Electric vehicle drivers traversing Massachusetts on the state’s major highways could find themselves facing one of EV owners’ biggest fears: a lack of chargers to ensure they can safely make it from point A to point B.  

The state has made significant progress over the past decade in making it easier for motorists to afford to purchase an electric vehicle and install chargers in homes. 

But Massachusetts has yet to tap funding from a key federal program to install chargers throughout the state’s network of major highways, the state’s Department of Transportation confirmed to CommonWealth Beacon.   

And now, the implosion of a major contract the state awarded to redevelop 18 service plazas along the Massachusetts Turnpike is bound to push back the installation of even more EV chargers.  

“All these things together make it harder to achieve our deployment goals,” said Eric Bourassa, director of transportation at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and a member of the state’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Coordinating Council.  

Those delays underscore the challenges facing the state in cutting pollution from the transportation sector, which accounts for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts at 37 percent. Widespread adoption of electric vehicles is a crucial part of those efforts, but the state remains far off its goals for the chargers needed to both increase consumer confidence in the technology and power the vehicles once they are on the road.   

There were 9,413 publicly accessible charging ports in Massachusetts as of May, the fourth-highest rate per capita in the country, but the state would need to triple its annual rate of new charging deployments through 2030 to achieve its climate commitments, according to the most recent state data. 

• Bluesky
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Published by MassINC