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Biden’s Ambitious EV Charging ‘Fantasy’ May Be On A Collision Course With Reality

Published

1 year ago

9 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By NICK POPE

 

President Joe Biden has pledged to install 500,000 public electric vehicle (EV) chargers around the U.S. by 2030, but logistical hurdles may be too much to overcome.

The Biden administration landed $7.5 billion to build out a network of public EV charging stations around the country in the bipartisan infrastructure package of 2021, but those funds have only led to a handful of operational charging stations to date. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reaffirmed the administration’s goal to build 500,000 chargers with the money by 2030 during a May television appearance on CBS News, but challenges like adding transmission lines, navigating the permitting process and coordinating with utility companies figure to make the goal improbable.

As of April 1, the administration’s $7.5 billion push had only led to seven operational charging stations combining for less than 40 chargers around the U.S., a pace that has drawn criticism from House Republicans and even Democratic Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley. While other projects are on their way to being built and operational, the nation’s EV charging infrastructure remains mostly concentrated in more densely-populated, coastal areas of the country, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

While results have been slow to materialize, federal funding should be sufficient to build approximately 25,000 charging spots at about 5,000 stations, according to Atlas Public Policy, a policy analysis organization that focuses specifically on EVs. In order to reach those figures by 2030, the administration’s funding will have to spur the construction of more than 900 stations each year until then, a big step up from the program’s output of less than 10 stations over nearly three years.

“Our programs are accelerating private sector investment that puts us on track to deploy 500,000 charging ports well ahead of schedule and continue to expand a convenient and reliable charging network,” a Department of Transportation spokesperson told the DCNF. “There are currently projects underway in partnership with states and local grantees for 14,000 federally-funded EV charging ports across the country under the [National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI)] and [Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI)] programs that will build on the 184,000 chargers operational today.”

Of the 184,000 chargers in operation today, more than 107,000 were already in circulation as of 2020, the last full year before the Biden administration took office, according to the DOE. Moreover, there are only about 10,000 fast charger stations in the U.S., a number that EV proponents would like to see increase to alleviate the public’s concerns about EV range and recharging wait times, according to The Washington Post.

Some of the biggest logistical hurdles are ones that may not be immediately obvious, such as enduring the process of building out needed transmission lines and upgrading existing utility infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of thousands of new chargers, according to experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation about whether such a number of chargers will be operational by 2030.

One skeptical expert is Dr. Jonathan Lesser, a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics and president of Continental Economics. Lesser estimates that “hundreds of thousands of miles” of new transmission lines will be needed to deliver enough electricity to the right places to meet the administration’s goal, a tall order given that the U.S. managed to complete less than 700 miles of transmission projects in 2022, according to data aggregated by Statista.

Lesser wrote his own analysis of the challenges the administration’s EV charger push faces for The Hill on Monday.

“The administration’s efforts to mandate EVs without considering the physical infrastructure to charge them (to say nothing of the cost), not only highway charging stations but also the necessary upgrades to millions of miles of local distribution circuits and transformers for home charging – is either an exercise in green virtue signaling or a cynical effort to restrict Americans’ mobility,” Lesser told the DCNF. “If EVs are the wave of the future then consumers will purchase them without the need for mandates and the private sector will develop the necessary infrastructure, just as it did a century ago and just as Tesla has done for its vehicles, without the need for government intervention.”

“If all those chargers were in place, you would need hundreds of thousands of large transformers and transmission lines along highways to provide the electricity,” Lesser continued. “You would also need linemen to install everything – and they are already in short supply. Of course, none of this addresses the issue of where the electricity comes from – if it is to be from renewables (e.g., wind and solar), there would have to be a massive building effort.”

Lesser believes there is “not a chance” that the 500,000 charger goal is met by 2030, and added that Buttigieg’s suggestion the administration will reach that target amounts to “pure fantasy.”

In addition to the billions of dollars meant to subsidize public charging infrastructure, the administration is also spending big to help manufacturers produce more EVs and to blunt the higher costs of EVs for consumers. Further, federal agencies have also promulgated aggressive fuel economy standards and tailpipe emissions rules that will force significant increases in EV sales over the next decade for light-, medium- and heavy-duty models.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm described the chargers covered by the $7.5 billion program as “the hardest ones because they’re going to places where the private sector hasn’t gone because there’s no electricity, because they’re remote” at Politico’s 2024 Energy Summit remarks on Wednesday.

Aidan Mackenzie — an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress with particular expertise covering energy, transportation and housing policy — agreed that logistical challenges are likely to hinder the administration’s goal for charger deployment by 2030. Specifically, he highlighted securing complementary infrastructure, like transmission lines, as likely to sap time and resources away from the effort to construct a national network of public chargers.

“It seems like it’s going to be hard to meet this target,” Mackenzie told the DCNF. “Different utility regions do not necessarily have an incentive to plan or build large capacity transmission lines that share power. They often interrupt the way that utilities want to control the generation in their region. So, I would very much expect that to be the binding constraint.”

However, Mackenzie added that the administration could achieve the desired results of its $7.5 billion program and its broader goal of 500,000 charger goal if regulators and builders are able to develop “muscle memory” in the earlier stages of rollout so that officials from both sectors can more easily and quickly navigate complex processes in the near future.

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Automotive

Canada’s EV Mandate Is Running On Empty

Published on December 6, 2025

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

At what point does Ottawa admit its EV plan isn’t working?

Electric vehicles produce more pollution than the gas-powered cars they’re replacing.

This revelation, emerging from life-cycle and supply chain audits, exposes the false claim behind Ottawa’s more than $50 billion experiment. A Volvo study found that manufacturing an EV generates 70 per cent more emissions than building a comparable conventional vehicle because battery production is energy-intensive and often powered by coal in countries such as China. Depending on the electricity grid, it can take years or never for an EV to offset that initial carbon debt.

Prime Minister Mark Carney paused the federal electric vehicle (EV) mandate for 2026 due to public pressure and corporate failures while keeping the 2030 and 2035 targets. The mandate requires 20 per cent of new vehicles sold in 2026 to be zero-emission, rising to 60 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035. Carney inherited this policy crisis but is reluctant to abandon it.

Industry failures and Trump tariffs forced Ottawa’s hand. Northvolt received $240 million in federal subsidies for a Quebec battery plant before filing for bankruptcy. Lion Electric burned through $100 million before announcing layoffs. Arrival, a U.K.-based electric van and bus manufacturer, collapsed entirely. Stellantis and LG Energy Solution extracted $15 billion for Windsor. Volkswagen secured $13 billion for St. Thomas.

The federal government committed more than $50 billion in subsidies and tax credits to prop up Canada’s EV industry. Ottawa defended these payouts as necessary to match the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which offers major incentives for EV and battery manufacturing. That is twice Manitoba’s annual operating budget. Every Manitoban could have had a two-year tax holiday with the public money Ottawa wasted on EVs.

Even with incentives, EVs reached only 15 per cent of new vehicle sales in 2024, far short of the mandated levels for 2026 and 2030. When federal subsidies ended in January 2025, sales collapsed to nine per cent, revealing the true level of consumer demand. Dealer lots overflowed with unsold inventory. EV sales also slowed in the U.S. and Europe in 2024, showing that cooling demand is a broader trend.

As economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Politicians and bureaucrats cannot know what millions of Canadians know about their own needs. When federal ministers mandate which vehicles Canadians must buy and which companies deserve billions, they substitute the judgment of a few hundred officials for the collective wisdom of an entire market.

Bureaucrats draft regulations that determine the vehicles Canadians must purchase years from now, as if they can predict technology and consumer preferences better than markets.

Green ideology provided perfect cover. Invoke a climate emergency and fiscal responsibility vanishes. Question more than $50 billion in subsidies and you are labelled a climate denier. Point out the environmental costs of battery production, and you are accused of spreading misinformation.

History repeatedly teaches that central planning always fails. Soviet five-year plans, Venezuela’s resource nationalization and Britain’s industrial policy failures all show the same pattern. Every attempt to run economies from political offices ends in misallocation, waste and outcomes opposite to those promised. Concentrated political power cannot ever match the intelligence of free markets responding to real prices and constraints.

Markets collect information that no central planner can access. Prices signal scarcity and value. Profits and losses reward accuracy and punish error. When governments override these mechanisms with mandates and subsidies, they impair the information system that enables rational economic decisions.

The EV mandate forced a technological shift and failed. Billions in subsidies went to failing companies. Taxpayers absorbed losses while corporations walked away. Workers lost their jobs.

Canada needs a full repeal of the EV mandate and a retreat from PMO planners directing market decisions. The law must be struck, not paused. The contrived 2030 and 2035 targets must be abandoned.

Markets, not cabinet ministers, must determine what technologies Canadians choose.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).

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Automotive

Trump Deals Biden’s EV Dreams A Death Blow

Published on December 6, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

President Donald Trump dealt the dreams of former President Joe Biden for an all-electric fleet of American cars a fatal blow on Thursday by terminating the onerous Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards Biden invoked in 2022 and further tightened in 2024.

“We’re officially terminating Joe Biden’s ridiculously burdensome, horrible actually, CAFE standards, that imposed expensive restrictions… It puts tremendous pressure on upward car prices,” Trump said during a press conference held in the Oval Office Thursday afternoon.

The Biden standards, which cranked down on allowable tailpipe emissions and raised industry-wide average car mileage to a stratospheric 50.4 miles per gallon requirement by 2030, were the centerpiece of his strategy to force American consumers to buy electric vehicles by intentionally forcing up prices for traditional internal combustion models.

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That’s right, America: Your government, led by Joe Biden’s autopen and the woke staffers who wielded it, intentionally and with malice aforethought drove up the prices of the gas powered cars you actually want to buy to try to force you to purchase electric models that poll after poll proves most of you don’t want. They did this all in the name of the global climate alarm religion, which far too many U.S. politicians use to justify a vast array of authoritarian actions.

The unbridled hubris involved in even entertaining this concept would have in the past been considered scandalous. Yet, today, it is completely in keeping with one of the central goals of the energy transition movement to drive up the costs of all traditional forms of energy to try to make the subsidized alternatives favored by the Democratic Party – wind, solar, and electric vehicles – competitive in the market. Activists in the climate alarm movement no longer even try to deny this goal – they proudly boast about it.

This was the real enterprise behind Biden’s ridiculous CAFE standards, and it is what President Trump interrupted on Thursday. It was just the latest in a series of body blows Trump and his officials have dealt the U.S. EV industry, one that could well prove fatal to many pure-play electric car companies and force major reallocations of capital budgets inside integrated automakers like Ford, GM, and Stellantis.

Naturally, the climate alarm activist community was outraged. “Trump’s action will feed America’s destructive use of oil, while hamstringing us in the green tech race against … foreign carmakers,” said Dan Becker, Director of the notorious far-left conflict group, the Center for Biological Diversity, according to the Guardian.

But here’s the thing: U.S. consumers don’t want to buy the alternative the climate alarm community and Biden administration were trying to force. Even with the attraction of Biden’s economically ruinous $7,500 per unit IRA subsidies, U.S. car buyers made clear their strong preference for big, full-size, gas-or-diesel-powered pickups and SUVs.

This reality is why Stellantis announced in September it was abandoning plans to introduce a full-size electric pickup to compete with Ford’s F-150 Lightning. Even worse for EV boosters, Ford has already cut back on production of the Lightning model, and is planning to eliminate it entirely soon, according to the Wall Street Journal. These decisions and plans were already underway long before Trump’s decision to rescind the CAFE standards, based on simple consumer demand.

Interestingly, many consumers believe Trump didn’t go far enough on Thursday, and that he should simply eliminate mileage requirements altogether. One commenter to my Substack newsletter writes, “why didn’t they just kill CAFE standards once and for all? From what clause in the Constitution does the federal government have the right to limit what type of car I can buy?…They should have just killed it outright.”

It’s a legitimate question: Why do federal regulators believe they have the right to control consumer behavior in the name of climate alarmism? In light of last year’s decision by the Supreme Court to rescind the Chevron deference – which helped facilitate the massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy for 40 long years – it’s a question that could be litigated in the months and years to come.

Joe Biden’s EV dreams are dead now, but that doesn’t mean the situation can’t possibly get even worse for the EV industry in America. Stay tuned.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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