Massachusetts has built no chargers with its $64m in federal EV money

Massachusetts has built no chargers with its $64m in federal EV money The Bay State's unspent NEVI award shows clean-energy cash can stall on the ground even when Washington isn't clawing it back. Massachusetts has not installed a single electric-vehicle charger with the roughly $64 million it was awarded under the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, Canary Media reported on Monday (2026-06-08). The money has been in hand. The highways remain bare of new fast chargers paid for by it.³ That matters because NEVI is the marquee charging vehicle of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, a $5 billion pot meant to dot the nation's major highways with fast chargers so drivers could reliably make longer trips. The state's slice is small against that total. The fact that none of it has turned into working hardware is a cleaner read on deployment risk than any forecast.³ Eric Bourassa, transportation director at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and a member of the group overseeing the rollout, said he was "not privy to the details of what's holding it up," while conceding that "everyone would agree that the pace" has been a problem. The person closest to the program cannot say why his state's money has not moved.³ For anyone trying to price the trajectory of American EV demand, that is the awkward part. Most of the worry over Biden-era clean-energy funds has fixed on the Republican trifecta in Washington pulling the money back. Massachusetts points to a different failure: the cash is already allocated, the state wants the chargers, and nothing has been built.³ The market around it has cooled. Global EV sales fell 8% in the first quarter of 2026 after policy shifts in China and the United States, the IEA said on Wednesday (2026-05-20).¹ Yet the longer arc still bends up. The agency expects EVs to make up nearly 30% of global car sales this year, around 23 million units, after sales rose 20% in 2025 to top 20 million. One in every four new cars sold worldwide in 2025 was electric, with roughly 40 countries recording market shares above 10%.¹ The growth is lopsided, and not in America's favour. Chinese carmakers supplied about 60% of the electric cars sold globally in 2025, the IEA said, while European and North American manufacturers each accounted for roughly 15%. A stalled charging buildout in a willing US state fits that ranking rather than challenging it.¹ Charging is the part of the demand story that most directly touches oil. NEVI was designed around longer trips, the journeys where range anxiety and a thin highway network keep drivers in combustion cars. Money that never becomes a charger does nothing to displace those miles. The gap between an award and a working stall is where projected US oil-demand erosion either happens or doesn't.³ It is also a reminder of how slow this category of spending converts. Carmakers announced $68 billion of EV-factory projects in 2021 and 2022, the industry's biggest building boom in decades, and the public charging side was supposed to keep pace. The vehicles arrived faster than the infrastructure to feed them on the open road.^2,1 None of this moves a barrel right away. Crude and product demand will not flinch because one state is sitting on $64 million. The signal is slower and more useful: if even funded, motivated states cannot get highway chargers into the ground, the bullish EV case for displacing US oil demand keeps slipping to the right, regardless of what happens to the funding politically.^3,1 Watch two things from here. The first is whether Massachusetts offers any accounting of what jammed the money, since Bourassa's group has so far not produced one. The second is whether other states show the same distance between dollars awarded and chargers live, which would turn one state's delay into a national read on how quickly American road transport actually electrifies.³