The Biden government promises five billion dollars for electric car charging stations on the trunk road network, thereby answering one of the hot questions about the traffic turnaround: What role does the state have in setting up a charging network?
Will you soon be driving electric? An interstate freeway at rush hour, Los Angeles, July 2015.
Joe Biden was fed up with the chicken-and-egg discussion: For too long, drivers said they would gladly buy electric cars if only there were enough charging stations. And for too long companies said they would like to build charging stations if only there were enough electric cars on the streets.
On Thursday, the Biden government approved a subsidy package for building a national network of charging stations on interstate highways. Cost: five billion dollars. This means that parking spaces are to be built every 80 kilometers on roads with the highest volume of traffic, where electric cars can be charged at fast charging stations.
The member states are responsible for the implementation of the subsidy program. They can now present their plans for the charging network to the federal government and charge them up to 80 percent of the costs.
After years of discussions about what role the state should play in promoting charging stations, the Biden government has now made a decision. It thus determines the general conditions for charging stations and the associated service areas, which are likely to develop into a billion-dollar market in the coming years.
Charging stations at home would actually be more effective
With the decision to only subsidize charging stations on freeways and not those within cities or even individual buildings, the Biden government is acting out of political calculations.
One study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is based among other things on the evaluation of large amounts of GPS data, recently examined which measures are key to enable as many people as possible to switch to an electric car. The researchers cite the possibility of charging at home as the first measure.
This is not surprising, given that many drivers find it most convenient to plug their vehicle in overnight. In addition, the range of electric cars today is far greater than that 62 kilometers that Americans drive on average per daywhich means that the average driver never has to drive to a charging station on an average day, provided they find a car with a fully charged battery in the morning.
But “lantern parkers”, i.e. car owners who do not have their own garage but park their car overnight on the side of the road or in communal parking spaces, do not have access to their own charging station. Parking spaces with electricity would have to be created for them in the immediate vicinity of their place of residence. An impossibility for the government, after all it affects millions of vehicles in the USA.
Charging stations on motorways soon unnecessary?
Instead, the Biden administration is focusing on the second recommendation of the study: the establishment of fast charging stations on freeways. This is intended to take away range anxiety from electric car drivers – i.e. the fear of being stuck without electricity on the few days on which they actually drive further than one battery charge.
According to the MIT study, this approach has one major disadvantage. Because the more modern and powerful the cars become, the less the charging stations on the motorway are needed. If the batteries get better, drivers can drive as far as they want and then recharge their cars overnight.
So is the Biden administration investing billions in taxes in a technology that could soon be overtaken by progress? The study only provides a cautious answer to this: It is likely that cheap electric cars in particular will not have sufficient range for a while. So there will probably be a need for charging stations on the motorway.
State funds are intended to catalyze private investments
The Biden government now wants to finance around 500,000 charging stations from the new subsidy pot. They are to be built within five years. This would increase the number of publicly accessible charging stations in the US from around 110,000 today by about six times – and you could get from Washington to San Diego and from Seattle to Miami without burning a drop of gasoline.
But there is a catch. The money from the subsidy pot is loud enough forecasts by the Atlas Public Policy think tank. In order to be able to meet the increasing demand for charging stations, infrastructure investments of around 87 billion dollars will be necessary over the next ten years. So far, the subsidy program has only covered about 5 percent of the expected costs.
Mobility experts and lobbyists in various American media have therefore already demanded more money from the state. However, the purpose of subsidies is not to cover the entire market. The Biden government only wants to use the payments to generate a critical mass of electric car drivers so that the private sector can start investing in charging stations on a large scale. So it’s not primarily about creating a new, constant spending item for the government, but about catalyzing investment by companies.
Elon Musk is fundamentally against subsidies
Whether this actually works the way the Biden government envisions it remains their bet with the future for the time being. Finally, subsidies can also create unexpected market distortions and hamper competition, for example among operators of today’s charging stations. Nevertheless languages Economically liberal organizations such as the Boston Consulting Group also advocate that the state should play a role as a catalyst for the development of a charging network. This is especially true given the urgency of climate change.
In addition, there is democratic support in the USA for the state to play an active role in promoting electromobility. The subsidy program is part of the infrastructure package that was passed by Congress in November after lengthy discussions.
Meanwhile, criticism of the subsidies has come from an unexpected source. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company is expected to benefit significantly from the new charging network, spoke out against state funding for charging stations after the parliamentary debates on the infrastructure package. Asked about the subsidies, Musk said in one video interview with the «Wall Street Journal»: «Unnecessary. Do we need subsidies for petrol stations? No. There is no need to subsidize a network of charging stations.”
However, some of the Republican politicians who once held this position in Parliament are now expressing themselves with caution about the infrastructure package. They were against it in the vote, but are now lobbying the government for their regions of origin to be given special consideration when the money is distributed. The normal political madness in the distribution of subsidies.