G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com

West Coast Electric Highway Expands to 7 States for Fast Charging

Arizona is the latest state to join the newest 7 member states that will expand the original West Coast Electric Highway system. Originally Washington, Oregon and California got together to build the West Coast Electric Highway at a cost of $257 million dollars to the taxpayers. This enabled anyone with an electric vehicle to drive from Vancouver BC to Baha California on I-5 in an electric vehicle. Since then, these states have expanded their EV chargers across state highways giving greater range to anyone driving an electric auto around.

Since then more states have assessed the future and decided on joining this to cover a larger interstate electric highway system. At the beginning of this year Colorado, Nevada and Utah said they would build out over the next 24 months a 2,000 mile electric interstate charging system of fast chargers. This summer say Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming join effective October 4th 2017  and here the week of October 20th 2017 we see Arizona join to grow the electric highway to over 5,000 miles of interstate that will have fast charging available by the end of 2019.

This on top of the thousands of miles of the original electric highway is growing exponentially the change that is coming to EV auto's.

All of these states are looking at investing their VW settlement funds into the electric highway initiative. Colorado alone says their $68.7 million dollar payout by VW will enable them to cover the whole state with Level 3 fast chargers leaving room for the extreme fast chargers to be installed by others who are willing to pay for an even faster recharge of their battery packs. The fast charging stations will cost between $150,000 and $200,000 per station installed all over the state. At the high end, this would mean Colorado alone will install 343 fast charging stations across the state.

Colorado Governor has also announced a $5,000 tax credit for new EV auto purchases on top of the Federal tax credit of up to $7,500. This means buyers can get a credit of $12,500 against the purchase of an EV auto.

The political representatives for these states point to announcements from General Motors of 20 electric auto's by 2023, Ford with 13 electric auto's by 2020, Mercedes-Benz with announcing an electric or plug in hybrid for each model in it's family by 2022.

Denver Post

Green Car Report

About damn time they did this.