This site has previously reported on the Biden Administration’s plans to get half a million commercial electric vehicle charging stations built by 2030. But, according to The Washington Post, they aren’t getting a great start on the job!

Biden promised to install thousands of EV charging stations. Only 7 have been built.

The network of fast chargers promised by the Biden Administration has had a painfully slow rollout

by Shannon Osaka | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | 4:51 PM EDT

President Biden has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030. Those stations, the White House said, would help Americans feel confident purchasing and driving electric cars, and help the country cut carbon pollution.

But now, more than two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to help build out those stations, only 7 EV charging stations are operational across four states. And as the Biden administration rolls out its new rules for emissions from cars and trucks — which will require a lot more electric cars and hybrids on the road — the sluggish build-out could slow the transition to electric cars.

“I think a lot of people who are watching this are getting concerned about the timeline,” said Alexander Laska, deputy director for transportation and innovation at the center-left think tank Third Way.

But after two years, that program has only delivered 7 open charging stations with a total of 38 spots where drivers can charge their vehicles, according to a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration. (The funding should be enough to build up to 20,000 charging spots or around 5,000 stations, according to analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy.) Stations are open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and under construction in four other states.

Not only did we report on the charging stations being built at Wawas in Pennsylvania, but we also noted a report in The Wall Street Journal that investors are losing faith that commercial charging stations will be profitable.

Think about that. The federal government is providing grants, not loans, to build these places, and investors are still not seeing that these places will be very profitable.

Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations; 17 states have not yet issued proposals.

There’s always the problem of government inefficiency, and here we have not one, but two levels of government involved: the feds with money, the states having to come up with plans, then the feds have to review the plans for approval.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97 percent of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.

The article tells readers that many of the non-Tesla charging stations have reliability issues, and that J D Power has estimated that only 80% of charging tries actually work.

But it’s the requirement that these stations be built no more than a mile from an interstate highway. Here’s a map of the interstate highway system in the Bluegrass State, and it only takes a glance to see that the vast majority of Kentucky, a state of mostly small towns, is a long way from an interstate highway. Some of the US highways shown could be considered “major,” as another part of the article states, but even some shown in the southeastern part of the Commonwealth are two-lane, not four-lane roads. Would you buy a Chevy Dolt if you lived in Irvine, Kentucky, 24 miles from the nearest interchange with Interstate 75, unless you were able to install an at-home charging unit?

A gasoline station is simpler, and well-known, engineering, and that’s part of the reason that they are all over the place. More, they do not take that much power to run them, while, “each charging spot will require the same maximum power as around 20 homes — a huge lift for local utilities not used to installing chargers.” It’s not just the commercial charging station which has to be built, but the electric company needs to be able to deliver the power required to run it.

It doesn’t take much to see that these requirements were designed and written by urban dwellers. Not everyone lives in a major city.