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The federal government today awarded an additional $521 million in funding for electric vehicle charging stations, the latest tranche of a $7.5 billion program authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that aims to expand fast chargers along highways and bring charging infrastructure to underserved communities.
$321 million from today's announcement will be spent on 41 different projects across the country – these projects are a mix of Level 2 AC chargers as well as DC fast chargers. The remaining $200 million will continue to fund DC fast chargers along designated highway corridors.
The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which administers the federal funds, cited a $15 million project to install chargers at 53 locations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a $3.9 million project to install publicly accessible chargers on the Sioux Reservation in North Dakota as examples of recent contracts.
“Today's investments in public charging stations fill critical gaps and lay the foundation for a zero-emissions future where everyone can choose whether or not to drive an electric car. That means more individual convenience, lower fuel costs and cleaner air and lower healthcare costs for all Americans,” said Gabe Kline, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.
The Biden administration has set a goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle chargers nationwide by 2030. The latest data from the Joint Office shows there are more than 189,000 chargers nationwide, although fewer than 44,000 of them are DC fast chargers.
But there have been real improvements in recent years – 56 percent of the busiest highways have a fast charger every 50 miles, up from 38 percent in January 2021. And in June, another 3,000 charging stations were added to the national network, it said. Additional funding went to repair or upgrade existing infrastructure, starting with a currently non-operational site in Washington, DC.
At the same time, progress on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) highway charging program has not been particularly rapid. NEVI funds are administered by states, similar to how they administer federal highway funds, and the additional layers of bureaucracy have meant that the first NEVI-funded charging station—in Ohio—did not come online until mid-December 2023.