This story was updated at 5:57 p.m. EDT.
DETROIT — One part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda that has caused bipartisan frustration is the $5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers on highways.
The much ballyhooed initiative is dragging.
State officials who know what’s happening met in Detroit in late September to talk strategy. A common thread emerged among their conversations: The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program is the most complex project they have ever experienced.
“Every site is a snowflake,” said Alexa Voytek, a deputy director of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. “We can’t cut and paste because every site is different.”
A tangle of interconnected issues has forced states to slow down.
State agencies that usually think in terms of pavement have had to wrap their heads around the complexity of providing power — and learned that electric utilities move slowly. Projects have a bewildering array of participants. Key pieces of equipment are in short supply.
So far, the program funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law has installed 19 charging stations in nine states, according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which serves as the program’s technical resource.
The plodding pace of the program has become a political liability for the Biden administration. “They spent $9 billion on eight chargers, three of which didn’t work,” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at the Republican National Convention in July.
That statement greatly exaggerated NEVI’s spending, but even some Democrats have publicly expressed frustration. In June, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) lambasted the project’s glacial progress as “a vast administrative failure.”
The Biden administration says that the number of public EV charging stations has grown dramatically during the president’s tenure. From all funding sources public and private, there are now over 72,000 stations. Most of them are slower chargers that fill a battery overnight and cost much less than fast chargers to build.
The structure and goals of the program seem straightforward. Every year for five years, the program makes a certain amount of money available to each state. A state’s first task is to build high-powered charging stations at 50-mile intervals along high-traffic highways, no more than a mile from a turnoff.
Mostly, state departments of transportation are in charge. They must follow some federal guidelines — for example, that stations have four stalls, each of which provide 150 kilowatts of power, which can refill an EV’s battery in perhaps 20 to 45 minutes. The state also crafts its own rules.
Once the state has figured out what exactly it wants, it sends out requests for bids to build stations from the private sector. Then the state evaluates those bids and chooses winners. The winning companies start building, and the states use the federal money to reimburse their expenses.
But what seems easy on paper, state officials say, is proving extraordinarily hard to do in practice.
‘I think that there was an expectation the program would move quickly, very quickly, without considering all of those different components,” said Erin Belt, decarbonization program manager at the Virginia Department of Transportation, in an interview.
The Biden administration promises the pace of the NEVI program is about to pick up.
Gabe Klein, the executive director of the Joint Office, said in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News that “we expect to see hundreds of federally funded chargers operational this year.”
At the conference, he acknowledged that the full fruit of NEVI — a widespread network of highway charging plazas that gives potential EV drivers confidence during road trips — is still years away. He told attendees that between 2026 and 2028 is “when you’re going to see the peak of the federal money having its impact.”
One sign of the complexity that states face is that even convening to discuss NEVI is difficult. It requires collaborations between the worlds of energy and transportation that are newly minted.
The conference was hosted by three umbrella organizations: the National Association of State Energy Officials, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and the federal Joint Office. That office is itself the first-ever joint project between two federal departments, the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation.
Here are the main hurdles that state officials see.
All new for state agencies
The mandate of a state department of transportation is, writ large, fairly straightforward. It builds and maintains road and bridge projects on public land.
“We’re good at building roads, we’re good at building bridges, we’re good at maintenance and things like that,” said Lyle McMillan, the strategic investments director of the Utah DOT.
What they don’t traditionally do is projects intimately tied to the electric grid, or on private property.
The NEVI program asks those DOTs to build charging stations at 50-mile intervals along highways, but by federal law, they can’t be built at highway rest stops, which are the most convenient DOT-owned sites.
Instead they must be erected within a mile of the freeway, with a private host. Usually that host is a business that has an available parking lot and the desire to capture the business of an EV driver. In practice, this has mostly been entities like gas stations, convenience stores and restaurants.
But complexity arrives because that host is only the first of a chain of participants.
The host is not the company actually building the station. That often falls to large charging-network providers, such as Tesla or EVgo. And that host often doesn’t own the land, meaning the landowner is also part of the negotiation.
“We’ve been basically tasked with creating a new product, a new something, and doing it on the fly, on private property, you know, public private partnership, something we’ve never done before,” McMillan said.
Too many cooks
State transportation projects are usually carried out by a combination of state DOT workers and large construction contractors and their subcontractors. Big construction firms are few in number, and state DOTs have long relationships with them. EV charging stations are different.
Chris Berg, director of sustainability at the Virginia DOT, marveled at the number of people involved.
“You’ve got federal government, multiple federal agencies. You’ve got, oftentimes, multiple state agencies — the DOT, sometimes the Department of Energy, sometimes the environmental department,” he said in an interview. “And then you’ve got local governments. You’ve got one, two, three private partners. You could have a site host and operator and equipment supplier, and then, you know, their subcontracting.”
It is a perhaps inevitable factor of bringing together two things that until now haven’t had much reason to mix: the electric grid and transportation, which creates all kinds of unexpected challenges.
Utilities move slowly
When the topic of electric utilities came up at the conference, it was usually joined to the phrase “early and often.”
That’s because state DOTs are finding that the single biggest bottleneck in building a charging station is getting the electric utility to build the necessary interconnections to supply at least 600 kilowatts of power, the minimum necessary for a NEVI station. And to do that, the DOT and its partners need to flood the zone with the utility — to reach out early and often.
“Even if we have the best utility partners, it can take a long time,” said Francesca Wahl, senior charging policy manager at Tesla. The automaker maintains the country’s largest network of charging stations and is a major recipient of federal charging dollars.
Power companies are facing their own challenges in an era of extraordinary electricity demand, with customers that range from data centers to EV charging stations.
Utilities plan years in advance with the goal of providing power to a well-established point on the map. But with charging stations, that point has a way of moving.
If a charging-station host backs out — because a business changes hands or a property owner gets cold feet — the charging station might wind up with a different host nearby. But when it comes to delivering lots of electrons, the transmission and distribution lines aren’t always that flexible.
That means power availability is “a very fluid and changing parameter,” said Jimmy O’Dea, assistant deputy director of transportation electrification at the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans.
Along with long planning guidelines, utilities are contending with a shortage of key equipment, like transformers, that has them waiting in line for supplies. As a result, customers can be frustrated with long lead times.
“It’s like three years,” said Jake Brown, the director of business development at Cloverland Electric Cooperative, a rural utility that serves much of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on delivering electricity to the most difficult NEVI sites.
“Given the transformers and equipment, that’s the biggest challenge we’re facing right now,” he said.
‘Learning as we go’
Despite the challenges, state officials expressed confidence that the many kinks would unkink, describing this as a necessary phase when doing something new and different.
“Sites won’t be snowflakes in the future as we — the state funding agencies, utility companies, the EV charging providers — all do more of this,” said O’Dea of Caltrans. “We’re all going to get better.”
Alex Schroeder, the chief technology officer at the Joint Office, said participants in his conference panel decided to tweak a common phrase — “mutually assured destruction” — as they prepared for the event. That phrase is a guiding principle in nuclear-weapons policy: a belief that no one will use nuclear weapons because they could destroy everyone.
Schroeder’s panel flipped the meaning. NEVI and its many partners aim for ‘’mutually assured construction,” he said, drawing laughs.
“At the end of the day, what everyone in the room is really here for — we’re here to build chargers. It’s a partnership,” Schroeder said. “We are learning as we go.”
