Mess with Texas: Time for a 2nd Look at Electric Vehicles

March 18, 2021

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by Burl Haigwood (Clean Fuels Development Coalition) ... Imagine it is 2050 and Texas gets hit by another winter storm, flood, heat wave, or God forbid, a physical or cyber terrorist attack on a vulnerable electric power system. As news cameras roll with footage of citizens lined up to evacuate, or to get food and water, what could be odd about those pictures would be the fact that the people are on foot, rather than what we see now with miles and miles of cars. Why? Because the electric vehicles they were forced to buy could not be recharged and mobility has come to a halt.

Too extreme? Texas energy officials admitted the state was minutes away from a total blackout. During several days of brutal cold in Texas, the city of Austin saw its fleet of 12 new electric buses rendered totally inoperative by the power outages. That problem will be magnified next year when officials plan to start purchasing electric-powered vehicles exclusively. Citizens on foot, unable to get to work, to shop, attend to medical needs.

If the vision of a total EV fleet was ever realized, this scenario is not outlandish – it is quite possible. A better vision would be a diverse, renewable, clean, safe, high octane, low carbon liquid fuel supply for all vehicles – -liquid fuels that will remain the heart of the transportation system for decades to come. That vision could embrace EVs, not force feed them into the system. If EVs are to make a meaningful impact on the composition of our fleet, that is great. But we must be realistic as to how and when that might happen, and what will definitely happen in the interim.

Policy makers, environmentalists, and green energy industry stakeholders need to avoid falling in the misinformation trap being waged to pit EVs against biofuels – it just buys more time for the benzene-laced additives in gasoline to persist and threaten our health. As is explained in Biofuels vs EVs: The Union of Concerned Scientists responds there is room and the need for a combination of technologies and consumer choices. Current technology and CAFE standards using a combination of battery technology (e.g., plug-ins) and high-octane low-carbon fuel can achieve 66-73 miles per gallon of gasoline.

The problem is gasoline. Therefore, policy makers need to focus on the imperfections of gasoline – not biofuels and EVs. Leveraging the powerful combination of biofuels and EVs in a new CAFE standard would be the most logical and next sequential step to achieve the fastest results to improve the environment, economy, and public health.

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Policy makers and consumers cannot rely on one system or fuel without added risk, liability, and cost.

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One report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) projects EVs may reach 50% market penetration by 2050. For that to happen, it will cost consumers and federal/state governments $1-2 trillion. Considering the economic impacts of COVID-19, where will that money come from? What are the alternatives?

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Cost² includes the state tax incentives required for utility upgrades, vehicle tax incentives, and EV refueling infrastructure projects that can cost upwards of $1MM per station. The utilities themselves offer rebates and incentives. After all, they are for profit ventures—why not use a loss leader to hook the next generation of customers.

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Cost³ includes the increases from higher emissions in greenhouse gases while waiting for EVs to reach their stated promise.

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MIT’s projection of EVs reaching 50% market penetration in 30 years only projects a 25% reduction in crude oil consumption. The U.S. would still be burning 70+ billion gallons of gasoline each year. Without new high-octane low-carbon standards in a new fuel economy rule, 20-35% of gasoline will still include benzene and other carcinogenic octane enhancing additives. Failing to reduce those additives—which EPA is required to do– is indefensible.

New analysis by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Labs show ethanol already has about 50% less carbon compared to gasoline. Under optimal agriculture scenarios ethanol could reduce greenhouse gases by 76% compared to gasoline.

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Cost⁴ includes the increase in public health care costs being passed onto Peter, Paul, and their federal and state governments. There is not one good reason to prevent cleaning up gasoline to the greatest extent possible as required by the Clean Air Act while waiting for the promise of EVs. According to EPA’s cost benefit analysis the “Clean Air Act has already achieved a 30-1 payback” (please google it) while gasoline was the dominant fuel. Cleaning up gasoline by removing as much benzene as possible is the sequential next step to grab the lowest hanging fruit and the fastest return on taxpayer investment. READ MORE

Reality EV: Why everyone needs to take another look at biofuels (Clean Fuels Development Coalition)

CHUCK SCHUMER WANTS TO REPLACE EVERY GAS CAR IN AMERICA WITH AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE --The Senate majority leader is reviving his plan to give people discounts for swapping their gas car for an electric one (The Verge)

BMW unveils a new electric car, but says it isn't counting out gas engines just yet (CNN; includes VIDEO)

How much more energy will the US need to electrify everything? (Quartz)

Are Electric Cars Really Better for the Environment? EVs produce fewer emissions overall than their gas-powered counterparts, but there are caveats (Wall Street Journal)

A PLACE FOR BIOFUELS IN GREENER TRANSPORTATION FUTURE (Brownfield Ag News; includes AUDIO)

Excerpt from CNN: BMW chairman Oliver Zipse said in an online press conference, the company will keep developing, building and selling cars with internal combustion engines, including plug-in hybrids.

"If there are no customers [for these vehicles] in our 140 markets, we will stop producing them," he said.

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BMW's strategy has long been to maintain flexibility in its engineering as it develops new vehicles so that its factories can shift quickly and easily from producing purely internal combustion cars to producing plug-in hybrids or electric cars as market demand shifts. The underlying engineering architectures for BMW vehicles is designed to make it easy for them to be built with electric, hybrid or purely internal combustion power.

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By 2030, the company expects roughly half its global sales to be electric vehicles. READ MORE

Excerpt from Quartz: How much strain will that put on the grid? By 2050, the US will demand nearly 90% more power than it did in 2018, in a scenario in which all new passenger vehicles sold by 2030 are electric and buildings and factories also aggressively electrify, according to an analysis by Nikit Abhyankar, a senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. That analysis was part of a comprehensive 2020 study of what it would take to make the grid 90% carbon-free by 2035. In a more conservative scenario, where electric vehicle adoption picks up just a little bit and buildings and industry rely mostly on fossil fuels, total demand will rise just 35% by 2050.

Either scenario will require a buildout of solar and wind farms, nuclear power plants, batteries, transmission lines, and other infrastructure that will be a defining challenge of the next few decades, Abhyankar says—but not beyond rates of expansion that the grid has seen before. READ MORE