Why Buc-ee's is picking a fight with Gov. Ron DeSantis

Updated: 1:50 p.m., Sept. 17, 2024

One promise of President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure law was to create a nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers, so that motorists traveling across the country wouldn’t have to worry about finding a place to refuel. Congress left the job of building that network to the states.

Now, nearly three years later, when EVs have emerged as a political point of contention, the states are in vastly different places in preparing that network.

As expected, the early years of the program were preoccupied with planning. The federal government had to write specifications for the chargers. Then the states had to submit plans for how they were going to deploy them along key corridors. Only then could state transportation departments—many of which had little or no experience dealing with electric charging equipment—ask contractors to bid on the work.

A dozen states haven’t even made it that far. Idaho, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming have still not issued a single request for proposals on the nationwide charging program, according to EVAdoption, a private company that provides data and forecasts on the EV industry.

By comparison, Colorado, Connecticut and Pennsylvania are on their third round of seeking bids to build fast chargers along major interstates.

The majority of states, though, have just started to gear up. Twenty-nine states have completed one round of request for proposals, according to EVAdoption.

Loren McDonald, the CEO of EVAdoption, says many factors appear to be contributing to the slow rollout in those dozen states that haven’t put out RFPs. “In some cases, they haven’t prioritized it. In some states, they don’t have the expertise in charging,” he said. “In a few cases, it’s hard to tell if politics are involved or if they’re just moving slowly, trying to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.”

Is Politics Delaying the Roll Out of EV Chargers?

Politics appears to be at play in at least a handful of states.

In Florida, which has the second-most EVs of any state in the country, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has routinely criticized the Biden administration and the infrastructure law for imposing the president’s ideology on states. It has rejected carbon reduction funds in the infrastructure law, sued the Biden administration 50 times and put up a state website that panned the administration for trying to “impede states’ rights, advance a social agenda, and politicize the nation's transportation infrastructure.”

The site doesn’t mention the charging program, but it does argue that “the federal government's obsession with electric vehicles is increasingly becoming an obsession that [helps] China.” Florida, on the other hand, is “emphasizing the importance of ‘fuel freedom’ and consumer choice,” it says.

Michael Williams, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Transportation, noted in an email to Route Fifty that the federal government updated its regulations governing the charging program this June. 

“As this is a newly created program with many requirements, it is important that FDOT completes our due diligence to ensure we are effectively planning the proper use of tax-payer dollars, especially as we have already seen individual projects delivered under this program costing millions of dollars,” Williams wrote. “As custom department practice, FDOT takes a thoughtful and strategic approach to all programs and projects we develop, including researching best practices and exploring innovative opportunities.”

But Florida’s slow rollout has upset gas station owners in the state, who want to get a share of the EV charging business. The $5 billion for states in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, formula program allows chargers to be built by private entities, if the owners put up a 20% match. The group of gas stations including Wawa, Buc-ee’s and Busy Bee see the program as a way to allow them to compete with the local power company, which now operates more than 1,000 charging stations.

“Florida has countless businesses that would love to use NEVI funds to help build out the state’s EV charging infrastructure, the same way that businesses in other states are,” said Charge Ahead Partnership Executive Director Jay Smith in a June statement. “It’s unfortunate that the state has still not issued an application for funds, while states like Ohio are opening NEVI-funded chargers.”

In Wyoming, on the other hand, the concern is that there are too few EVs in the state to make stations that meet federal standards financially viable. The NEVI program requires each charging location to have four fast chargers—which draw far more power than the slow chargers you can install in your home garage. There has to be one of those sites every 50 miles on key interstate corridors. But Wyoming has only 800 registered EV owners.

A Goal of 500,000 Public Chargers

The 2021 infrastructure law designated $7.5 billion over five years to build out charging stations for vehicles running on electricity, hydrogen and other alternative fuels.

The vast majority of that—$5 billion—is dedicated to the NEVI formula program, which is designed to build chargers along key highways nationwide. States will automatically receive their allotments of that money, as long as they submit plans for their networks and update the federal government on their progress.

The NEVI program and another $2.5 billion for local governments and community groups to help underserved areas are part of the Biden administration’s strategy for increasing the number of public chargers in the country to 500,000 by 2030. There are currently about 78,000 in service.

Many states are just now starting to open up NEVI-funded chargers. There are 19 sites in nine states online, with a total of 69 chargers. Ohio has five sites up and running, with 24 chargers, while New York has three sites with a total of 12 chargers.

The NEVI program requires states to first build out charging corridors along major highways. Once that is complete, they can use remaining funds for other charging deployments. Only one state, Rhode Island, has so far been certified as having completed its highway corridor buildout, McDonald said.

But many industry experts said they have always expected the program would be slow to get up and running. The process of getting chargers in the ground required state and federal officials to navigate the complexity of creating a new government program, extending and upgrading the electric grid to the sites, and shepherding the program through government procurement processes.

Andrew Wishnia, a private consultant who helped shape the infrastructure law as the former deputy assistant transportation secretary for climate policy in the Biden administration, said he expected the rollout of NEVI-funded chargers to pick up speed soon.

“There are 69 chargers today that have used federal funding to be deployed,” Wishnia said. “There are going to be hundreds by the end of the year, thousands by next year and hundreds of thousands by 2030 in order to reach the president’s goal of 500,000 chargers. We’re well on our way.”

Pushing Toward the 2030 Goal

Wishnia said one way states can speed up the deployment of chargers is to streamline the process for finalizing contracts once an announcement has been made. In many cases, that can take several months, which can significantly slow down a project.

Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the Electrification Coalition, said it was “unfortunate” that EVs have become a political “wedge issue,” but he said public expectations about how quickly the chargers could be installed might be unrealistic.

“Everyone should have done a better job of saying this is a brand new, big-formula program that has to roll out to DOTs, and DOTs traditionally haven’t been involved in fueling. They don’t normally do charging infrastructure,” he said. “There’s a learning curve that has to take place, and it makes sense that it was going to take a while for that to be developed.”

“[The program is] going to build a national charging network. It’s going to help connect communities. And it’s going to ensure that we can drive anywhere in an EV,” Prochazka continued, “but it’s not going to happen overnight, and nor should it. We should do this in a thoughtful and smart way.”

Taking time to roll out the program deliberately will make sure that the chargers can be used by everyone, that they can charge quickly and that they are adequately maintained so that they are dependable, Prochazka explained.

“We all want things to move faster,” he said. “But this is about building something that will be resilient and meet the needs of consumers and fleets across the country.”

Republican officials have increasingly raised concerns about government enticements to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, and the platform the GOP adopted at its convention criticized the Biden administration’s push to speed that transition.

At the same time, though, many Republican states have attracted new auto and battery factories that depend on federal subsidies and wider public adoption of electric vehicles.

Theoretically, if states decline to use their NEVI funding, the federal Transportation Department can take it back and redistribute it, under a provision included in the infrastructure law. But Prochazka said that scenario is unlikely. “The idea is that we still want EVs to be a 50-state effort because it needs to be,” he said. “So there’s going to be more effort to try and fix problems than to cut people off.”

Prochazka said that the transition to electric vehicles is crucial for the future of U.S. manufacturing and automotive leadership. And building the charging networks can spur EV adoption while boosting local economies. “I think states are mostly going to get there and mostly doing a good job,” he said. “But we just need some states to move a little faster.”