DALLAS — Seven months after Congress passed the infrastructure bill and President Joe Biden signed it into law, the dollars are beginning to flow into Texas.
Over the next several years, Texas will receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to improve the electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure in the state.
The specific goal is to place an EV charger every 50 miles along most interstate highways and main corridors. It would be enough to support at least one million electric vehicles.
And, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm says it’s an opportunity not only for private business, but also for state utilities.
“A lot of utilities are seeing the electrification of the vehicles as an opportunity to provide resilience to the grid. Because what you’re doing, of course, is adding batteries and energy storage onto the grid as well as using the grid when you’re charging,” Granholm said on Inside Texas Politics. “So, if you can sell electrons back and forth from the grid using those batteries, that’s a huge opportunity.”
Watch the segment below:
Granholm says Tesla, which recently moved its headquarters to Austin, is doing just that in its previous home of California. The EV manufacturer joined with that state’s power utility, PG&E, and created a virtual electric grid.
But, there is plenty of concern in Texas that our grid is not ready for the EV revolution.
Granholm says Texas is not alone in that worry.
“It’s not just Texas. Every state is going through this same assessment in that, you know, it’s not a light switch that you flip on. It is going to happen over time,” she told us.