Source: EV Hub

Every week brings new developments in an increasingly hot U.S. EV market. With EVs featuring strongly in Biden’s infrastructure plans, a group of 12 state governors issued a joint letter on April 21 to the Administration urging for national targets to electrify sales of all light-duty vehicles by or before 2035 and all medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by or before 2045. The group of states includes most of the signatories of last year’s zero emission bus and truck MOU which established a similar goal to electrify all medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales by 2050. Notably, New Mexico was among the group of eight signing the letter to the Biden Administration. The state has indicated interest in joining the ZEV program in the past but had not participated in previous multi-state MOUs.

New York and New Jersey continue to extend their policy leadership in the Central Atlantic region and both states signed on to the April 21 letter. While the latter is likely to become the second state to formally adopt a version of California’s Advanced Clean Trucks Rule, the former is continuing to tap several public and utility ratepayer funding resources to advance transportation electrification. New York has committed the second most of any state to electric truck funding and on April 20th, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced the launch of the New York Clean Transportation Prizes. The agency will administer $85 million across the state to invest in clean mobility projects including electric truck and bus deployments in underserved communities.

The funding is broken out into three categories: the Clean Neighborhoods Challenge, funded at $30 million; the Electric Mobility Challenge, funded at $21 million; and the Electric Truck and Bus Challenge, funded at $24 million. This funding was made available through the July 2020 approval of the $701 million make-ready program split across six of the Empire State’s investor-owned utilities. An additional $10 million was made available separately for projects in Long Island Power Authority’s service territory. While the projects funded are yet to be determined, each will focus on providing benefits to underserved communities through transportation emissions reductions.

With this funding award, New York raises the total public funding committed to transportation electrification to $488 million, the second highest in the country after California. To help compare state policy and support for EVs, Atlas has published the beta version of the State Policy Dashboard. The dashboard allows you to compare enacted and pending policy activity across the country, search open requests for proposal and information, and see how each state is awarding funds from the Volkswagen Settlement and other public programs. At least 47 policies related to EVs have been enacted in the last 12 months alone and all-time public funding for EVs is at $2.4 billion.

The EV Hub relies on feedback from its users to enhance the usefulness of each dashboard and to make sure we are capturing all recent policy and funding activity. Let us know what you think of the State Policy Dashboard here and if we are missing any public funding or policy actions, you can submit those here.

About the author: Conner Smith