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A podcast by GBH News reporter Ian Coss gives this notorious project a long-overdue reappraisal. Bonus: The show comes with lessons for climate infrastructure projects of the future.
If you’ve lived in Massachusetts at any point in the last 50 years, you’ve heard of the Big Dig. It’s infamous — a tunnel project that was supposed to bury an elevated highway in Boston to the tune of $2 billion that eventually ballooned in cost to $15 billion and took a quarter of a century to finish.
The Big Dig was more than just a highway project, though. It was a monumental effort that Ian Coss, a reporter at GBH News, calls a “renovation of downtown Boston.” The project built tunnels and bridges, yes, but it also created parks, public spaces, and mass transit options that transformed the city. In a nine-episode podcast series appropriately called The Big Dig, Coss dives into the long, complicated history of the project, making a case for why the Big Dig was so much more than the boondoggle people think it was.
I talked to Coss about how the Big Dig came to be and the lessons we can learn from it as we continue to adapt our built environment to a changing climate. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved to Boston for college in 2010, and I remember going to the North End and being struck by how beautiful it was. I didn’t realize how recently that view had changed until I listened to your podcast — I mean, the Big Dig had only wrapped up a few years earlier.
It’s easy to forget how quickly it transformed. I grew up in Massachusetts, so when I would come into the city I would see [the Big Dig] being built — I have vague memories of the elevated artery. And when I moved to Boston Proper in 2013, which was less than a decade after the project wrapped, it was stunning for me to be like, “oh, this is what that project was,” because I definitely didn’t understand it at the time.
What made you decide to create an entire podcast about this “renovation” of Boston?
I think part of it was this disconnect where I grew up hearing about the Big Dig and mostly hearing bad things about it — it was behind schedule, it was a disaster, a boondoggle, etc. — because that really was the reputation of the project, nationally and locally. And then moving to the city and seeing the fruits of it, it was hard to reconcile those things. Like, this “disaster” created a greenway through the middle of the city. Now you can actually get to the airport.
What was driving that narrative of its being a disaster?
The Big Dig went on a very long emotional journey. It started as this kind of visionary, idealistic project championed by activists and supported by politicians of both parties. And then, after navigating the process of funding, permitting, contracting, managing, and designing, by the time it's in construction, it really is not a source of pride.
There are a number of technical things about the Big Dig that could have been done better, and we can learn lessons from it. The way it was contracted could have been done better. The management structure could have been done better. There were flaws in the design, including a fatal flaw that cost the life of a driver in the tunnel.
I think a lot of it is about the storytelling. Just to give one example, so much of the negative narrative around the Big Dig was around the cost. You often hear about how it started with an estimated cost of $2 billion and wound up costing $15 billion. But I think that narrative misses a few things.
One is that it was never going to cost $2 billion. That was not a realistic estimate. But in our country, it is so hard to get approval, political support, funding, and permitting in place that there is a very strong incentive all throughout the process to downplay the costs, downplay the risks, downplay the disruption, make it sound like this is going to be quick and easy and painless and cheap, just to get to the starting line. Because the paradox of it is that if we had known in 1983 or 1987 or 1991 that this was going to be a $15 billion project, it would have never happened. And yet, in hindsight, there are many smart people who told me that this project was a bargain at $15 billion because of what we got in terms of economic benefits, transportation improvements, and environmental improvements.
There’s almost an element of asking for forgiveness rather than permission here, but that forgiveness is inevitably laced with anger because of those expectations.
Right. If only it were just forgiveness.
The Big Dig had its roots in the National Highway Program. Were all those projects going constantly over budget?
There’s a great paper that I cite in episode four where the authors studied the cost of highway building per mile every year from the 1970s through the 1990s, and it’s actually a great sample set because we’ve built so many highways of different sizes in different states. Basically, what they found is that highway costs per mile really ramp up significantly in the 1970s. And that’s, of course, the period when the [Big Dig] was first getting conceived.
So the short answer to your question is, it was cheaper once. But there were other costs, in that those early highways in the ‘50s and ‘60s largely did not consider the impact on communities or on the environment. They did not make a lot of mitigation efforts to minimize the day to day disruption caused by those projects. So I think part of what the Big Dig captures is this really historic change in the way we build things in this country that was ushered in by the anti-highway movements, by citizen activism, and by the National Environmental Policy Act. Over the course of the 1970s we made it much harder to build things, for very good reasons.
I think the Big Dig — which some people describe as the last great project of the interstate era — captures an attempt to do a massive, ambitious infrastructure project that is also loaded with environmental mitigation and also has a robust community process. Part of what we learned through that is that you can have a project that’s cheap and efficient, you can have a project that’s democratic and humane, but it’s tough to have it all. And the Big Dig was trying to have it all, and we did get it all, but at enormous cost. That was the thing that could never be solved.
You make a connection between the Big Dig and climate change right from the first episode. What are the climate lessons we can learn from the Big Dig?
In some ways, it’s ironic to hold up the Big Dig as a case study for climate change because it’s a highway project. My point is not that the Big Dig is, like, the future of infrastructure. But what it offers is a recent case study on a massively ambitious building project. We have some distance, and you can see the whole arc of it, but it very much lives within our era. It’s not the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of those other big projects built in a different time under different conditions.
The way I see it is that in order to mitigate or prevent the worst effects of climate change — and you can feel free to disagree with me — we’re going to need to build a lot of stuff. This is not a problem that we’re going to solve by riding bicycles and growing vegetables in the backyard, both of which I do and hope everyone does. And of course, those projects might look different than the Big Dig because building a wind turbine isn’t exactly analogous to building a downtown tunnel. But I think there are relevant analogies, especially things like coastal mitigation in cities, improving mass transit, building high energy transmission lines — these large scale projects that will affect people but also are an important public good.
You talked on the show about the Big Dig as an attempt to make this process more democratic at some level. People on both sides had very strong feelings about it. This reminded me of the NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy of climate projects. Did anyone mention any best practices that could be applied to future projects of this kind?
I’ve talked with Fred Salvucci [former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation and driving force of the Big Dig] about this. He mentioned this biblical parable — he’s full of parables — about Jesus walking across the water and then turning to his disciples and telling them to follow. But they step into the water and fall right in, and when they get back out they say it’s impossible. And then Jesus says, “It’s easy to walk across the water. You just have to know where the stones are.”
And Fred said the lesson there is that, in order to navigate this kind of process, you have to know where the flashpoints are, what the issues will be. That way you can anticipate them rather than just going in and saying “this is my project, I’m going to do it this way and you can fight me on it.”
Part of what I think is really interesting about this, which I think speaks to present-day projects like offshore wind, is that in that fight, you have very well-intentioned actors who are trying to make the project better and using the environmental process to do that. And you also have bad actors who are weaponizing and manipulating the environmental process to their own personal ends. And those two things get all mixed up.
You know, I’m an environmentalist. I believe in environmental review. I don’t want to sit here and say that we need to get rid of all environmental permitting because it makes it too hard to build things. But I think it’s also important to recognize that these things can be weaponized.
Scheme Z, which proposed this big spiral loop of ramps and a bridge over the river, is a good example. Politically, that became very messy — they were trying to impose concentrated harm in the name of a public good. And I know, strategically, maybe there are things [Salvucci] could have done to mitigate that or circumvent that, but given the structures in place, the logical outcome is that it spends a decade in lawsuits and review committees and you wind up with something that’s okay, that everyone can live with.
The funny thing about that is that it turned into the Zakim Bridge, which is now a Boston icon.
Right. I mean, that’s part of the communication piece, too.
I was biking under the Zakim bridge the other day, and I biked through where there’s a nice pedestrian and bicycle bridge and this skate park that is always filled with people. Truly, that is maybe the best utilized public space created by the Big Dig.
It’s easy for me to play Monday morning quarterback and say “oh, you should have communicated that better, you should have told the story better.” I mean, he was saying all the right things. But then all you had to say on the other side was “it’s 18 lanes and five ramps,” and that sounded terrible and looked terrible on the page. And I mean, sure, I wish there weren’t all those ramps there, but like you said, ironically, the bridge became an icon of the city.
I think a big part of the lesson for me is how hard it is to build infrastructure democratically because the timescales are all wrong. These things have short-term costs and cause short-term disruption and bring very long-term benefits.
I was constantly struck by this issue of scale, both in terms of time and money. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of billions of dollars and projects that span decades. These are just things that are impossible for any regular person to really plan out.
I was talking to someone who said that their dad was in his 70s when the Big Dig was just getting started. And for him, it was like, “my city’s going to be torn up for the rest of my life,” right? That’s what this project meant for him — he would live with this mess of a project and never see the results. And he had to deal with that so that you could move to Boston in 2010 and never know the city another way. The cost of that benefit is borne by another generation.
And it’s the same thing with climate change. It moves on a scale that is so much longer than politics. The Big Dig took almost 40 years from conception to completion. So if you’re thinking about political capital, if you’re thinking about two- and four-year election cycles, it’s very, very hard to conceive, plan, and deliver a project on that kind of time scale.
The benefits and costs are almost inverted in climate change, in a way. We’re talking about future benefits, yes, but we’re also talking about future costs if we don’t do anything. But it’s so hard to make people think in a 40- or 50-year timescale.
If the Big Dig was so hard to make happen politically with what I think was a more genial political environment overall, it feels kind of impossible to think of building anything on that scale right now.
I gave a talk at City Hall a few weeks ago and I was talking with some of the young planners there, people who are in their 30s. Some of them have been listening to the series, and they told me they could not imagine what it would be like to get that kind of federal funding out of Washington, get all the local players on board, get it through the permitting process, and get it contracted. Because right now if they try to take away one parking spot and put in one bike line, they’re bogged down in meetings for a year.
I think climate change is also the inverse of projects like this because with the Big Dig, for example, you can feel the tangible benefits of a quicker commute and a more beautiful city. But with climate change, if the projects work, you’d actually feel nothing.
Exactly. Climate change is way, way harder. A road project or a rail project will have benefits. You get ribbon cuttings and photo ops. But if we make Boston resilient to flooding or something, you know, do some big project that would improve the shoreline or whatever ideally, that historic storm surge may never come, or it’ll come and we’ll be prepared for it and nothing will happen. But yeah, you’re working with long term counterfactuals.
It feels to me like climate change was designed in a laboratory to flummox institutions. It takes all of our cognitive biases, our ingrained social and biological blind spots and weak points and just flicks them all at us at once.
All nine episodes of The Big Dig are out now. You can listen on theWGBH website,Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.