CHEAPR Rebates Close Out a Slow Q2 – Will They Make Changes?

37 CHEAPR rebates in June

This tepid number was only slightly higher than the 27 in May, closing the quarter with a soft 81 rebates total and 275 for the first half of the year. This 275 compares to 818 during the first half of 2019.

Partly, this was due to the recession, but a lot of it has to do with the changes made to the program in October 2019, when the price cap for vehicle eligibility was lowered from $50K to $42K. You can see in the graph that the numbers immediately tanked in November and have stayed low.

CSE Proposal for CHEAPR Program Revisions

The CHEAPR board met on July 17th to entertain proposed program changes submitted by their consultant, the Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE). These proposed changes were a decidedly mixed bag. DEEP is accepting public comments until August 12th. Email comments to the at deep.mobilesources@ct.gov

These are our positions:

We support raising the vehicle MSRP price cap from $42K to $50K.*

We support raising the incentive levels back to where they were prior to October 2019.*

We support the supplemental incentive for low and middle income (LMI) individuals/families.

We support a rebate for used EVs, limited to LMI.

We support creating a pilot incentive of $500 for e-bikes for LMI.*

We advocate suspending the incentive for fuel-cell vehicles, which can be revisited in a few years.*

*Items with an asterisk are not part of the CSE proposal.

We went into more detail about these items in our previous post on the subject.

CHEAPR is extremely underspent. They have issued $287,500 in rebates through June against a budget pacing number of $1,750,000. The supplemental LMI and used EV rebates won’t come online until next year. In other words, there is plenty of room to raise the levels.