Power outages used to be something New Jersey residents simply endured — a few uncomfortable hours, and sometimes even days in the dark after a storm, waiting for the grid to come back online. A vehicle used to be a device to just move you around; and something on which you would spend money to fuel, maintain and repair. It was not a device that would make you money.
The calculus is changing.
As extreme weather becomes more frequent and our electrical system faces growing strain from rising demand, the question of grid resilience is no longer theoretical. It is a business continuity issue, a household safety issue and an economic issue. Similarly, the task before us to build a reliable and affordable 21st century grid, providing the service we need at a reasonable cost for all the innovation coming down the proverbial Turnpike is powerfully aided by what will be sitting in the driveways and loading docks across the state.
Electric vehicles are batteries on wheels. A well-designed EV policy treats them that way — not merely as transportation technology, but as distributed grid assets that can store energy when supply is abundant, return it when demand spikes, power a home or a facility during an outage, and use the grid we all pay for more efficiently, saving all of us money. This is the frame through which New Jersey should understand its EV programs: not as a subsidy for a consumer product, but as an investment in the resilience, service, reliability and affordability of the infrastructure everyone depends on.
When your electric vehicle can keep your lights on during a blackout — and share power with the grid to prevent the next one —and make better use of all those fixed costs we pay for, it stops being just a car. It becomes an important part of the solution.
ChargEVC’s 2026 Electric Vehicle Roadmap 3.0, released this month, makes this case in detail. It calls for aggressive expansion of bidirectional charging infrastructure — both public and private. It calls on utilities to offer managed charging programs and time-of-use rate designs that direct EV charging to off-peak hours, reducing strain on the system and lowering electricity costs for all ratepayers, not just EV owners. And it calls on the Board of Public Utilities to advance the utility filings, stalled for years, that will make this infrastructure a reality. This is common-sense policy: using the vehicle batteries New Jersey residents and business owners will be investing in to make our power system more reliable and more affordable for every household. It’s one of the most powerful leveraging of private investment against public investment.
The grid resilience argument is also, increasingly, an American competitiveness argument. China has moved aggressively to dominate the global electric vehicle market — in manufacturing, in battery technology, and in the domestic adoption that creates the scale advantages driving costs down. New Jersey’s EV programs are part of how the United States competes. When we invest in charging infrastructure, fleet incentives and consumer programs that accelerate adoption, we are not just greening our transportation sector. We are building the market that supports domestic manufacturing, attracts private investment, and keeps American companies — and American workers — at the front of the most consequential industrial transition of our time.
New Jersey has built two of the most effective clean transportation programs in the country — and both are now at risk.
The EV rebate program, funded through the Clean Energy Fund, has put up to $4,000 back in the pockets of New Jersey families who make the switch to electric, directly addressing the upfront cost barrier that keeps many households on the sidelines. The NJ ZIP program has done the same for commercial fleets, providing the financing that makes electric truck adoption viable for small and mid-sized operators who cannot absorb the premium over diesel on their own.
Together, these programs are not line items to be trimmed when budgets get tight — they are investment in the load-bearing infrastructure of New Jersey’s EV transition. Eliminate the rebate and you stall light-duty adoption at exactly the moment the market is reaching scale. Gut ZIP and you pull the ladder out from under the fleet operators who have already committed to electrification and are counting on that support to see it through.
Additionally, and wisely, the many programs offered by the Board of Public Utilities, the Economic Development Authority and the Department of Environmental Protection that provide financial support for the charging infrastructure have requirements that ensure that these assets are networked and able to interact with the grid as more of the vehicles come on line with bidirectionality features.
These programs exist because the market, left entirely to itself, moves more slowly than the challenge requires. The upfront cost of electric trucks, for example, remains substantially higher than diesel — a real barrier for small and mid-sized fleet operators who cannot absorb that premium without financing support. The New Jersey Zero Emission Incentive Program, funded by Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative proceeds, bridges that gap. It has already catalyzed fleet investments that would not have happened otherwise, and it is a direct enabler of the grid resilience benefits described above — every electric truck added to a New Jersey fleet is another large-capacity battery that can support the grid during periods of peak demand.
Pulling back from these programs now — as federal support for clean energy grows increasingly uncertain — would strand the fleet operators and consumers who have already committed to electrification, slow the buildout of charging infrastructure at exactly the moment it needs to scale, and forfeit New Jersey’s position in a global competition it has spent a decade positioning itself to win. Importantly, it also takes away a powerful tool the state has to address the affordability of electricity in New Jersey.
Severe storms will keep coming. Energy demand will keep growing. The grid will keep facing pressure it was not designed to handle. The question facing New Jersey policymakers is whether they want to address that pressure by building distributed resilience into the transportation system — or by leaving that capability on the table while other states move forward.
The Roadmap is the blueprint. The infrastructure, the programs, the 265,000 EVs on our roads today, and the $6 billion or so in private sector investment for those vehicles (conservative estimate of $25,000 per vehicle) are the proof of concept. Let’s smartly leverage the private sector’s investments in vehicles with the public sector dollar. We all win.
And I did not even mention gasoline at $4.50/gallon and diesel at $5.50/gallon.
Pam Frank is the CEO of ChargEVC, New Jersey’s not-for-profit electric vehicle industry coalition. Founded in 2016, ChargEVC conducts New Jersey-based research that informs legislation, policy, and program development for the state. The organization’s 2026 Electric Vehicle Roadmap 3.0 is available at chargevc.org.
