Experts Predict Problems Coming for Electric Cars

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June 04, 2021

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by Jeena Cadigan (WBOY) With more companies coming out with electric cars, experts are predicting costly upgrades to towns and cities in West Virginia. With more electric cars on the road, more charging stations are needed. Along with those stations, companies will have to build more power sources and lines to get and disperse that energy. Experts said we don’t have those capabilities yet.

“Electric vehicles are great, but we have not fully considered the impact that it will have on our electric grid infrastructure,” said Roy Nutter, West Virginia University professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. “It will require a lot of expansion of our electric distribution and charging facilities. Remember, electric power comes from the ‘power company.’ We must consider this when considering wide-scale EV adoption.”

Since solar power doesn’t work at night, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time, companies will have to rely on other sources, like coal, to get energy. Experts said this makes West Virginia a prime spot to start building more infrastructure.

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Experts said in about 8 to 10 years, if infrastructure doesn’t grow, drivers will start to see problems at charging stations. READ MORE

Solar Power’s Land Grab Hits a Snag: Environmentalists (Wall Street Journal)

There's A Big Problem Buying A Used EV: Proposed rules would give consumers access to battery life info, but not before 2026. (Jalopnik)

Automakers face a threat to EV sales: Slow charging times (Associated Press)

EV Market Slows in U.S. -- Thirty-nine percent of U.S. adults surveyed say they are considering an EV for their next car. (NACS)

How green bottlenecks threaten the clean energy business: A great green investment boom is under way, but supply-side problems are underappreciated (The Economist)

Biden wants millions of electric vehicles on the roads. Can the power grid handle it? (NBC News; includes VIDEO)

Politicians and automakers tout the rise of electric vehicles. But gas station owners aren't rushing to install chargers. (CBS News)

Thinking of buying an electric vehicle? Read this first. Government incentives and charging stations are considerations for the climate-conscious consumer (Washington Post)

Clean Energy Faces the Same Problem as Fossil Fuels: Community Protests -- Wind and solar projects require vast bodies of land and water, sparking complaints from local farmers and fishermen (Wall Street Journal)

Why is it so hard to find chargers for electric cars? Utility regulations are partly to blame. (CBS News)

After Fires, Chevrolet Bolt Owners Are Warned: Don’t Park Indoors -- Even electric vehicles serviced in response to a recall last year may still be at risk, the vehicle’s manufacturer and federal safety officials said. (New York Times)

Transmission for renewables in largest power market may cost $3B (E&E News)

The Chevy Bolt recall is burning up what’s left of GM’s EV good will -- The largest automaker in the US has big goals for electric vehicles, but the last half-decade is now full of stumbles (The Verge)

THE MAINE LINE: Maine voters go to the polls today to vote on a new transmission project (Politico's Morning Energy)

Where electric cars could help save coal -- In states like North Dakota, giving up gasoline might not mean giving up fossil fuels (Washington Post)

GM heralded this plant as a model for its electric car future. Then its batteries started exploding.-- The company had to recall 141,000 Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles, a microcosm of the challenge GM faces as it aims to shift its production to all-electric (Washington Post)

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal: All the same, many here are dead set against a planned solar plant atop the Mormon Mesa, which overlooks this valley 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Slated to be the biggest solar plant in the U.S., the Battle Born Solar Project by California-based Arevia Power would carpet 14 square miles—the equivalent of 7,000 football fields—with more than a million solar panels 10 to 20 feet tall. It would be capable of producing 850 megawatts of electricity, or roughly one-tenth of Nevada’s current capacity.

“It will destroy this land forever,” Ms. Rebich, 33, said after riding her bicycle on the 600-foot high mesa.

Across the U.S., more than 800 utility-scale solar projects are under contract to generate nearly 70,000 megawatts of new capacity, enough to power more than 11 million homes, equivalent to Texas and then some. More than half this capacity is being planned for the American Southwest, with its abundance of sunshine and open land.

These large projects are increasingly drawing opposition from environmental activists and local residents who say they are ardent supporters of clean energy. Their objections range from a desire to keep the land unspoiled to protection for endangered species to concerns that their views would no longer be as beautiful. READ MORE

Excerpt from CBS News: Today, 80% of direct current fast charging and "Level 2" charging stations — the fastest way to charge an EV — are located at 10 facility types, according to the Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center. The majority of that 80% is hotels and apartment buildings, car dealerships, shopping centers and parking lots — not gas stations.

Mehdi Mahmoodi owns 12 fuel stations across the Bay Area. He has not invested in installing an EV charging station at a single one, nor does he plan to any time soon.

"We haven't looked into it because there's not really much profit," he told CBS News.

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Retailers who install charging stations today are taking a risk. Electric vehicles, while more popular than ever, still only make up 1.8% of the market share. Charging stations are expensive to install. And unlike liquid fuels, retailers in most states only have one electric supply from which to buy: utility companies, which can sell the energy directly to consumers.

This relationship puts gas station owners at a disadvantage as they look to an electric future.

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Retailers who want to be EV charging early adopters risk owning antiquated technology in just a few years.

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Hani Hamadi is embracing the future of EVs, but only lightly. He is installing one charging station at one of his seven Michigan gas stations — and it's not the property he owns around the corner from a Ford plant making electric F-150 trucks.

Hamadi was approached by Detroit-based DTE Energy while he was renovating one of his properties. DTE and the state of Michigan offer incentives to retailers who install EV chargers. A DTE rep told Hamadi a charging station at his location would be a "goldmine."

Even with their enthusiasm, Hamadi was hesitant but wanted to test the market himself.

"It's not going to work everywhere," he said. "You can't have a charging station across the street from another charging station. It wouldn't be worth it because the investment is so big."

His EV charging station will cost $125,000 to $150,000 to install. That's "no comparison" to a double sided gas pump, which can be constructed for $20,000, Hamadi said.

He expects it will take seven years to start making money off the charger, whereas a new gas pump would turn a profit in less than a year.

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Plus, gas station owners will have to get used to a new business model. Not only will they have to rely on public utilities for the energy, Eichberger said fuel retailers will have to figure out what convenience they can offer customers when most EV owners will be able to charge at home.

Add to the challenges that low EV batteries take much longer to fill than a liquid tank. Commercial charging stations can take 10 to 45 minutes depending on their speed and source to fully charge a vehicle. As a result, Eichberger said, retailers will have to offer customers amenities like meals, free wifi and better customer service as drivers wait for their cars to recharge. This could mean more space inside stores, but also for outdoor lots.

Space for retailers is now at a premium. READ MORE

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal: In late June, about 30 local commercial fishing boats surrounded a towering vessel off the coast of Brittany, seeking to block the installation of part of a $2.9 billion wind farm run by Spanish utility Iberdrola SA .

The fishermen succeeded in driving the ship away, prompting a judicial investigation and legal threats from the local Iberdrola unit, Ailes Marines, against the protesters. The fishermen say they will continue to fight against the project, saying it threatens to destroy their businesses by disrupting the marine life they harvest and their access to it.

More broadly, their protests underscore a mounting problem for energy companies and governments around the world scaling up production of renewable energy: Clean-energy projects require vast bodies of land and water, potentially depriving farmers and fishermen of their livelihood. And the result is that in places as disparate as Massachusetts, South Korea and Colombia, clean-energy installations have faced the same sort of community grievances once directed at fossil-fuel producers. READ MORE

Excerpt from CBS News: That's thanks to the confluence of existing regulations that affect the price of electricity, the way gas stations make money, where EV owners live and how they charge up.

Today, most EV owners charge their vehicles at home using slower Level 2 chargers. Those without that capability, or drivers headed a long distance who need to charge along the way, can head to a charging station with a faster commercial Level 3 charger — typically located in a shopping center or apartment parking lot and only sometimes at a gas station.

It's "nearly impossible" for fuel retailers in most states to profit off EV charging, because of regulations in place that keep businesses from selling electricity for more than it costs them, AJ Siccardi, president of Metroplex Energy, a subsidiary of RaceTrac Petroleum, told CBS News.

While gas stations purchase liquid gas wholesale from refineries — allowing customers to look for a better price on fuel from one block to the next — the price of electricity is set by public utilities according to demand on the electric grid at any given time.

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Tesla, which makes three of the top five most popular EVs in the country, has installed more than 25,000 charging stations around the world for their customers only. Owning the car is the buy-in to use Tesla's chargers.

Other charging providers, such as ChargePoint and EVgo, offer customers subscriptions or pay-as-you-go models to "refuel."

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Charging providers can offer EV drivers per-minute rates for the time they're parked charging up or per-mile rates that are often allotted in monthly subscriptions. This allows them to operate where it is otherwise illegal to resell kilowatt hours of electricity.

Gas stations have been slow to install EV charging because doing so is expensive and any margins are slim at best.

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And without that federal funding, experts warn certain communities might be left out of the EV boom. Today, sales are significantly lower in rural and low-income communities. Since it's hard for a business to make money with an EV charger, Fitzgerald worries retailers and developers in areas where few people drive EVs won't build them — and because there's nowhere to charge, people won't buy new EVs. That would leave those areas — historically, some of the most affected by the pollution cars and trucks spew — the most reliant on the gas-powered vehicles of yesteryear. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico's Morning Energy: But the new connection is also garnering resistance from two sides that are normally at odds with each other: environmentalists and natural gas plant operators. Green groups fear the project would cause major damage to the state’s forest lands, with a new 54-foot wide corridor in need of being cut through 53 miles of woodland. Existing transmission would also need to be widened by 75 feet. Twenty five towns along the new transmission have voiced opposition to the project. Meanwhile, energy companies NextEra, Vistra and Calpine all oppose the project over the potential competitive pricing from Canadian power.

It has been a fraught fight, as Pro’s Jordan Wolman writes, not only uniting disparate interests but also raising concerns over foreign interference in the state’s elections, with groups spending tens of millions of dollars to sway voters either for or against the proposed lines.

“This should have never been a ballot referendum,” state Sen. Trey Stewart told Pro’s Jordan Wolman. “What it's going to boil down to is people going in based off 30 second ads that they've seen blowing up their TVs and their radios and their mailbox for the last few months, and they're going to vote one way or the other.” Read more from Jordan. READ MORE