Along with apple pie, baseball and tips, the car is classic American. But when it comes to the 21st-century passenger car, automakers in the United States — except for Tesla — have been playing catch-up and struggling to counter the rise of China’s electric vehicle boom. Sure, both EVs and internal combustion cars have seats and four wheels, but it’s not as simple as American automakers swapping in a few parts and calling it a day.
So on Thursday, the Energy Department announced $1.7 billion to fund the conversion of 11 auto manufacturing facilities, which were either closed or at risk of closing, to make EVs and supplies for the nascent industry. Those facilities will be spread across eight states – Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia – which the DOE says will create 2,900 new jobs and ensure that more than 15,000 union workers will keep theirs. General Motors will get $500 million for one of its plants in Lansing, Michigan, and Fiat Chrysler nearly $600 million in total for two of its facilities.
Shortly after the announcement, Grist sat down with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to talk about why domestic EV manufacturing is so important, how those EVs can actually help the grid instead of destroying it, and why even children will benefit from the $1.7 billion even if they can’t drive.
The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. Why is the Biden administration providing this funding? Why is it important to the DOE that electric vehicles are produced locally?
A. The funding comes through the Inflation Reduction Act, but the intent behind it is of course to make sure that America relocates manufacturing, especially in the clean energy space, and here in the electric vehicle space. We compete globally, with China of course. And we want to make these products here. We want to make it with union workers, and we want to make it in places that have been bruised by globalization. That’s where this particular round of funding really centers — communities that have built cars for the past 100 years, and should be building them for the next 100 years.
Q. Some of this money goes to electric buses. Why is it critical to get more of those on the road?
A. Diesel particulates are not healthy for children – increased asthma, other very serious health impacts. So having an electric bus, which is quiet and clean and healthy, is great for kids. It’s great for fighting climate change. It’s great for communities, and now it’s also great for job creation.
Q. How is the Biden administration trying to boost demand for EVs?
A. We are seeing an increase in demand. Plus, the administration is working to make sure that demand continues. So how do you do it? By lowering the price. This means that those tax credits at the dealer, now used everywhere, drop the price of an electric vehicle to either equal and, in many cases, cheaper than an internal combustion engine.
We want to make sure the infrastructure is there so people don’t have distance anxiety, and that’s what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act’s levy funding for states does, to fill the gap where the private sector hasn’t installed chargers. So on transportation corridors every 50 miles we want to see a high-speed charger, and we want it to be no more than a mile from the transportation corridor. [be] app-enabled. Since the president took office, the number of publicly available chargers has doubled. The goal is to reach 500,000 of them by 2030. We are well on our way to doing that.
Q. People were also worried that if we deployed more EVs, the grid simply wouldn’t be able to handle that additional load. Do you have an answer to that?
A. The president has a goal of getting to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, so we need to continue to deploy, deploy, deploy all these clean energy assets — utility-scale solar, wind, distributed solar, other types of clean energy, such as hydroelectric power or geothermal power, or small modular [nuclear] reactors. We will have enough generation capacity for the electrification of transport.
Q. And with the development of vehicle-to-grid technology, grid operators will actually be able to utilize EVs as a large network of batteries. In that case, EVs can actually be an asset on the grid, not a burden.
A. One hundred percent. The virtual power plants that are created – by making sure that the distributed energy sources like electric vehicle batteries are part of the mix – means that we can add between 20 and 100 gigawatts just from virtual power plants like electric vehicles, or connecting a bunch of electric vehicles together . So yes, that is absolutely part of the plan, and part of the funding that DOE is doing is to encourage those types of pilot projects, to ensure that they can be worked out and then taken to scale.
Q. A few of these facilities that will receive funding are in swing states, and we have an election coming up. I was curious how they were chosen and why now, just before the election? Or is it a matter of: You look more at the facilities that can be converted and less at the state itself.
A. It does not involve the election. It involves a merit process that is selected by professionals and career staff within the Department of Energy that evaluates all of these objective factors as to where we can make sure that we reuse these internal combustion engine plants that in this particular case were closing. A lot of this went to historic car manufacturing communities because that’s what it was aimed at. It was all part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and so that act forces us to continue to award grants, whether we’re in an election year or out of an election year.
Q. Republicans have a attempt to slow EV adoption. Can they target this kind of funding? And if there is another Trump administration, will they be able to reverse any of this as well?
A. In short, once these announcements are made and steel is in the ground and people start being appointed, which is happening now, it will be political malpractice for any leader of that state or that political party to go in the opposite direction of where their constituents want to go would love to see them go. I mean, people get hired. This is a very good thing across the country. So I am hopeful that any future administration will see the value and the importance of keeping this industrial strategy in place.
