The timeline is even longer (and with such good cause). It also took till March 2023 to specify federal requirements for a charger! That's not a bad thing, it's not unreasonable at all. We didn't have any open systems for charging until then! There were no federal standards for what to build or how to stay or fall out of compliance! Before you start paying people to build chargers, you have to have some direction for what to build, have to make it better than the free for all of unreliable chargers that had hindered confidence & adoption so badly!

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...

Folks act so salty about this all, such snark. But in my view so much was smartly done. There's so many layers of problems that needed to be tackled for consumers to actually get success, and it felt like these were gone through slowly carefully over time to make something useful and helpful.

For example, the charging standards require a certain amount of availability. Otherwise, folks might build some crappy chargers, not maintain them, and still claim money.

Folks have had all kinds of issues with chargers being not in service. Or fully used! One of the big requirements that took a while to hammer out was that chargers neede to live report their status: how many chargers are there, at what power outputs, at this location, and which are in use & what capacity is remaining? So you can get to the charger you are aiming for and have some real hope of charging up!

It's been just under two years since the standards got made. They're good, important standards, that insure this money was going to be for public benefit, that it really would tackle the problem. It is unsurprising as hell to me that there's not a ton of deployments yet!

For a "hacker news" site, I would expect a more reasonable set of expectations about product development lifecycle. Simply manufacturing compatible chargers is gonna take at least a year, in all probability. Site planning can somewhat happen in parallel, but going through the state to get the fed money is going to be a bit complex, especially at first. This stuff just takes time! The pool of money was mostly unspent, and I expect over time, as roll outs ramped up, the difficulty & costs would have been going down.

The political appetite & cycle is so contrary to the actual pace of the world some time. Sometimes we have to be willing to let good things take time to happen. It all felt so with-cause to me.

Ok. It's the failure to build that's the issue more than the spending.

>As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.

That's not good for a law that was ratified in November of 2021. It might be about par for the course for the federal government, but that's the problem.

> Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.

The trick being played here is counting all charging stations in the US and pretending they're part of the IRA's funding.

Oil would be pretty much the same. Ag would be a chaotic disaster. The subsidies for ag were written in blood based on the need to smooth the natural forces of extreme cyclic market fluctuations that affect all inelastic commodities.

But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient.

I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.