Oregon’s All-In Approach to Electrification

Climate change is affecting every corner of the planet. In Oregon, that means that extreme weather—wildfires, high heat, floods, and landslides—are growing more frequent and destructive. These disastrous events aren’t cheap. Every five years, we’re spending $20 million more to respond to extreme weather around the state, and we’re barely keeping up.

Not only does extreme weather cost the agency money, it’s also harming our communities. These dangerous events can close or damage roads, which disrupts the movement of goods and services and blocks lifeline routes critical for evacuation and recovery.

We must address the impacts of climate change and the single largest source of their cause: greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Oregon’s plan for reducing emissions from transportation is multifaceted: cleaner vehicles and fuels; expanded and improved low-emission travel options (biking, walking/rolling, and transit); supportive land use changes; increased system efficiencies; and pricing. Our efforts in those areas over the past decade have paid off: by 2050, we project emissions will be 60 percent lower than they were in 1990.

Most of our progress results from regulations and investments in cleaner vehicles and fuels. But we also need to reduce people’s dependence on driving and increase use of low-emission options. Our recently adopted Oregon Transportation Plan includes bold policies around reducing passenger vehicle miles traveled, with a target of a 20 percent reduction by 2050.

That will not be easy. It will take coordination between local and state agencies, plus buy-in from the public. However, recently adopted regulations in Oregon ensure that local government plans and transportation project lists actually result in reductions to miles traveled.

The state Department of Transportation is making similar commitments and is examining roadway pricing strategies that better reflect the true cost and impact of driving, in support of transitioning to lower-emission options. But many people will still need to drive some or all of the time. For those trips, our goal is to make every mile driven clean.

Therefore, Oregon is all-in on transportation electrification. We’re already on a promising trajectory: In the first quarter of 2023, we were third in the United States for the share of new cars, trucks and SUVs sold that are electric. We average about 1,000 new EV registrations per month.

The public is clearly responding to the electrified future, and we’re responding with substantial investments in EV charging infrastructure. ODOT’s initial investment will be over $100 million, funded from the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program and state dollars. While the NEVI funds create a charging network along major highways and interstates, we are also focusing on areas that the private sector may not initially see as profitable, like rural regions and disadvantaged communities.

Our new Community Charging Rebates Program aims to close charging gaps in those neighborhoods. The program reimburses most of the cost of Level 2 charging projects at multifamily homes and publicly accessible parking areas. Seventy percent of funding is reserved for projects in rural and disadvantaged communities. We launched the rebate program in June, and within two days we received requests equaling about half of the available funding for the first round. We plan to hold future rounds in 2024 and beyond.

These investments are a strong start, but our studies show that we need to double the amount of charging infrastructure each year to accommodate demand by 2035. That will require a huge investment, in the billions of dollars range, from both the private and public sectors.

Targeted and continued investments, policies, and programs are needed to reduce emissions from transportation, whether it’s cleaning up each mile driven, or reducing how far and how often people drive. Climate change threatens all of us, and it will take all of us to push back against it.