The electrification of U.S. automobile culture has hit quite a few speed bumps lately — some from market events and some inadvertently put up by the very movement trying to promote electric vehicles (EVs).

A surprising story in Politico recently revealed that almost $100 million of the $265 million awarded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has been awarded to conventional truck stop and gas station chains (using EVAdoption data). Now, of course, this is the same real estate that the EV industry wants to utilize for charging stations, but it’s an eye opener on the Highway to Net Zero, nonetheless.

The American Petroleum Institute has pointed out that there are more than 145,000 fossil fuel filling stations nationwide with more than 1 million gas and/or diesel pumps. Conversely, the U.S. has less than 35,000 electric charging stations in place.

The challenges to transportation electrification are manifold, so to speak. In addition to taking a long time to charge your EV, finding a station to do it is equally difficult, if not worse.

It’s not going to be zero to 60 in six seconds flat, yet the solutions in the forward view mirror are closer than they appear, even if not simple or fast. Electric power is not like fuel, which can lay in a storage tank; electrons must keep moving, and distribution lines and the grid must maintain a certain frequency or risk outage issues. Microgrids and aggregated distributed energy resources (DERs) can drive the transition.