Wyoming Puts Huge Dent in Biden's EV Charging Plan: 'No Desire to Establish Infrastructure That Will Likely Fail'
The “Cowboy State” of Wyoming continues to throw a monkey wrench into Joe Biden’s electric car plans, this time by delivering a firm “no thank you” to Biden’s proposed nationwide EV charging network.
Last September, the Biden administration rolled out a plan giving all 50 states the approval to begin building a nationwide network of EV charging stations, with a goal of installing at least one charging station for every 50 miles of interstate highway as part of Biden’s so-called “zero emissions” policy.
As Biden continues to push electric vehicles on the nation, the ultimate goal of this stage of the plan is to have 500,000 new charging stations across the nation at a cost of $7.5 billion in tax dollars.
But it appears that officials in the wide-open state of Wyoming are wholly uninterested in joining Biden’s EV charging network. Indeed, Wyoming says that the plan to erect a new station at each 50-mile marker isn’t even worth the state’s effort and is a waste of precious resources.
“The state says building and maintaining a charging station every 50 miles would require vast resources with little payoff. Only about 500 people own electric cars in the state,” Politico reported.
The news site added that Wyoming officials said the stations would be a wasteful burden on their state treasury in the near future. Since there are so few EV owners, officials said that the stations would not earn back their construction costs until the year 2040 at the earliest, and since federal subsidies only last five years, the state would be on the hook for the costs for decades.
“Wyoming has no desire to establish infrastructure that will likely fail,” state officials told the Biden administration.
State officials maintained that Biden’s plan, as drawn out in the 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is a waste of resources. But they did have another idea.
Wyoming provided a counteroffer: Officials asked the feds to build its charging network across the secondary roads and local highways that serve its tourist industry, including Yellowstone National Park, where a high number of visitors in their Teslas drive. This plan made more sense, since the roads in these areas get far more use by EV owners.
Naturally, Biden’s administration rejected Wyoming’s offer.
And it doesn’t help that Biden is also using his EV plans to push his racial divisions by alluding to a lack of EVs as somehow proof of racism in the car market.
Though Wyoming is the first state to reject the president’s demands, the Cowboy State is not alone in its concerns over Biden’s plans to electrify the nation’s fleet of private vehicles. Other rural states have also expressed concerns that the costs and maintenance of the new charging stations are not exactly in their best interests.
One issue is laying cable to get electricity out to the far-flung areas along the highways to power the stations, according to EnergyWire.
Another issue is the bitterly cold winters that many rural states endure each year — cold being a sure EV performance killer — and the fact that many drivers are pulling trailers on the highways in rural states — another drain on battery life.
Another problem in far-flung areas is Biden’s 50-mile rule. That distance often places a charging station in the middle of nowhere. There are no stores, no restaurants and no towns anywhere near many of those 50-mile markers and state officials feel that this puts the charging station in jeopardy of vandalism, not to mention putting a driver’s safety at risk while being stopped all alone in the middle of nowhere. And without any other businesses around them, some officials feel that there will be even fewer ways to recoup the cost of erecting the stations.
As to vandalism, some states in the Pacific Northwest have already discovered that charging stations are helpless targets of the criminal class.
It seems as if not a week passes where we don’t see another new problem with electric vehicles, but at least this issue isn’t exactly the fault of the still-shaky technology. Users in Seattle have discovered public charging stations broken open and missing copper wiring, which had been ripped out by metal thieves. The problem is costing the city millions and forcing authorities to reconsider how the stations are built to try and prevent vandalism.
This is not the first time Wyoming has spoken out against the greenies and their EV obsession. Just last month, the state senate filed a bill that would “ensure the stability” of the state’s oil and gas industry by working to phase out electric vehicles just as states including California and New York are claiming to phase out gas-powered cars and ban them in the coming decade.
With the technology available for EVs to date, they really are not effective for long-distance driving in largely rural states like Wyoming. And Wyoming does not want to be stuck with a bill that will run into millions of tax dollars just to satisfy Biden’s obsession.
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