$5B approved for car chargers along highways
FILE - Electric vehicles at a public charging station. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON - A big win for electric vehicle (EV) owners comes as the Biden Administration announced that $5 billion will be spent putting charging stations on major highways.
On Wednesday, Georgia’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Infrastructure Deployment Plan was approved. This ranks Georgia among the first 35 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to move forward with the build along 53,000 miles of interstate highways.
Each of these states now has access to over $900 million in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure formula funding for the next five years, totaling $5 billion.
Georgia's plan is part of a larger green goal to lessen carbon emissions for the country.
CALIFORNIA'S ELECTRIC CAR MANDATE COULD SPREAD TO OVER A DOZEN STATES
This comes after California's historic move to ban the sale of new gas-fueled cars by 2035. This restriction will mandate new vehicles to run on electricity or hydrogen.
Several states are likely to follow suit, including Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Vermont.
Georgia Department of Transportation announced July 21 that U.S. 441 from Cornelia in northeast Georgia to Dublin in east central Georgia is the strip of highway where the first set of charging will go. U.S. 82 from Brunswick in coastal Georgia to Albany in southeast Georgia is the second.
GDOT officials say between those two routes, 330 miles will be added to Georgia’s electric vehicle charging network.