NM to get millions for EV charging stations
Santa Fe, Doña Ana and Hidalgo counties will benefit
New Mexico will get almost $68 million to build an electric vehicle charging network.
On Thursday, the Federal Highway Administration announced $623 million in funding for 47 projects in 22 states and Puerto Rico. New Mexico’s three projects garnered just more than 10% of the funding. The federal grants require a 20% match.
“The president has talked about how America won the 20th century in the automotive space and he wants us to win the 21st century as well, and it’s pretty clear that in the 21st century EVs will play a critical role,” Federal Highway Administrator
Shailen Bhatt said.
The Federal Highway Administration has awarded three grants in New Mexico: $63.8 million for charging centers in Hidalgo and Doña Ana counties, $3.3 million for an electric vehicle charging network and station in Santa Fe County and $500,000 for EV chargers in Taos.
Charging centers
The New Mexico Department of Transportation will contract with TeraWatt Infrastructure to build and manage two charging centers for commercial vehicles along Interstate 10 near Lordsburg and Vado. TeraWatt will own both charging centers.
“This $63 million investment to Lordsburg and Vado is the largest award in the
United States and will go a long way in not just supporting cleaner trucks, but boosting economic development in our rural communities,” Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., said in a statement.
“It is a small rural community with the salt of the earth, hard-working people that I am fortunate to represent. Placing one of these chargers in Vado will be transformational,” said state Rep. Doreen Gallegos, District 52. Before TeraWatt Infrastructures was officially a company, it began purchasing land along I-10 in 2018, anticipating that electric vehicle chargers would be needed for the heavy freight traffic, TeraWatt CEO Neha Palmer said.
“It is one of the deepest freight lanes in the U.S.,” she said.
The company is building a corridor of EV charging stations for commercial and freight vehicles, beginning on the West Coast and heading east to El Paso. The first of these centers near the Port of Long Beach likely will be operational this year, and the goal is to get the entire corridor up and running within 36 months. EV charging center construction takes roughly two years from start to finish, including permitting and coordinating with utilities.
A significant amount of power will be needed at each site, and the centers in New Mexico will get at least some of that power from fields of solar panels.
“If you think of 10, what we call classic vehicles, these heavy duty trucks, charging all simultaneously, they take about as much power as the Empire State Building,” Palmer said.
To charge up at one of the centers will ideally be a similar cost as fueling a diesel truck, she said, but cost will depend in part on the electricity rates in the area.
TeraWatt is working with customers who are interested in creating EV fleets to transport freight along the I-10 corridor.
“Obviously, a lot of these companies have made strong pledges with respect to their emissions, and so this can be a significant component of their emissions and a way for them to meet their corporate goals,” Palmer said.
“I think that there’s also some benefits to this technology that aren’t totally apparent yet. But as the technology advances, there will be significantly less maintenance required on EVs. ... We know that as battery efficiency gets better, battery technology gets better, the cost of batteries comes down for these vehicles. There’s a very likely scenario where this has actually lower costs than traditional fueling and traditional freight.”
The two DOT-contracted charging centers will include nine pull-through stalls with 350 kilowatt and 1 megawatt direct current fast chargers.
Santa Fe and Taos
Santa Fe County will use the $3.3 million in grant funding to build 33 fast chargers and level 2 charging stations in 13 locations. The chargers and charging stations will be in underserved communities, near areas of multifamily affordable housing and at county transportation hubs.
“EVs are really much easier to charge if you have your own driveway or garage. One of the things we really liked about Santa Fe and Taos is that these are community locations,” Bhatt said.
Taos will install six publicly available fast EV chargers in three community building parking lots, including at the Taos Visitor Center, which serves Taos Pueblo. The chargers will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“From passenger sedans to school buses and delivery trucks, today’s EVs are market-ready right now,” Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said in a statement. “If we want to meet our ambitious climate goals and deploy these clean and zero-emission vehicles at scale, we need to build much more EV charging infrastructure in our communities and along our major highways.”
The federal dollars are coming from the bipartisan infrastructure law.
The announcement is the first distribution of $2.5 billion that the federal government has committed to spending within five years on EV infrastructure, and more funding should be announced soon, Bhatt said. The highway administration received $3.3 billion in grant fund requests, Bhatt said.
The program also tries to incentivize producing EV chargers domestically, with requirements for how many of the chargers have to be assembled in the U.S., Bhatt said. There are 26 domestic manufacturers of EV chargers, Bhatt said, but two years ago when the infrastructure law went into effect, there were none.
The federal funding to boost New Mexico’s EV infrastructure comes after two air quality boards in the state — the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Air Quality Control Board and the state’s Environmental Improvement Board — adopted a set of advanced clean car rules in November.
The rules, which are intended to increase the percentage of zero-emission vehicles, or ZEVs, delivered to the state, broadly target new cars. ZEVs include electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
The advanced clean cars II rule says starting with model year 2027, auto manufacturers will need to deliver 43% ZEVs to dealers in the state. And by model year 2032, that percentage will be increased to 82%. The advanced clean trucks rule will set similar rules for the delivery of new vehicles like cargo vans, delivery trucks and transit buses.
Jerry Valdez, a senior executive with the NMDOT, said the state had initially applied for $159 million in federal grant funding to build out EV charging infrastructure. But he said that request was “shooting for the moon” and that the state expected to receive less than that.
Valdez said the $63.8 million going toward building up the two medium- and heavy-duty commercial truck charging stations along the I-10 corridor are the “first of their kind in the nation.” He said the total cost of the project will surpass $80 million with matching funds of more than 20% being provided by TeraWatt.
“We will hit the ground running to make sure that we get those stations up as quickly as possible as the construction and the manufacturing and the equipment are available,” he said.