This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
For all the concern about lost federal funding courtesy of the Republican trifecta in Washington, Massachusetts still has not deployed a single electric vehicle charger through a Biden-era program that President Trump has left intact.
The Bay State is sitting on the roughly $64 million it was awarded through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a $5 billion federal initiative authorized through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law meant to strategically dot the nation’s major highways with charging infrastructure that would make it easier for EV drivers to reliably travel greater distances.
Two years ago, Massachusetts selected three vendors to identify locations for NEVI charging stations and then build and maintain them. Only contracts with two of those companies, however — Applegreen and Global Partners — are signed, the state’s Department of Transportation confirmed to CommonWealth Beacon, leaving open questions about the viability of the third vendor, Weston & Sampson.
Now, nearly four years after receiving federal approvals, no EV chargers on Massachusetts’s major roadways through NEVI are up and running, MassDOT also confirmed.
It’s not clear what exactly is causing the holdup. CommonWealth Beacon filed a public records request to view the contracts with the two companies to ascertain whether there are deadlines associated with charger installations, but MassDOT did not provide those contracts in time for publication.
“The slowness of adoption here is mystifying,” said Jim Aloisi, a former state transportation secretary who now lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the board of the advocacy group TransitMatters. “If your approach to transportation sector decarbonization is largely about the transition to EVs, then you should be spending a fair amount of effort accelerating the process of getting people to adopt EVs, and one way to do that is obviously to roll out the NEVI initiative. That’s the disconnect.”
MassDOT didn’t respond to questions about why the pace of NEVI work has been so slow. The department’s “conservative” projections in 2022 found that NEVI funding would be sufficient for building 92 charging ports.
Some officials serving on the state’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Coordinating Council, which was established in 2022 to help create an equitable and reliable charging network, also appear to be in the dark. Eric Bourassa, who is a member of the group and serves as the director of transportation for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said that he’s “not privy to the details of what’s holding it up,” but that “everyone would agree that the pace of NEVI deployment in Massachusetts has been disappointing.”
So far, the two signed NEVI vendors have spent close to $4 million, according to Marshall Hook, a MassDOT spokesperson, all of which are for “development-focused” activities like engineering, permitting, and procurement.
There have been signs of progress. Applegreen has placed an order for EV charging equipment for locations in Greenfield and Newburyport and are targeting late July to begin construction, Hook said. Global Partners, meanwhile, has been approved to place orders on equipment and is finalizing plans to install chargers in Lancaster, Wrentham, and Raynham.
James Cater, senior director for sustainability strategy and innovation at Global Partners, said in a statement that the company is “happy” to be working on Massachusetts’s NEVI program and is beginning the procurement process for contractors for their initial charging sites “soon.”
Applegreen and Weston & Sampson did not respond to requests for comment.
Why is the adoption rate so slow?
Yet the slow adoption rate through NEVI continues to bewilder transit advocates given the state’s relatively small size and political embrace of EVs. Neighboring states like Rhode Island, New York, and Vermont boast a significant stock of NEVI chargers, in addition to more sprawling red states like Utah and Ohio.
“We should be capitalizing on every opportunity that we have available to us,” said Anna Vanderspek, electric vehicle program director at the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “MassDOT should explain why it’s taken so long and what timetable we can expect now.”
The uptake on NEVI has been slow nationwide: Just 19 states have at least one operating EV charger funded through the program, according to the National Association of State Energy Officials. Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who specializes in infrastructure policy, said that poor capacity more broadly across states has stifled their ability to quickly implement the program as they wrangle procurement processes, permitting, and electrical grid transmission complications.
“There were plenty of ingredients here to have paralysis by analysis,” Tomer said. “Government officials are naturally going to be risk averse, especially with newer programs, and officials needed to learn on the fly. NEVI hits all those sweet spots, so it’s not terribly surprising that deployments are coming along slower than initially hoped.”
The data around Massachusetts’s EV push offers a mixed bag. On one hand, the state’s slow crawl on NEVI is contrasted by its relative success deploying EV chargers in general. State data show the Commonwealth ranking fourth in the country for charging ports per capita after a sharp increase in installments over the past few years.
Yet, Massachusetts still has about 2,000 charging ports less than what it estimates it needs, according to the most recent state climate report card.
The state also remains significantly behind its targets for registered electric cars and trucks as it races to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half compared to 1990 levels by 2030. There are just 735 medium-and-heavy-duty EVs on the road, a sliver of the 3,200 called for by the end of 2025.
On light-duty EVs and plug-in hybrids, Massachusetts has about 166,000 such cars, short of the 200,000 needed by last year. Last year, the Healey administration also delayed an EV sales requirement.
Part of convincing consumers to purchase generally more expensive electric cars involves easing “range anxiety,” the worry of EV drivers about whether they’ll make it to their destination or the next charging station — one of the core functions of the NEVI program.
Notably, Massachusetts has also placed its NEVI bet on two companies that have been at intense odds with each other in the past year.
Applegreen and Global Partners — the two vendors with signed contracts with the state for NEVI work — have been at the center of a bitter dispute over the state’s efforts to redevelop 18 highway service plazas. MassDOT awarded Applegreen that major contract last year, but the company backed out after losing bidder Global Partners sued the state and fought to block the deal over allegations that the process was unfair.
MassDOT is now preparing to rebid the whole project, and the state inspector general ridiculed the agency for having “too many flaws” in its process that has attracted the ire of Beacon Hill.
The bad blood between Applegreen and Global Partners may not spill over into how fast the companies can deploy chargers on the state’s major highways since they will be responsible for separate individual sites, minimizing the necessity for direct collaboration.
But the situation speaks to the challenges of complicated procurements and the fragility of the private market to perform this sort of work, when a small pool of companies competes for similar supplies and subcontractors and could be vulnerable to price spikes.
“The word ‘irony’ is a good one,” Aloisi said. “It may be that there’s just not a lot of good competition in this area. What does that landscape look like, and who wants to play in that sandbox? And it may be that the unfortunate answer is not too many players, so you’re stuck with the same.”
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