The White House said that President Joe Biden will announce on Wednesday that the first $900 million in U.S. funding to build EV charging stations in 35 states has been approved. This is part of a $1 trillion infrastructure law that was passed in November.
Congress gave the states nearly $5 billion over five years to help them build thousands of charging stations for electric cars. Biden will also say at the Detroit AutoAuto show that the U.S. government has bought a lot more electric vehicles (EVs).
Related: Biden will put more limits on how much the U.S. can sell chips and tools to China.
In 2020, less than 1% of new federal purchases were electric. That number more than doubled in 2021, and the White House said that by 2022, “agencies will have bought five times as many EVs as they did in the whole of the last fiscal year.”
In December, Biden signed an order telling the government to buy almost all EVs or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by 2027. The U.S. government owns more than 650,000 cars and trucks and buys about 50,000 cars and trucks each year.
In August, Biden signed a bill that gives the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) $3 billion to buy more electric vehicles (EVs) and infrastructure to charge them. USPS told Reuters last month that it wants to buy a lot more electric vehicles (EVs). Previously, USPS planned to buy at least 10,019 EVs, but now it wants to buy at least 25,000 EVs out of its initial order of 50,000 delivery vehicles from Oshkosh (NYSE:OSK).
Biden wants that, by 2030, half of all new cars sold will be electric or plug-in hybrid electric models, and that there will be 500,000 new EV charging stations. He has not said that he wants gasoline-powered cars to stop being sold by 2030, though.
Related: Biden will put more limits on how much the U.S. can sell chips and tools to China.
Officials say that the lack of charging stations is still the biggest reason why more people don’t use EVs. The mayor of Detroit, Michael Duggan, told reporters on Tuesday that the number of places where electric cars can be charged will need to grow quickly.
