3 Years After Allocating $5B for EV Chargers, 17 Stations Completed | Hacker News Reader

3 Years After Allocating $5B for EV Chargers, 17 Stations Completed

nationalreview.com

24 pointsfortran7711 comments

> likeliest group of people to own an EV […] These people do not live in “disadvantaged communities.”

Isn't that the whole point? Early EV adopters are already creating a demand in richer areas, and that can be fulfilled by commercial suppliers. It's the poor areas that have a chicken-egg problem. EVs have to get cheaper, but that requires a mass-market demand for non-luxury vehicles. But people won't consider buying an EV if the infrastructure is not there, and no business will invest in chargers where there are no EV owners.

Yes. While it's true that most EV owners now are relatively affluent, there are a lot of sub-$10K used EVs on the market and if chargers are available in disadvantaged communities, those used EVs become a much more viable option.

What we need to concentrate on is electrifying the parking lots of apartment buildings and parking garages. Doesn't need to be super-level-10 charging, it really can just be L2 or even L1 chargers.

That will bring a range of EVs to "disadvantaged": scooters, ebikes, blade scooters, skateboards, etc. It will also work for day-to-day driving in PHEVs and city car EVs, which we also desperately need to nudge car companies to start making.

The sodium ion battery EV drivetrain should enable a very very cheap city car. Sodium ion should be 40% the cost of NMC or less, and keep in mind that Tesla likely is at price parity with NMC-EV and ICE drivetrains right now.

people that live in the sticks have reasonably the space at home to charge EV's and most likely wouldnt use a charging station unless their workplace parking got some or they are on the road for a long trip.

The demand for charging station will be higher in expensive high density areas where people cant charge at home

A better and more informative (albeit older) article can be found here: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger...

According to this article, while the chargers are funded by the federal government, the actual projects are administered by the states. So not so much a problem with the Biden administration as it is a problem with state governments.

500,000 chargers queued up and 17 were built in 3 years.

It’s a bit surprising people are hearing this story for the first time. It’s been thrown around for the past year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/...

https://www.americanenergyalliance.org/2024/06/biden-spends-...

That's a terrible blog post that only cites a WSJ opinion piece.

I think it is likely true that only 17 chargers have been built so far. The government subsidized chargers near me were only recently had their locations announced. It is possible the installation could get done fairly quickly now that sites are chosen.

What is relevant is not $5B so much as how much of that $5B has been used already as several commentators on the (better than I would expected for the National Review) comments section of that page note.

Yeah, there's a link on the article that talks about stuff finishing planning this summer.

https://driveelectric.gov/news/q3-2024-nevi-quarterly-update

Wait till you find out how they’re doing on bringing Internet to rural areas. This is quite literally a solved problem, but they don’t like the solution.

Build back better. Or something like that.

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