The U.S. Will Use $5 Billion To Build New EV Infrastructure
The money will go towards building new chargers nationwide
The state of EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. is, as we in the biz say, not great. A patchwork of efforts from charging providers and auto manufacturers has left owners of electric vehicles with a mess of apps, maps, and third-party sites to sort through, just to plug in their cars. Yet, for all that complexity, most of the country still has a dearth of chargers — making EVs not just impractical, but borderline impossible to own.
An effort from the Biden administration, however, seeks to change that. The most recent infrastructure bill (the one that passed last year, not the one that was introduced at the same time but died off this year, keep up) allocated billions of dollars in federal funds for EV infrastructure. Now the Department of Transportation has announced a $5 billion plan to fund charging stations nationwide, starting with over $600 million this year.
The program, which will spread that $5 billion investment over the next five years, is designed to build EV charging infrastructure in every state. It's focused around chargers on or near interstate highways, and within something the administration is calling "Alternative Fuel Corridors." It seems those corridors have yet to be defined, but the process of creating them appears to be currently underway.
While the U.S.'s current EV charging network leaves a lot to be desired, this sort of investment can go a long way towards fixing that — and making EVs a practical choice for far more Americans. Now if we could just get clean energy to power those chargers, things could really start shaping up well.