Most of the noise around the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program has been about money that did not move. Tom Moloughney went to Manchester, Kentucky to see a site that got built anyway. It belongs to PowerUp America, a startup the video says was founded by Josh Turner and Jesse Hensley, two electric vehicle drivers who decided the charging industry was not serving people like them. Their first location is a green field build with four stalls under a canopy, pull through parking, tap to pay card readers and both NACS and CCS connectors on every port. The equipment is Kempower, a Finnish manufacturer that the video describes as having a large European footprint but comparatively little public visibility in the United States, where most of its installed hardware sits behind fences at depots and fleet yards.
The federal freeze is the backdrop. The video reports that funding was paused in February 2025, that companies which had already signed equipment contracts and secured sites were left exposed, and that a federal judge later ruled the freeze unlawful and ordered the money released. Turner says PowerUp kept moving by taking private investment from a third generation Nashville fuel retailer that the video says operates more than 200 traditional refueling stations. What that buys is scale: he describes over 23 federally funded sites opening within a year and more than 100 additional private ones. Moloughney puts the eventual network split at roughly 35 percent Kempower and 65 percent Tesla Superchargers, the latter bought through Tesla's Supercharger for Business program. Worth knowing before you route to one: four stalls is small next to the larger banks you find at established highway locations, and Moloughney notes there is no 24 hour restroom on site, with nearby options closed between roughly 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.
Kempower's Jed Routh explains the part most drivers never see. The site runs 800 kW across four satellites, and rather than splitting power in fixed pairs it allocates in 25 kW increments across the whole site, so a car that can only take 25 kW does not sit on half the cabinet while a truck next to it waits. Routh says NEVI requires each port to be capable of 150 kW, and that this site can push up to 400 kW into a single vehicle when nothing else is drawing. Moloughney watches a Rivian R1T plug in at 10 percent and ramp to roughly 150 to 160 kW, with the station screen drawing the live charging curve and flagging whether the car or the charger is limiting. Turner says plug and charge should go live within about 60 days. Moloughney's criticisms are small and practical: no trash cans, no squeegees, and he would prefer more than four stalls, though he notes conduit is already in the ground to expand to eight. Turner traces the company back to a 2021 Ford F-150 Lightning and a road trip to Florida that convinced him charging was being built for operators rather than drivers. He says PowerUp won awards in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee before the freeze, that the Tesla sites will carry PowerUp branding with rates the company sets while Tesla runs the back end, and that locations will appear on PlugShare and the usual routing apps as they come online.
Bottom line: The interesting thing here is not the hardware, it is who chose it. Canopies, pull through stalls and both connectors on every port are the things drivers have been asking for and operators have been calling too expensive for a decade. Four stalls in rural Kentucky will not fix anyone's road trip by itself, but a company that installs conduit for eight before it needs six is thinking about year five. Judge them in eighteen months on uptime, because that is what separates the networks that last from the ones that looked good on opening day.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.