For all the concern about lost federal funding courtesy of the Republican trifecta in Washington, Massachusetts still has not deployed a single electric vehicle charger through a Biden-era program that President Trump has left intact.
The Bay State is sitting on the roughly $64 million it was awarded through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a $5 billion federal initiative authorized through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law meant to strategically dot the nation’s major highways with charging infrastructure that would make it easier for EV drivers to reliably travel greater distances.
Two years ago, Massachusetts selected three vendors to identify locations for NEVI charging stations and then build and maintain them. Only contracts with two of those companies, however — Applegreen and Global Partners — are signed, the state’s Department of Transportation confirmed to CommonWealth Beacon, leaving open questions about the viability of the third vendor, Weston & Sampson.
Now, nearly four years after receiving federal approvals, no EV chargers on Massachusetts’s major roadways through NEVI are up and running, MassDOT also confirmed.
It’s not clear what exactly is causing the holdup. CommonWealth Beacon filed a public records request to view the contracts with the two companies to ascertain whether there are deadlines associated with charger installations, but MassDOT did not provide those contracts in time for publication.
“The slowness of adoption here is mystifying,” said Jim Aloisi, a former state transportation secretary who now lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the board of the advocacy group TransitMatters. “If your approach to transportation sector decarbonization is largely about the transition to EVs, then you should be spending a fair amount of effort accelerating the process of getting people to adopt EVs, and one way to do that is obviously to roll out the NEVI initiative. That’s the disconnect.”
MassDOT didn’t respond to questions about why the pace of NEVI work has been so slow. The department’s “conservative” projections in 2022 found that NEVI funding would be sufficient for building 92 charging ports.
More Context
Published by MassINC