On Thursday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that building eight electric vehicle charging stations so far under the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7.5 billion investment in electric vehicle charging stations is “on track.” Because most construction will occur in the second half of the decade.
Co-host Joe Kernen asked, “[O]ur designs on electrification of the auto industry, have we recalibrated there? And I’ll just give you one item and you can — maybe you can explain why, but under the Inflation Reduction Act, 7.5 billion for building these charging stations. The latest information, eight have been built with the 7.5 billion that had been allocated. You’re supposed to get to 500,000 of these charging stations by 2030. What is really the problem with — do you — have you looked at that and figured out why?”
Buttigieg responded, “Oh yeah, that’s on track. So, we’re at about 190,000 publicly available charging stations in the U.S. That’s approximately double what the level was when President Biden came in. The issue, though, is that there are some gaps in the market, ones that are just not going to be built by the private sector that’s been building the construction of those chargers to date. That’s why the legislation provided for funding to do federally-supported chargers that are intended to be online before 2030. Now, the bulk of that construction will happen in ’27, ’28, quite a bit, actually, I expect by 2026. A handful, as you mentioned, are actually already up and running. But really what you’re going to see is more in the second half of this decade. And it’s really important to have those federally-supported chargers, because you have stretches of road or even just in the middle of our cities, apartment buildings, places in our economy where it just doesn’t yet pencil out for there to be the private sector profitably doing that. And even though about 80% of EV charging happens at home, the reality is that the new EV kind of landscape we’re working toward where the president’s goal is about half of sales to be EVs by the end of this decade requires us, by the end of this decade, to have a lot of charging apparatus that just isn’t there as we’re sitting here in 2024.”
