The idea is good. The need is there. But still the push for EV’s is not easy.
The Biden administration’s plan to remake how Americans travel by forcing automakers to rapidlyshift to predominantly electric vehicle sales would strike a major blow against global warming — but only if federal officials can successfully execute it. There is a lot standing in their way. The initiative is being launched at the same time the nation’s electricity grid — which would fuel all these new EVs — is wheezing, with destabilizing power outages and developers of wind and solar projects often stuck waiting years to connect to transmission lines. It is uncertain how car companies will secure all the minerals needed to build EV batteries, with federal plans to bring onshore supply chains facing major obstacles. The durability of the Biden blueprint could also depend on Democrats retaining control of the White House in 2024 and defending the vehicle emissions rules against expected court challenges. Not since the Nixon administration allowed California to write its own tailpipe emissions standards — setting in motion a regulatory regime that would push automakers to build increasingly efficient cars — has there been such an aggressive push by Washington to reshape the American auto industry. And of course there is the charging station conundrum: Can enough of them be built and kept functional to help car buyers overcome range anxiety?
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Good questions all and there is work to answer them
All of these questions have many transportation experts hedging their bets. The regulatory push “could drive a more rapid transition to battery electric vehicles than we currently expect,” Matthias Heck, a vice president at Moody’s Investors Service, said in an email. But he also cautioned that “risks for this carbon transition are high, if not very high, for the industry.” Biden administration officials wave away such warnings, at a time when other countries are already rapidly electrifying. In China, EVs already account for nearly a third of new vehicle sales. Norway jumped to over 79 percent in 2022, in a country where EVs accounted for less than 3 percent of total vehicle sales a decade earlier.
Can the electric grid expand to meet the needs?
Much of the U.S.focus will now shift to the electricity grid. Whether it can be flexible, resilient and green enough in the coming years remains an open question. Engineering is a challenge, but the bigger hurdle involves addressing financing and regulations if the grid is to evolve into one that can reliably charge tens of millions of electric vehicles. Before the administration even unveiled its latest plan to push automakers to step up EV production, the Department of Energy had already concluded that transmission systems need to be expanded by 60 percent by 2030 to meet Biden’s broader emissions goals. And they may need to triple in capacity by 2050. That expansion is not on track. Fights over where utility lines should be located, who should build them and who should pay for them continue to create major bottlenecks. The average time it takes a developer to add a wind or solar project to their regional power grid has jumped to four years, twice as long as it took in 2017, according to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Biden administration is promising to ease congestion and shore up the grid through billions of dollars in spending on transmission lines and other improvements authorized in the infrastructure package that Congress passed. But it could be years before the upgrades and expansions are operational. “It is going to take major work,” said Dan Bowermaster, senior program manager for electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute.
California is a case in point.
California — which last summer passed a rule banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035 — will be an important test case. A week after that rule was passed, extreme heat pushed the state into a power emergency, with officials imploring residents to curtail their electricity use. The state has since delayed its plans for shutting down a major nuclear power plant, amid concerns that new renewable energy projects were not coming online fast enough tokeep the electricity system stable. It now needs to bring renewables onto its grid at an unprecedented pace, with the state’s energy commission projecting that the share of electricity from the grid going to power electric cars during peak hours will jump from 1 percent today to 10 percent by 2035. “There are great lessons to be learned from California,” said Todd Bowie, a principal at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. He added that setting targets and standards is vital but “actually implementing them and making them real is another animal.” There is hope that EVs can ease the transition. The cars have the potential to work as mini power stations, storing electricity in their batteries that can be dispatched back onto the grid or used in the homes of their owners during power crunches. “The EVs themselves can be part of the solution,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. But even here, there is an asterisk: Vehicles will need to be built with batteries that are capable of exporting the electricity they store.
EV’s need charging station that are uniform.
The nation’s current network of charging banks is dysfunctional and inadequate. The ones that do exist are often broken. The stations are often a money loser for their owners, and acquiring the real estate is a daunting task. The network that functions best now is available only to drivers of one brand of car, Tesla, at a time when there are already 91 different EV models on the market. The Biden administration is scrambling to address the problem, aware that EVs will not be widely embraced if drivers have to worry about getting stranded with every long road trip. At Biden’s encouragement, Congress has already approved $7.5 billion for construction of EV charging stations. In a briefing on Tuesday,White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said that money will feed an expansion that is already underway. “The number of charging stations that line our highways has doubled, and the number of electric vehicles that are deployed on our roads has tripled,” he said. White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan added in an email Saturday morning: “As the President says, it is never a good bet to bet against the American people.” To highlight its focus on building more charging stations, the White House has dispatched top officials to unveilings of new projects and corporate round tables. Biden’s lead adviser on infrastructure, Mitch Landrieu, visited a Tennessee facility earlier this monthwhere a new type of fast charger will be manufactured. It is a start. But the United States is lagging. According to S&P Global, China has 1.2 million charging points, Europe has 400,000 — and the United States has only 140,000.
Where to get the material needed for batteries.
The sourcing of battery materials is another potential stumbling block. Carmakers are scouring the globe to find the cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium they need to make all these batteries. It is a major disruption to their business model, and one that pushes them into uncharted territory, such as ownership of mining. But there’s a reason these mining and processing facilities have been built overseas, with China largely in control. It is a messy business, and it requires infusions of capital. Congress — partly concerned about the national security implications of China’s hegemony over critical minerals — included huge subsidies and restrictions in the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that batteries would be built with U.S. materials or those from its trading partners. The open question is whether production of those materials can be scaled up quickly enough. In the United States, it typically takes 10 years to open a new mine, in part because of opposition from local communities and environmental groups. General Motors, in its response to the EPA’s proposal on Wednesday, said the government needs to come through with permitting reform — among other changes — to help speed up investment in the industry and consumer adoption of EVs. Congress has also made tax incentives for car buyers partly dependent on the location of an EV’s supply chains and assembly, limiting their availability at least for now. And other subsidies to push those supply chains to the United States and other friendly nations may add to the cost of purchasing an electric car because of higher labor standards and other factors in those countries. EPA officials note the new EPA proposals would not go into effect until the model year 2027, giving car companies time to reconfigure those supply chains. “We’ve got some years to ramp up,” said EPA administrator Michael Regan. “We hope that we can take advantage of that runway.”
There will be legal challenges
Critics — especially fossil-fuel advocates — have already sought to frame the EPA proposal as a de facto ban on gasoline and diesel. Lawyers and lobbyists expect they are gearing up for a fight. Other major interests — including the auto industry itself — and Republican states may join them, depending on the final formulation of the rule, which the EPA is expected to complete next year. Vehicle emissions rules are often subject to protracted legal battles, and this one may be the most controversial ever. Texas and several other fossil-fuel-producing states challenged the Biden administration’s last updates to vehicle emissions rules in 2021. That case is still pending in federal appeals court, nearly two years after the EPA’s initial proposal. The changes the EPA hopes to drive from this new proposal are so drastic they may face especially tough odds in federal court, said Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer at the Bracewell LLP law firm who oversaw air pollution policy at the EPA under President George W. Bush. The Supreme Court just last year ruled to limit the EPA’s authority on climate change, citing what is called the “major questions” doctrine to say the agency didn’t have authority to impose sweeping change over the electric power industry — or other major economic sectors — without explicit direction from Congress. “If the courts say that Congress didn’t givethe EPA power to remake the power sector, the courts can say the same thing about the automobile sector,” Holmstead said.
The regulations follow the same blueprint of past ones.
Administration officials note that their rule updates are structurally the same as all the versions that have proceeded it. It requires car manufacturers to stay within a limit set on the emissions of the entire fleet of vehicles they sell, but it doesn’t require they sell EVs, or mandate the use of any other specific technology to comply. Administration officials and their allies say that technology-neutral rule should be within the law. But because EVs have no tailpipe emissions and are starting to become common purchases for consumers, experts assume thata massive increase in EV sales will be the only way to comply. As of January, fully electric cars made up just 7 percent of new vehicle registrations in the United States. Under the most aggressive scenario in the EPA’s proposal, that number would have to rise to 67 percent by model year 2032. That sweeping change could trigger the “major questions” doctrine for the conservative court, Holmstead said. And then the EPA would likely have to prove the math behind all the targets it says are achievable, not just for increasing consumer sales, but for the mineral production and other supply-chain development needed to build these vehicles, he added. “If EPA can’t show there’s a plausible way for all of that to happen on that quick a time frame, then a court can rule it’san arbitrary and capricious rule” and invalidate it, he said.
These plans are built on market plans.
Biden administration officials say their estimates are sound because they are built on markettrends, citing $120 billion in private sector investment going into developing EVs over the past two years. That is a drastic change from the conditions that preceded past auto emissions rules,and gives the agency the justification it needs to be so aggressive, said Chet France, a former senior official at the EPA who had helped develop past regulations, including the first national greenhouse gas standards for vehicles. “I wish that when I was at the agency — that when I was setting a rule — there was that much investment,” said France, who is now a consultant with Environmental Defense Fund. “This is a case where investments are unprecedented.”
Oil and gas will always object but they will be forced to come along.