According to White House officials, renewable energy and electric vehicles will “reinvent” the American economy, and in a political climate, infrastructure could still be a bipartisan effort.
“The exciting news about the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act is these are multi-year bills and the funding is in place, the program designs are in place and it will be up to us to do a good job implementing them such that they will retain broad political support hopefully on both sides of the aisle,” said Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of the US Department of Transportation.
6th annual CoMotion LA
More than 2,000 policymakers, venture capitalists, startup companies, and transportation experts gathered at LA for the sixth annual CoMotion LA, a three-day event looking at the future of transportation, as per ENR.
Trottenberg and Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, were the keynotes of the event, talking about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the new Republican-controlled House, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the federal government’s push for EVs and other renewable energy sources.
Trottenberg stated one of the “nice things” regarding infrastructure bills is that “even in a very polarized political climate, infrastructure is still a relatively bipartisan issue and if we continue to do our jobs right we are going to continue to get support.”
With all this funding set up, the government is talking about “reinventing the entire economy—an economy that was basically built on the back of fossil fuels in the last 120 years—around renewable energy. So once the politicians, and it doesn’t matter what color state it is, realize the financial fiscal impact of jobs and quality of life, I think a lot of these issues are going to go out the window.” said Klein.
Klein added that EV sales are currently on a “hockey stick graph” ready to “explode upward.”
He stated there was a 60% increase in EV sales this year over last year. In 2021, there was a 50% increase over the previous year.
“The hockey stick is coming and the infrastructure we are putting in place in the states … is going to give people that are nervous, security and all of these folks are going to fall in line.” He added that as the shift to EVs continues, internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles “are going to be a thing of the past and not worth anything.”
EV charging plan
In addition, Trottenberg said that part of the legislation required all 50 states to submit an electric vehicle charging plan to the US DOT and if the time comes to do this, “every state—blue and red—stepped up and even as we have a divide in Congress, when we get to the state level states want in on infrastructure, and it is bipartisan and the issue doesn’t fall along the lines you might think.”
