Electric vehicles....

Wyoming bucks Biden on electric vehicles

By ARIANNA SKIBELL

Wyoming and the Biden administration are in a standoff over electric vehicle charging stations.

And the stakes are high. The quarrel could leave a Wyoming-size hole in President Joe Biden’s national network of 500,000 charging ports, while the state stands to lose control over millions of federal dollars, writes POLITICO’s E&E News reporter David Ferris.

Here’s the rub: The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 allocated $7.5 billion over five years for states to build out charging stations for electric cars. The administration is requiring those stations to be located every 50 miles, largely along highways, so drivers feel confident they won’t get stranded. Them’s the rules.

But the thing about Wyoming is it’s huge and sparsely populated (it’s larger than Michigan with a population the size of Baltimore). 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.

Wyoming crunched the numbers and projected that the charging stations the administration wants wouldn’t be profitable until the 2040s. And since the federal funding lasts only five years, the state doesn’t want to be saddled with a massive bill for over a decade.

“Wyoming has no desire to establish infrastructure that will likely fail,” the state told the federal office overseeing the charging network effort.

Wyoming’s proposal: But Wyoming didn’t reject the money outright. Instead, it asked the feds to fund chargers along smaller highways that serve its tourist gems, such as Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks — routes that don’t fit the administration’s parameters but see a lot more Tesla traffic.

While the National Park Service supported that approach, the administration said no. And so the perennial struggle between states and the federal government over who knows best continues.

It’s happened before: Wyoming, of course, is not the first state to reject federal dollars for infrastructure projects it doesn't like. Under former President Barack Obama, then-Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott returned $2.4 billion in federal funds for a high-speed train that would have run between Tampa and Orlando.