A California company that in late 2022 announced plans to establish a series of electric vehicle charging stations along Interstate 10 was recently awarded nearly $64 million through a partnership with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to help finance two such stations in Southern New Mexico — a pair of projects that could total approximately $80 million worth of investment in the state.
TeraWatt Infrastructure, based in San Francisco, landed the $63.8 million through the U.S. Department of Transportation's Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) grant program. The program, which doled out $623 million to 47 grant recipients in total, is aimed at supporting the build-out of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure throughout the U.S.
Two other projects in New Mexico — a community EV charging project in Santa Fe County and installation of six EV chargers in locations around the Town of Taos — landed $3.3 million and $500,000 in CFI grant monies, as well, respectively.
But TeraWatt's charging centers took the vast share of the federal dollars awarded to New Mexico. The California company plans to build one charging station near Lordsburg in Southwest New Mexico, and a second in Vado, just north of El Paso and the New Mexico/Texas border.
TeraWatt's $63.8 million chunk of funding to support those two stations is matched by around $16 million in investment from the company, bringing the total funding for the stations to about $80 million, said Anthony Harrison, TeraWatt's head of regulatory and government affairs.
That $16 million comes from a $1 billion investment round TeraWatt announced in September 2022 — around the same time the company first announced its plans to establish the I-10 Electric Corridor, a series of seven high-powered charging stations for medium- and heavy-duty commercial electric vehicles between Los Angeles and El Paso.
Why Lordsburg and Vado, specifically? It has to do with what Harrison called "pattern matching" around how goods are moved between the Port of Long Beach — near where I-10 terminates — and El Paso.
"What we were doing was overlaying the immediate needs of where the freight needs to move and then looking at the expected truck battery technology, and then also route planning in terms of driver breaks," Harrison said.
All that analysis, he said, meant that for its Electric Corridor to work properly, TeraWatt needed to build a charging station every 150 miles along I-10 between the Port of Long Beach and El Paso.
Harrison said TeraWatt's partnership with the New Mexico Department of Transportation pushed the company to locate both sites in the state, rather than building the easternmost station on the Texas side of the border. It was much more economically viable, he said, to work with electric utilities in New Mexico and with the state's Department of Transportation.
TeraWatt intends to work with the Public Service Co. of New Mexico to supply electricity for its Lordsburg station and El Paso Electric Co. to supply its Vado station, Harrison said. The company's goal, he added, is to operate the sites with all renewable energy "to the extent possible and available." That means a mix of on-site electricity generation using renewable energy sources and utility-provided power.
Final details on the stations' electricity needs are still being determined, Harrison said. The company hopes to have that agreement between it, NMDOT and the Federal Highway Administration completed by the end of the year.
Once that's ready, TeraWatt will start building the stations out in phases. Harrison said the company wants to have the first phase of both New Mexico stations operational in 2025. Federal grant dollars will help accelerate the time frame for future phases, he added.
Instead of constructing the stations all at once and then having a large amount of infrastructure sit unused, Harrison said, TeraWatt will build in phases to match medium- and heavy-duty EV adoption and the demand for EV charging.
Trucking fleets sign long-term fueling contracts with TeraWatt to use the company's charging stations — the company signed one such deal with PepsiCo in September 2023 to utilize TeraWatt's charging station planned to be located in Rancho Dominguez, California. Those longer-term deals help ensure "operational assurance" for the company's charging infrastructure and price certainty for how much it'll cost trucking fleets to charge their EV vehicles, Harrison said.
The company hasn't publicly announced any contracts for its stations under development in New Mexico.
While a bulk of the $80 million total funding will go toward the construction and operation of the two charging stations near Lordsburg and Vado in New Mexico, Harrison said another component of TeraWatt and the New Mexico Department of Transportation's grant application was supporting job training efforts.
To that end, Harrison said TeraWatt plans to work with New Mexico State University's Research, Creativity and Economic Development Office to support job training and recruitment related to jobs required for the construction and operation of the two New Mexico stations.
While Harrison said specific job numbers related to TeraWatt's two New Mexico stations won't be available until the contract agreement is finalized, he said the company expects around 500 jobs to be required for the development and construction of its entire I-10 Electric Corridor.
