Georgia suffering from divided loyalties on electric vehicles: Fed pumping money into state for EV factories & battery plants, but ‘many voters & state lawmakers don’t like or want EVs’

Georgia is having an EV identity crisis

By DAVID FERRIS

Georgia is suffering from divided loyalties on electric vehicles.

On one hand, its lawmakers and economic-development types are thrilled to have garnered almost $25 billion — more than any other state — to build battery and EV factories. They could employ tens of thousands and fulfill Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s goal of making Georgia an “electric mobility capital.”

On the other, many voters and state lawmakers don’t like or want EVs. Few people outside of Atlanta drive them. State legislators have put up barriers to Georgians owning EVs because they consider the technology a creation of overreaching California regulators, designed to address climate change, which many there still think is an overblown problem.

“On the political level, that’s the really fascinating tension,” said Stan Cross, the director of electric transportation at the nonprofit Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “That tension between wanting all of this benefit from jobs and investment, without celebrating the end product created.”

Dwell for a moment on how unusual this all is.

Americans are usually the first to embrace a new technology, especially when it offers economic opportunity and jobs. But in Georgia and much of the South — where the lion’s share of America’s EV investment is going — even that opportunity isn’t yet overcoming the deep skepticism.

These conflicting impulses have consequences for both political parties.

For Democrats, it means that President Joe Biden — and now his anointed heir, Vice President Kamala Harris — are having difficulty turning their legislative victories into votes in this crucial swing state. After all, it is the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark legislative achievement, that accelerated Georgia’s EV transition.

It also puts Georgia Republicans in a state of perpetual awkwardness. They simultaneously want to celebrate the jobs that they helped land, by offering EV makers big incentives and out-hustling other states, while not celebrating the fruit of the factories. And they have to avoid the fact that some of the credit belongs to Democrats.