicious.

You don't have to tell me twice. I'm a red member. haha

> There’s a reason they go at businesses instead of rest areas.

With a few grandfathered exceptions, rest areas are prohibited from hosting private enterprise.

Citation? Because I see private enterprise at many rest areas frequented between both coasts, including a Tesla supercharger in Ohio off the turnpike.

https://www.tesla.com/en_US/findus/location/supercharger/Gen...

https://www.tesla.com/en_US/findus/location/supercharger/gen...

https://reason.org/commentary/federal-ban-on-commercial-rest...

Interesting! TIL! Thanks! Something I will add to my list when chasing after congresspeople for other policy issues.

You have to wonder where they're finding contractors to competently build these and maintain them. Electrify America has a bad reputation for offline and broken stations, and Tesla might not bid on a contract like this. It would be cool if they built state capacity to just have charging stations.

My city spent a stupid amount of money to build 13 slow chargers across the city based on public feedback. I have zero faith that this will fare any better.

The best EV charger is the one installed in the home. If the government actually wanted to spur adoption it would be through easing permitting and creating boilerplate contract language for apartment and condo chargers.

I tried traveling with a nissan leaf ev (24kwh) a couple years ago, and it was COMPLETELY impractical. It was just a stupid leap of faith with giant portions of luck and silly time wasting. 3rd party charging services suck. They have few chargers, they have few stalls and terrible information about them. (The worst was blink, virtually always broken)

And then I tried a couple years later with tesla, and it was a completely different experience. Telsas have large batteries, the chargers are very plentiful along most routes, have many stalls, and are dependable.

I came to realize having a non-telsa ev is really a waste of time unless you can charge at home and stay in range.

So anything to create a reliable network to travel I think is a good idea (for non-tesla cars)

> I tried traveling with a nissan leaf ev (24kwh) a couple years ago, and it was COMPLETELY impractical

A Nissan Leaf, especially the version with the smallest battery, is a commuter car. It's meant to drive you around within your city, never being too far from a charger. It's not meant to travel around with. Your experience isn't a Tesla vs Nissan experience, nor even a Tesla vs non-Tesla experience, nor even a electric vs gas car experience. It's a "travelling long distance in a 100-mile-range vehicle" experience.

Nissan, and most other car manufacturers, make cars that have much larger batteries and can go much further. Even most Leaf models can go much further than your 24kwh model. The charging experience is much better when your range is sufficient that you don't have to stop and charge every 90 minutes, and thus have a better diversity of chargers available.

One might similarly try to travel in a gas-powered golf cart and complain about how impractical it is.

I traveled round trip between NJ and MI last year using Electrify America with my ID.4. It was fine, no real pain points -- EA's been improving pretty aggressively in my experience, and I think we're broadly in pretty good shape.

I charge exclusively using public chargers.

Your experience with a Leaf just showed you that old technology in a vehicle with a small battery and slow charging is best for local travel and not good for road tripping. There is a place for such vehicles but the highway is not it.

Today, there are lots of much more advanced EVs from dozens of makers that have large range and faster charging. Over the next year, they are all switching over to a new standard charging connection (which was developed by Tesla. Props). The CCS charging network will also be switching over to j3400. Hopefully this increased competition will force more of them to properly maintain their networks or be replaced.

A good first step to the chicken and egg problem. Living in Wisconsin I have never seen an electrical charging station.

>Local government entities and state agencies would not be allowed to operate public charging stations but could run their own stations to charge their vehicles.

I'm confused at why this was included in the regulation. Would companies really refuse to build stations without this stipulation? It reminds me a lot of telecommunications companies lobbying hard against municipal and related telecommunications services.

>> A good first step to the chicken and egg problem. Living in Wisconsin I have never seen an electrical charging station.

There are approximately 35 active Tesla Supercharger stations with almost 300 individual chargers in Wisconsin. (More than I would have guessed...)

> in Wisconsin I have never seen an electrical charging station

As per the article, in Wisconsin any company that did would be regulated as a utility company; the law makes exemptions so non-utilities can set them up.

> Would companies really refuse to build stations without this stipulation?

The funds that are freed up are federal funds. No idea if that's a result of the above deregulation, or if those funds can't be used directly by municipalities.

Either way, as a business owner I'd be hard pressed to invest in putting chargers in my parking lot if the city came along and put in a bunch for street level parking.

Small towns have set up speed traps on highways passing nearby so much that many states have enacted laws to restrict the ability of such towns to annex land for this purpose. Since EV chargers aren't a natural monopoly, local governments could use their power of zoning and other regulations to create an artificial monopoly for themselves over EV charging. State enterprises also have a history of being inefficient when they can lock out non-state competitors or drive those competitors out of business through state power.

State ownership of utilities are a mixed bag but at least they're generally answerable to those in their service area. Due to the transient nature of vehicles needing charging, it's not difficult to see some small towns that happen to be near road junctions setting themselves up as the only charging choice in the area. Maybe you have enough charge left to bypass pass the chargers that are 25% more expensive than the state average. Or maybe you just stop and pay it.

Eau Claire, WI - a pretty small town has at least three DCFC - EA, Tesla & a local electric company plus tons of level 2 all over.

> I'm confused at why this was included in the regulation

The WI GOP. At least you can pay by the kWh in WI now instead of by the minute with this law.

Eau Claire is the biggest settlement at the junction point where Minneapolis travelers either go to Wausau and the UP, or to Milwaukee/Chicago.

Yea I guess I'm just surprised OP hasn't seen any. The junction point explains the fast chargers, but the Level 2 would presumably be used primarily by locals.

I mean even middle of nowhere cities like Ellsworth are getting DCFC - granted at a dealership, but still it's happening!

https://www.plugshare.com/location/560842

MG&E built one on the Madison isthmus[0], but they’re already a utility company.

[0]: https://www.mge.com/lovev/charging/charge-go#/find/nearest?c...

They do not stand out as much as a whole gas station so it can be easy to miss charging stations. Once you start looking though, they are much more common than you might think. In any case, what matters, if you aren’t charging at home, is that you can find chargers using an app or the car’s navigation system.

I think I’ve seen them in Kohl’s parking lots… but that’s about it.

GOOD! I wish anti-EV states would follow suit. EV chargers are a landmine for business/income taxes. Unlike a gas station, people have to wait at least 15 minutes to charge their vehicle. You could have TikTok-theaters (theaters that show trending videos across TikTok), pop-ups, restaurants, etc.

>> EV chargers are a landmine for business/income taxes

I think you mean a goldmine for business & income taxes?

lol, i sure did.

> You could have TikTok-theaters (theaters that show trending videos across TikTok), pop-ups, restaurants, etc.

Thanks, I hate it. So you want to turn these ev charging spots into the equivalent of strip malls and billboards.

Does this mean Tesla charging or ... ?

Eventually it’s all NACS/J3400 in North America, which is the “Tesla Charger” but the J1772 wire protocol and some additions to help adoption. For example, you can run two phases from commercial 480v three phase commercial power to charge at 270v.

As a J1772 equipped driver, I don’t mind eventually needing an adapter since I don’t personally use DC fast charging very often.

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