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What I’m Reading: Unplugged: How broken charging stations could stall the EV movement–and the fight against climate change.. (I read the story in the print copy of the magazine; the link and quotes below are to the online edition of the article from late April, which has slightly different text in some parts.)

The tale:

Matt Hirsch has long loved the idea of electric vehicles and first leased his Hyundai Ioniq in 2020. He even installed a charger right next to the driveway of his suburban Boston home, where he does most of his topping up. But lately the relationship has started to fizzle.

Sometimes he takes longer trips, forcing him to use multiple apps and websites to meticulously plot out the charging stations on his journey, so he doesn’t get caught without a charge. One frequent drive, to a brother’s home in New York, often takes him by a station run by Electrify America in the Massachusetts town of Chicopee–where he often finds some if not all of the four available plugs broken.

It’s a vexing situation for Hirsch, and he worries about the effects that broken and slow chargers will have . . .

— Aarian Marshall, Unplugged: How broken charging stations could stall the EV movement–and the fight against climate change.
WIRED (30.07/30.08), 20-21.

The problem:

. . . [I]f the US is to pull off a transition to electric vehicles–and other greener transportation alternatives–it’s going to need a lot more charging stations. The vast majority of electric vehicle drivers today do their charging at home, and the country has nearly 46,500 public fast chargers, which can typically charge a battery in 20 to 30 minutes, to fill in the gaps. But it will need 180,000 of them by 2030 to cover more of the US, predicts the International Council on Clean Transportation. Plus 856,000 more level 2 chargers, which are cheaper to install but take longer to charge up a car.

US governments–states, municipalities, and above all, the feds–seem willing to spend a whole bunch of money to get there. . . .

. . . But based on their track record, it’s not clear whether any of those new chargers will work for as long as they need to. It’s hard to find definitive data on public electric vehicle charger maintenance, or how today’s chargers are performing in the wild. Companies that build chargers tend to say they have a 95 to 98 percent nationwide uptime, an industry term meaning the tech is charging or ready to charge. But talk to an electric vehicle owner for a while, and you’re likely to hear complaints about slow or broken chargers.

A recent survey of 181 San Francisco Bay Area public charging stations, partially funded by the nonprofit Cool the Earth, suggests that 23 percent of them might be nonfunctioning at any given time, stymied by broken screens, shoddy credit card or payment systems, network connection failures, or damaged plugs. Only half of the functional chargers tested by the research team successfully completed a payment transaction with just one swipe of a credit card. . . . A survey of EV drivers by one California agency found that more than a third of them, and nearly 60 percent of those who said they used public chargers, had encountered nonfunctioning ones. Sixteen percent had run into payment problems. Nearly half had needed to call customer service for a charger-related issue.

— Aarian Marshall, Unplugged: How broken charging stations could stall the EV movement–and the fight against climate change.
WIRED (30.07/30.08), 20-21.

Why’s this happening? My view (not endorsed by the author or by WIRED) is that it is pretty simple: public infrastructure spending is a terrible way to build out infrastructure, and a terrible way to manage the transition to new technologies. It’s not terrible despite the fact tat governments seem willing to spend a whole bunch of money to get there; the problem is because governments seem willing to spend a whole bunch of money to get there. And they spend it the way that governments typically, characteristically spend money on big projects, over and over again. So the whole subsidized system suffers from just about every predictable, systematic failure of all public spending and political planning. You’re pinning your hopes on the same people, and the same systems, and the same incentive structures, that produced public housing, public education, and public health planning and responses to pandemic Covid-19. There are strong theoretical reasons to suspect that this is a bad idea which will turn out badly. There’s also a long track record of structured, predictable, systemic failure.

As soon as I saw the headline of this story, I figured that the problem would almost certainly closely involve one of the classic, endlessly repeated failures of public spending:

. . . Even if stations are serviced regularly, nature occasionally interferes: A charger repair technician working for the company ChargerHelp recently found a wasp’s nest snuggled into a charger’s electronic guts, the company’s cofounder said at a recent industry event. . . . What’s more, not all early US charging station projects set aside funding for regular check-ins or maintenance, said Thomas Ashley, vice president of policy and market development at Shell Recharge Solutions, in an email to WIRED. Some early projects did not require the companies installing or managing the chargers to maintain a certain level of reliability or uptime, he says. Even in today’s charging infrastructure contracts, where uptime or reliability requirements exist, they’re generally not strong enough to meet driver expectations and are not granted sufficient budget for longer-term maintenance needs, Ashley says.

— Aarian Marshall, Unplugged: How broken charging stations could stall the EV movement–and the fight against climate change.
WIRED (30.07/30.08), 20-21.

It’s turned out like this so far because it almost always turns out like this, and it almost always turns out like this because (1) the incentives for public choice that come out of political processes and (2) the structures for decision-making that come out of governmental institutions almost always combine to make these dysfunctional patterns of spending and planning, malinvestment, overinvestment, and underinvestment, as completely predictable as they are stifling, ugly, broken and needlessly, grindingly stupid.

See also.

• GT 2005-11-23: Uncle Sam Is Your ISP

• Protest in Montgomery, Alabama, 24-26 June 2022:

• Unfortunately, Yellowhammer Fund has decided that they have to temporarily pause our services funding access to abortion outside of the state while they consult with legal experts about what they can do in the future. I do not currently have any further information on when or if they will resume funding or support for people from Alabama facing unwanted pregnancies. I am grateful for everything they’ve done so far, and I very much hope that they will be back and operating again soon.

We have made the deeply difficult decision to temporarily pause our services for the safety and security of our clients, our supporters, and our staff. During this time we will consult legal experts to reassess how best to continue doing our work in the immediate future.

. . . We assure you that we will always continue to fight for Reproductive Justice in Alabama and the Deep South. We will still serve our communities in the best capacity in our new post-Roe reality.

. . . This is an evolution not a defeat.

— Yellowhammer Fund, This is an evolution, not a defeat
June 29, 2022.

• POWER House in Montgomery is a pro-choice community space that has provided support, resources and clinic escort volunteers for years in central Alabama. They are now raising funds to be able to stay open and to continue and expand their no-questions-asked assistance program despite Alabama’s abortion ban.

• ARC-Southeast is a regional fund based out of Atlanta that provides procedure funding as well as help with travel costs and lodging to support folks in six Southeastern states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.

As always, border policies and the border cops who enforce them impose horrendous suffering on innocent people, for the sake of inflicting the deplorable, invasive and violent means to an utterly worthless political end. Then they turn around and look at the humanitarian crisis that they themselves have created, they contort their faces into a grotesque mask of feigned pity, and Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland of Security will talk on and on about how it is all so awful, and the smugglers and traffickers are to blame, and the politicians in Washington and the paramilitary patrol on the border all care so, so very much and they are all so, so very sorry, and this only shows how much harder they need to work at shutting crossings systematically, relentlessly, and completely. So that they can make damned sure to enforce all the laws that keep forcing peaceful, harmless people into these awful conditions over and over again. There is no political policy on earth that could be worth this, no system of control and enforcement that could justify or even excuse hunting people and leaving them no escape but to cram themselves into the back of a tractor-trailer truck in 100 degree heat so they can try to hide while they are trying to get around a goddamned apartheid patrol that never should have set one foot out the door or laid one hand on an immigrant minding their own business. There is no crisis on the border that is not the direct result of the crisis of the border, no humanitarian disaster that would not be instantly and forever wiped away just by letting people cross peacefully where they want to cross, and letting them stay anywhere that they can find a place or a person willing to have them. All you need to do is stand down, let these people cross freely and openly where they choose, and leave them alone.

Nobody needed to die. Not one person. Not one child. How dare you? What else is there to say? What could there be to say in anything other than looking directly at the borders and the government of the United States of America and screaming, screaming, screaming.

I think that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is wrong and deeply alarming. It’s wrong as a matter of principle; its immediate consequences are and will be immensely destructive for women’s individual liberty; and its alarming implications and long-term consequences are likely to be a poison within U.S. American political culture for years to come. Abortion is a woman’s right, an inalienable individual right to bodily autonomy that neither democratic majorities nor state legislatures nor any other government or power on earth has any business infringing, abridging, regulating or overruling. That somewhere around half the states in this country have done so immediately, or will most likely do so within days, is a brutal and heartbreaking display of overweening political power over the most intimate parts of our lives.

I can say more about why if you’re interested — either why I think abortion ought to be recognized as an inalienable individual right, or why I think the Supreme Court ruling is wrong, or why I think it’s awful that state governments may now exercise the power to invasively regulate or prohibit abortion according to democratic rule. For the moment, now that the decision has been handed down, I think it is important to take a careful and realistic look at what the real-world situation is, and to respond accordingly in ways that will seriously address the real-world problem going forward.

State by State

Nothing is over. Abortion is not illegal in the United States. The Dobbs ruling doesn’t claim to make it illegal or hint at any effort to do so. What it does is to put abortion rights into the political process — it removes the Court doctrine that prevented state governments from making it illegal in those states respectively. I think this is an awful decision.^[1] But with this decision inflicted, the question is now a question of political organizing and grassroots civil society. The development of safe and effective pills (mifepristone and misoprostol) and telemedicine have dramatically decentralized the technology for safe medical abortions. In about half the states in the country there will almost certainly continue to be pretty vigorously pro-choice abortion laws. (These are a couple of respects, and very important ones, in which the situation now is much better for reproductive liberty than it was in 1973.) Abortion laws, either preexisting ones or new ones passed in a rush, are going to severely curtail or ban abortion in about half the states in the country. Jacob Sullum at Reason has a useful run-down of the effects of the ruling state by state, here: Here Is a State-by-State Rundown of What Will Happen Now That SCOTUS Has Freed Lawmakers To Restrict Abortion.

Aid and Abet

Part of what’s going to happen is going to be a matter of political protest, state by state campaigning in state legislatures and all of the mechanisms of political process outside of the courtroom. But it’s also worth remembering the absolutely central importance and power of civil society and grassroots mutual aid to provide direct assistance to people seeking abortion care.

One of the most practically consequential things that you can do right now if you are concerned about access to abortion in the states where it is and will remain broadly legal is to give money to abortion funds, especially abortion funds in states with hostile state governments, and especially in states in the Deep South and the Midwest. Abortion funds are mutual aid networks that provide direct support to people seeking abortions in a particular community or locale. Those that are in areas where abortion access is threatened by hostile state governments have been making plans for months to provide access to travel and abortion care in states where abortion remains legal. This is going to be awful, and it’s going to be expensive, but it is work that they are doing and will continue to do.

I give money to support Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion fund in the state of Alabama: [SEE UPDATE BELOW. -RG, 2022-06-29.]

Abortion clinics in Alabama shut down immediately when the ruling came out, but Yellowhammer is continuing to operate and actively soliciting support to help cover the costs of funding travel to states where abortion remains legal.

[UPDATE, 29 June 2022. Earlier today, Wednesday 29 June 2022, Yellowhammer Fund sent out an e-mail statement to their supporters stating (emphasis mine): We have made the deeply difficult decision to temporarily pause our services for the safety and security of our clients, our supporters, and our staff. During this time we will consult legal experts to reassess how best to continue doing our work in the immediate future. . . . We assure you that we will always continue to fight for Reproductive Justice in Alabama and the Deep South. We will still serve our communities in the best capacity in our new post-Roe reality. . . . This is an evolution not a defeat. I do not currently have any further information on when or if they will resume funding or support for women from Alabama seeking abortions. I hope that they will be able to come back soon.]

The West Alabama Women’s Center will continue to provide birth control and other sexual health services, Marty said. Clinic providers hope to provide services to women on Medicaid.

Lauren Frazier, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Southeast, said the organization’s clinics in Alabama stopped performing abortions before the Dobbs decision came down. They are devoting more resources to patient navigation to help arrange travel for people who need to go out of state.

The Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial assistance to women who want abortions, said it will have to increase fundraising to cover the high costs of seeking care in other states such as Illinois. The organization also hopes to open a pregnancy and parenting resource center for people who can’t travel out of state and must carry unplanned pregnancies to term, Roberts said.

— Amy Yurkanin, Supreme Court abortion ban: Alabama abortion advocates regroup after Roe v. Wade decision
Al.com, 24 June 2022.

I also support Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, an abortion fund covering the state of Mississippi (which is the state directly and immediately affected by the Dobbs ruling):

Texas is the largest state with overtly hostile laws that will most likely make nearly all abortion illegal nearly everywhere in the state. The size of Texas and the very long distances to states with more liberal abortion laws (California, Illinois, or across the border to Mexico) make the question of travel resources especially intense. It’s also a state with a lot of very active abortion funds, most of them based out of the major cities. These are all worth supporting; although you should be aware that Texas’s insidiously, catastrophically, fractally awful SB 8 law includes some provisions targeted at abortion funds. As a result, several of these organizations — especially NNAF-affiliated not-for-profits — are temporarily pausing funding or may be reconsidering what they can do legally going forward:

• Fund Texas Choice (Austin)
• West Fund (El Paso)
• Texas Equal Access (TEA) Fund (Dallas)
• Clinic Access Support Network (Houston)
• Lilith Fund (Austin)
• The Bridge Collective (Austin)
• Frontera Fund (McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley)
• Jane’s Due Process (deals with legal support and 1-on-1 case management for young people dealing with Texas parental consent laws)
• Buckle Bunnies Fund (San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Austin and Houston — grassroots network, not an incorporated nonprofit)

Here’s a big list with lots more:

1. ^[1]Nobody’s reproductive rights or control over their own bodies should be subjected to political processes or to the control of governments or ruling majorities. Of course they shouldn’t. Jesus. Individual liberty is inalienable.↩