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Why permitting reform could break the political alliance that produced America’s most significant climate law
The U.S. climate coalition is under serious strain.
The tension has been brought to a head by last month’s debt-ceiling compromise, which enacted a variety of reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act and exempted the long-debated Mountain Valley Pipeline from federal environmental review. While environmental groups have decried the concessions as “a colossal error … that sacrifices the climate,” clean-energy trade groups are praising them “an important down payment on much-needed reforms.” This gulf now threatens to disintegrate the political alliance that, less than a year ago, won the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), its most tangible accomplishment and by far the country’s most significant climate law.
The differences over permitting reform aren’t just a disagreement about tactics. Rather, they reflect fundamental changes within three of the most important factions within the climate coalition — the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the Washington-centric group I’ve termed the green growthers. Facing these changes and their implications is critical to preserving the political foundations of federal climate action.
Ever since passage of the IRA unlocked massive fiscal resources for decarbonization, the climate coalition has been split on how best to put that money to work. While nearly everyone recognizes the need to substantially increase the pace at which clean energy infrastructure gets deployed, division centers on the question of permitting reform. To even name the debate is to invoke a factional diagnosis: the view that environmental laws are hobbling decarbonization by preventing clean energy infrastructure from getting built quickly enough — or even at all. This perspective has rapidly gained momentum across a bipartisan community that includes self-styled centrists within the climate coalition.
Permitting reform is unraveling the climate coalition because it reawakens a fundamental, unresolved disagreement over how to decarbonize. Its timing adds to these tensions: bipartisan legislation to curtail national environmental law has arrived, not accidentally, just as the clean energy industry has become most capable of splitting from the broader climate coalition that helped create it.
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The oldest faction in today’s climate coalition, and the most diffuse, is the environmental movement. Its mainstream wing has roots in the principles of preservation, and its largest organizations have spent multiple generations fighting for clean air and water, and ecologically healthy lands and species.
Its environmental justice wing, by contrast, emerged as racial justice activists combined civil-rights and environmental-protection principles to address historically unequal pollution burdens that have concentrated health risks and environmental damages in disempowered communities of color. Only in the last few years, after decades of discoordination, disinterest, and exclusion, have preservationist institutions become more attentive to the legacy of environmental racism. The movement has now coalesced, however incompletely, around a broader and more inclusive environmental vision.
Though preservationist and environmental-justice approaches can still lead to different priorities, the new environmental movement is at its most unified when it opposes fossil fuel production. The movement’s history of civil disobedience and legal combat have taught it to keep fossil fuels in its crosshairs — not only because of the social and environmental harm fossil fuel projects cause, but also because fights against fossil fuels mobilize the public, clarify the stakes, and yield tangible improvements for local communities and environments.
Though both wings of the environmental movement fought hard for the IRA, the law does almost nothing to directly constrain fossil fuel production. Instead, the IRA largely aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions not by preventing those emissions, but rather by boosting the production and use of low-carbon energy — along with generous subsidies for storing carbon dioxide, often in conjunction with oil production or fossil fuel combustion. Accordingly, the environmental movement has redoubled its efforts to pair the law’s clean energy subsidies with new fossil fuel restrictions.
The environmental movement’s discomfort with a subsidies-only approach to decarbonization is probably better known than the shifting politics of the clean energy industry. As the new environmental movement has coalesced, clean energy has matured into a fully-fledged industry, both in the U.S. and around the world. Until the past few years, the nascent clean energy industry wielded little political muscle, depending instead on the political support and lobbying assistance of environmental groups. Not that long ago, renewable energy was more expensive, less familiar to regulators, and supported by fewer subsidies than fossil energy systems. As a result, clean energy companies depended heavily on the environmental movement’s political support to survive and grow.
Over the past half a decade, technological progress and policy victories achieved in coalition with the environmental movement have vaulted key technologies like wind, solar, and batteries into commercial maturity. Those gains are now locked in. The IRA provides at least 10 years of new federal clean energy tax credits, ending the boom-and-bust cycle of short-term extensions that held the clean energy industry together for most of the previous two decades. With falling costs and fiscal tailwinds, the clean energy industry no longer relies on the environmental movement’s lobbying muscle for commercial success.
The clean energy industry’s maturation has led to more profound differences with the environmental movement that eclipse a simple re-alignment in relative power. As the clean energy industry has grown, it has come to share the fossil energy industry’s preference for more permissive regulatory regimes and fewer environmental protections. In the pre-commercial era, climate-conscious jurisdictions like California drove clean energy development through supportive environmental policy. In recent years, though, the clean energy industry has grown faster and profited more in places like Texas, and for the same reason the fossil fuel industry has: because Texas offers open markets and few restrictions on energy development. As the clean energy industry’s policy priorities have shifted, its growing lobbying apparatus has followed suit, leading groups like the American Clean Power Association to collaborate with fossil fuel companies in pursuit of environmental deregulation.
Activists and policymakers focused on rapid, massive clean energy development make up a third critical faction of the national climate movement. Many in this group work in and around the Biden administration and have come to the climate fight not from the environmental movement, but from other areas such as industrial policy, national defense, some strands of organized labor, and electoral politics. They have brought their prior priorities — job creation, domestic manufacturing, and stable energy prices — to their climate politics. In the wake of the IRA, they remain focused on lowering the remaining barriers to rapid clean energy development.
These often center-left climate actors have only cohered into a distinct faction in the past five years, as enthusiasm for so-called “supply-side progressivism” has given them a common language with which to articulate a set of climate solutions founded on proactive government support for private reindustrialization. For some green growthers, deregulation is a necessary precondition to decarbonization, and since many also believe that clean energy will — with the IRA’s help — outcompete fossil fuels, they see fewer risks to reforming environmental law than the environmental movement does.
In part, the conflict over permitting reform has grown bitter because the term gets used to refer to many different policy proposals. Depending on the speaker and the audience, it can mean sweeping changes to how environmental laws govern new infrastructure projects; tailored tweaks to environmental review; more resources to strengthen administrative capacity and expedite permitting reviews; or changes to the process for building transmission lines and connecting power plants to the grid. This tangle of meanings has undermined the climate coalition’s ability to negotiate its internal differences and prioritize consensus solutions to the challenge of rapid clean-energy development.
More fundamentally, though, the environmental movement, the clean energy industry, and the green growthers are clashing over permitting reform because it has forced them to confront their ongoing disagreement about how to achieve decarbonization.
To many in the environmental movement, and especially on the climate left, most permitting reform proposals double down on what they see as a worrying tenet of the IRA: its dependence on competition and market dynamics to slash fossil fuel production. The environmental movement is familiar from long experience with this kind of market thinking, which promises that present development and the damage it entails will eventually unlock future benefits. As the environmental movement as a whole has become more concerned with historical pollution burdens, that bargain looks worse, and less trustworthy, than ever.
Many permitting reform proposals, including the newly-enacted language of the debt-ceiling deal, exacerbate these concerns by targeting the environmental movement’s oldest and most effective legal tools for defeating fossil fuel projects. At the same time, these proposals still omit any of the constraints on fossil fuels that the environmental movement believes necessary for decarbonization.
The environmental movement has responded with deployment-focused proposals of its own that aim to speed clean energy development without weakening environmental law. However, even the most straightforward of these proposals — such as appointing a fifth commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — have repeatedly been deprioritized by clean-energy groups and green growthers. In the wake of the debt ceiling deal, which included none of the environmental movement’s reform priorities but substantially weakened environmental review, the movement is mobilized and angry.
To the green growthers, by contrast, rapid decarbonization cannot happen without permitting reform. According to the IRA’s market-decarbonization logic, the best and most politically plausible way to drive fossil fuels out of American energy markets is to displace them with cheaper and more abundant clean energy. At the same time, events such as the gas-price shock of 2021 — and its damage to Biden’s popularity — has reinforced their existing belief that suppressing fossil fuel extraction without first creating massive new clean energy production will risk serious political backlash. This theory of change has led green growthers to be simultaneously sympathetic to the clean energy industry’s deregulatory wishlist, and skeptical of the environmental movement’s focus on constraining fossil fuel production.
These factions’ divergent theories of decarbonization have offered a wedge to those within the climate coalition who believe rapid, effective clean energy development has become incompatible with rigorous environmental and social protections. Anti-coalitional voices, especially within portions of the clean energy industry, increasingly see permitting reform as an opportunity to split the climate coalition, excising the environmental movement from the climate coalition and creating a new, climate-inflected industrial alliance.
Most green growthers understand that such a split would deprive the existing coalition of its popular wing at a critical moment, threatening the political viability of climate progress. Though the growthers believe that the IRA’s clean-energy manufacturing boom will build a powerful new political coalition in favor of decarbonization, that coalition does not yet exist.
Environmental protection, by contrast, is extremely popular across America today, and the environmental movement has repeatedly proven its ability to mobilize public support. Though the clean energy industry no longer needs the environmental movement’s political muscle to turn a profit, the climate coalition as a whole may struggle to maintain political support for decarbonization without it, especially as climate change destabilizes the country’s energy systems and the right continues to oppose rapid decarbonization.
To understand why, you don’t need to look farther than Texas, which is something of a proving ground for the three factions’ competing beliefs about how deregulation may shape decarbonization.
In recent years, Texas provided strong evidence for the clean energy industry’s assertions that, whatever the environmental and social costs, less regulation can speed the deployment of renewable energy. It likewise bolstered green growthers’ claims that cheap, plentiful renewables can displace fossil energy.
But suddenly, Texas is also proving the environmental movement’s counter-argument. The state’s legislature has just created a new set of generous rules and tax subsidies that support new gas-fired power plants while hampering clean energy development. Though state lawmakers are transparently motivated by gas-industry lobbying and culture-war fixations, they have justified the legislation by arguing that Texas’ increasingly unreliable grid needs more gas plants to keep the lights on.
Such claims, however dishonest, will only grow more plausible to many voters as climate-exacerbated disasters and the energy transition itself strain infrastructural systems in the years to come. Without permitting structures or robust state environmental laws, Texan climate activists are ill-equipped to fight a possible new wave of gas plants, and Texas’ future decarbonization is now in peril.
Whereas last year, Texas’ clean energy boom seemed likely to continue driving fossil fuels out of the market and emissions down, now Texas’ new IRA-style subsidies and weak environmental protections look more likely to leave the state with more energy production of all kinds. Though Texas will continue to add clean energy, its decarbonization remains in doubt.
Permitting reform is threatening the national climate coalition because it cuts to the heart of a longstanding philosophical disagreement about what it will take to actually achieve decarbonization. It has arrived as the climate coalition’s major factions are transforming in ways that themselves sharpen the conflict. Good-faith advocates of decarbonization in all camps should be concerned that, in the wake of the debt-ceiling deal, a new round of fractious permitting-reform fights will split the climate coalition into separate camps with irreconcilable theories of climate action.
The result, though ideologically purifying, would be politically disastrous.
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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.