By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration said Tuesday it is awarding $521 million in grants to build out electric vehicle charging and deploying more than 9,200 EV charging ports.
The Energy Department and Federal Highway Administration said $321 million will be allocated for 41 community projects that expand EV charging infrastructure, while $200 million will fund 10 corridor fast-charging projects.
Milwaukee will receive $15 million to install EV chargers at 53 sites while Atlanta will receive $11.8 million to install a DC Fast Charging Hub at the city’s airport with 50 DC fast chargers providing charging for rental cars, ride-share drivers, and airport shuttles.
The Biden administration has faced harsh criticism for the slow deployment of EV charging stations from a $5-billion U.S. government program created in 2021.
Automakers and others say drastically expanding EV-charging stations is crucial to the wide deployment of electric vehicles, key to U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The White House goal is to grow the nationwide network of chargers to 500,000 ports, including high-speed chargers – no more than 50 miles (80 km) apart – on the nation’s busiest highways.
As of August, the United States had 192,000 public charging ports and since the start of the Biden administration, the number of publicly available fast-charging ports has increased by 90%.
FHWA said approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week.
In June, just seven EV-charging stations had been deployed under the 2021 U.S. program consisting of a few dozen total charging ports, said Shailen Bhatt, who heads the Federal Highway Administration.
“That is pathetic. We’re now three years into this … That is a vast administrative failure,” said Senator Jeff Merkley at the hearing. “Something is terribly wrong and it needs to be fixed.”
Bhatt said in June he was frustrated with slow deployment and said the agency is working with states on their plans to deploy EV chargers.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has also repeatedly criticized the deployment pace.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and David Evans)
