One of the biggest pieces of Biden's plan to transition America to renewable energy is a push to supercharge the adoption of electric vehicles. The EV market has matured, with car makers offering a wider range of options, but big American producers like Ford and General Motors have recently put the brakes on some EV production, delaying new models and pivoting to hybrid vehicles, citing weakening consumer demand. But the government can't wait for corporations to build the infrastructure needed for the electrified future of automobiles. 

The administration's goals for EVs are ambitious and well funded. $7.5 billion from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was allocated to help states build out the crucial framework for charging stations needed to encourage EV purchases and allay “range anxiety” — the worry that an EV will run out of juice before reaching its destination or a charging station. 

But three years since the infrastructure bill was signed into law, the promised EV-charger rollout is happening at a glacial pace. We took a deep dive into the latest data to see where things stand today. 

Infrastructure weak

Before this big federal push to electrify America's roads, the first wave of EV chargers mainly consisted of Tesla-only fast-charging stations and slower Level 2 chargers, which can take several hours to charge a vehicle from empty to 80%. Today you might find a few Level 2 chargers at hotels, your local library, municipal parking lots, or car dealerships. 

But in order for the public to take the leap over to electric, they need to know that they'll be able to find a charger when on a long road trip (even though most Americans drive only 20 to 30 miles per day on average). 

To get there, the $7.5 billion pot is split into two buckets spread over five years: $2.5 billion for the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary-grant program, and $5 billion for a formula-grant program called the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure plan, or NEVI — a robust EV-charging backbone along our nation's highways. To prioritize EV chargers, as well as hydrogen, propane, and natural-gas fueling locations, the Federal Highway Administration mapped out a network of major highways they call Alternative Fuel Corridors. 

The idea behind NEVI is to make sure our interstate highways have lots of chargers — every 50 miles, according to the plan — and that they are within a mile from an AFC roadway with signage telling you how to find them. 

The plan calls for 500,000 American-assembled chargers by 2030 with an emphasis on Level 3 DC fast chargers, which can charge your EV from empty to 80% in about 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the car. These chargers will be publicly available 24/7 and also need to be maintained, as the rule requires 97% uptime. The rules for qualifying chargers also mandate a contactless payment method accepting debit and credit cards, and that membership should not be required for use.  

The US government isn't building and installing these chargers themselves but rather distributing money to the states, which then contract with companies to install them. Each state needs to submit an annual plan to the FHWA detailing how they will use the money. In addition to the details of where the chargers will go, these plans include such details as public engagement, cybersecurity, trained charger-repair technicians, coordination with local utilities, tribal governments, and, notably, disadvantaged communities.

The plans have protections in place to ensure that disadvantaged communities aren't left behind from all this spending. “Justice40” is a cross-agency federal initiative that requires 40% of spending on clean energy and other climate-change solutions to reach “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” a White House environmental-justice fact sheet announced.

What US charging infrastructure looks like today

As of today, the US Department of Energy reports that there are 66,869 charging stations, with 185,528 available charging ports at those stations. When you plot out how many chargers have been installed each year, the number is growing steadily, but for the US to get 500,000 chargers by 2030 seems unlikely. As for what this looks like on the ground, this March, only seven charging stations in four states funded by the effort were operational. 

In a statement to Sherwood News, the Joint Office of Transportation and Energy, which is coordinating this effort, insisted that the pace is quickening and that they're ahead of schedule. 

“Currently 77 NEVI-funded EV charging ports are operational across 19 charging stations located in nine states, and we are expecting this number to continue to grow rapidly, with 32 states having announced conditional or final awards for 796 charging-station locations, amounting to about 3,200 fast-charging ports,” a spokesperson for the office said. They added that “nearly 1,000 new public chargers” come online every week, “thanks to a combination of direct federal funding, federal tax incentives, state and local funding, and private investment.”

Recently, the Department of Transportation announced $1.3 billion in awards through the CFI program, which funds EV chargers and other alternative-fuel infrastructure for public facilities and communities, “especially in areas where the private sector may not go,” the Joint Office statement said.   

Zooming out to look across America's highways, the Alternative Fuel Corridor data shows that only about 30% of the routes meet the requirements as of this July. But as the Joint Office spokesperson said, “states and localities are now in the driver's seat,” since the first $2.4 billion of federal funding has been distributed. All 50 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico) have gotten approval from the FHWA for the first two rounds of their NEVI plans.

Progress on building out these electrified corridors is not evenly distributed. Only one state has completed all their AFC miles: Rhode Island. But to be fair, being the smallest state in the US, they had only 44 miles to electrify. DC has 27 total miles, but only about half of them have the proper signage so far. Other states have had a slower start.   

Six states — Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming — report zero miles of ready AFC roadways. 

Jessica Dilley, director of alternative program deliveries at the Mississippi Department of Transportation, said all states didn't start from the same place. In an interview with Sherwood News, she said other states had existing staff working on EV plans which gave them a big head start. “We didn't have any EV plans already in place for our state. So we already kind of knew we were not a state that was on the forefront of the EV-infrastructure implementation,” Dilley said.

Dilley said Mississippi is on track to implement the program according to its timeline, considering the time it took to build up their team. “It's taken us about this much time to get our state established, to install a new program from the ground up,” Dilley said.

Ben Murphy, electric vehicles planner at the Montana Department of Transportation, said in a statement to Sherwood News that NEVI's unique conditions “required the development of new solicitation and contract templates, which we are close on finalizing.” 

Murphy said the state, which currently has zero miles of “corridor ready” AFC routes, will initially focus on interstate highways. “Once the solicitation goes out this fall and awards are made, construction will begin — the first step in working towards 'corridor ready' status,” Murphy said. 

Find-a-charger

As all these new chargers are being built, it can be hard to find existing EV chargers. While there are many apps to help drivers find the smattering of chargers that are out there, they can be literally hard to find. Unlike gas stations which are predictably omnipresent, chargers are sometimes tucked away in weird spots. 

The Department of Energy maintains a database of every public charging station. About a quarter of the stations in the data also list the type of facility where the station is located. The most common facilities were hotels, followed by car dealerships.

Up to the states 

“Things are not going as fast as we would like them to be,” Tony Dutzik, associate director of Frontier Group, a public-policy think tank, said in an interview with Sherwood News. Dutzik said that while progress has been slower than expected, the way it's implemented matters a lot. 

Dutzik emphasized that while the federal government created the plan, it's up to the states to actually deliver this EV infrastructure to citizens. “States are moving at different speeds. There are some states that already have chargers in the ground. There are some states that don't even have solicitations out the door yet,” Dutzik said.

“Ultimately, when it comes to transitioning to electric vehicles, it's a marathon, not a sprint, and doing it right and doing it quickly are both extremely important.”

Update (Oct. 3, 2024): This story has been updated to correct a few data points. An earlier version omitted Arkansas as a state with zero AFC miles and miscalculated some of the ready AFC miles in the table. The map mislabeled some routes as ready.