https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment...prog-grant.cfm
Thousands of EV chargers across the US are broken and unreliable. The U.S. Department of Transportation just gave several states and local governments money to fix them.
Yesterday, the Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility Accelerator Program (#RAA) awarded $150M to 14 state DOTs and 10 local entities to "improve the reliability of existing charging infrastructure" through "repair[ing] or replac[ing] broken or non-operational electric vehicle charging ports."
A few questions that came to mind, given what I’ve learned about #NEVI so far:
1. Round 1 of NEVI funding prioritized setting up funding along the alternative fuel corridors (AFCs). Will recipients of RAA similarly prioritize repairing/replacing chargers located along AFCs?
2. NEVI Standards and Regulations include a 97% minimum uptime requirement. Are chargers that are repaired/replaced through RAA funds subject to this same requirement?
3. How do we ensure the thousands of chargers that are currently being installed will have maintenance scoped into their budgets? Ideally, the chargers being installed today through #NEVI funding won’t require $100M+ in grant funding to be replaced a few years later.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5...8Q2rJeO06NVEr4
The RAA funds are specifically targeted at a known list of charging units that were listed as Temporarily Unavailable in the national AFDC database on a specific date in October 2023. Most of these are L2 units. Since the AFCs are a NEVI DCFC focus, I highly doubt there is much overlap. If there is, it's very small!
The RAA docs do say that units updated must meet NEVI's 97% uptime requirements, but there is no real enforcement mechanism in either NEVI or the RAA (shameless plug: Our software can be used by states to audit these station's uptime and reliability). The RAA docs actually go beyond just NEVI uptime and say that all units modified must meet *all* NEVI requirements, including upgrading any DCFC stations from 2 to 4 ports. That could be a win for a few award recipients.
Year 6 is pivotal for both NEVI and RAA. That's when the government funding runs out and we get to see which local and state governments are truly supporting the electric transition for the long term!
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