Governments looking through rose-coloured EV glasses
No one admits to the hurdles presented by today’s technologies, writes David Booth.
Has there ever been a more market-distorting subsidy than the incentives Ontario ladled on Elon Musk this month? Not content on having North America’s most generous electric car rebate, Ontario announced plans to “invest” up to $75,000 in every electric truck Tesla sells in Ontario.
Now, Canadian pricing for Tesla’s truck has not been finalized, but it would nonetheless be fair to say Ontario taxpayers are going to be subsidizing about a third of the cost of Tesla’s ballyhooed zero-emissions groceryhaulers. Even for a provincial government renowned for its largesse for anything green, the Green Commercial Vehicle Program is one humungous barrel of pork.
And one that speaks to perhaps a little desperation. Despite recently upping the EV subsidy to a maximum of $14,000, Ontario’s projections for EV penetration into the marketplace are lagging. Premier Kathleen Wynne had hoped battery-powered cars would make up five per cent of the market by 2020, but sales are running at about a tenth that.
Wynne, however, isn’t the only person believing their own propaganda. Save for a few small countries with truly outsized subsidies, electric vehicles have never hit any of the phantasmagorical numbers projected. Nissan’s Leaf, for instance, is nowhere near the 10 per cent of global sales chief executive Carlos Ghosn promised for 2020. Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen — virtually every automaker extent — have failed time and time again to reach even more modest projections.
Nor are automakers the only parties who are egregiously optimistic. Former U.S. president Barack Obama’s projection of one million EVs by 2015 proved positively Panglossian, and anyone who thinks 22 per cent of Quebecers will opt for plug-ins by 2025 probably also believes Justice France Charbonneau has banished corruption from the province’s famously venal politics.
The problem is not one of hope, but of hype. The march to automotive electrification will not be stopped. In certain applications — inner city buses, local delivery vehicles — their penetration should and hopefully soon will be 100 per cent. But the numbers generating headlines — 25 per cent of all its sales by 2025, for instance, says Volkswagen — is fuelling wholly unrealistic public expectations, not to mention ( judging by Ontario’s latest program) distorted public policy.
Worse yet, reasonable discussions on the subject get precious little attention. So, while Bloomberg’s contention that 54 per cent of all cars will be electric by 2040, a Frost and Sullivan report, EV Car Wars: Who will win the battle between BEVs, PHEVs and FCEVs, passed largely unreported because, well, thanks to its reasonable conclusions, it offered no click-baiting headlines.
While most of the basic formulae remain the same — like many analysts, Frost and Sullivan predict the cost of lithium-ion batteries may reach a hundred or so dollars per kilowatt hour by 2020 — its report posits plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) are a superior solution. The report concludes that, while BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) require a complete overhaul of our electricity and transportation infrastructure in their quest for zero emissions, PHEVs could reduce CO2 emissions by 80 per cent with only local, i.e. homebased, grid upgrades required.
Nor does the promise of a fast-charging infrastructure promise widespread adoption of BEVs. The company’s researchers note that, “contrary to what the industry believes, BEVs sales might not surge even with large-scale deployment of fastcharging infrastructure” and cite Japan, where “fast charging stations have reached saturation levels and yet EV sales still declined. The reason cited: Most of the drivers tend to travel long distance at the same moment (weekend, holidays) and a (projected) charging infrastructure … can’t address this peak demand.”
The problem is detailed with even more exactness by a recent study titled The Vehicle Refueling Wars: A comparison of Gasoline, Electric and Fuel Cell Vehicles. It determined that, because of the loss of utility to the driver (the longer wait time) and the high cost of the centralized refuelling model, “it is questionable that even Ultrafast DCFCs can serve as a replacement to gasoline refuelling in a centralized refuelling paradigm.”
The numbers are daunting. According to the report, while one gas pump can refuel as many as 1,024 cars per day, even a high-powered 350-kilowatt DC fast-charger can only recharge 75 EVs in the same 24 hours, less than a tenth of conventional cars refuelled. And for the record, Tesla fans, that company’s vaunted Supercharger is only good for 31 cars per day. It’s also worth noting there are about 900,000 fuel dispensers in the United States. Yes, the math is mind-boggling.
Nor, as many electric vehicle proponents contend, is there any guarantee home charging will be the easy solution to a future electrical infrastructure. In England — where, of course, the government has pledged to go completely plug-in by 2040 — the authors of Forecourt Thoughts: Mass Fast Charging of Electric Vehicles posit the cost of upgrading every home to the capacity needed for efficient EV recharging is so prohibitive that it makes more sense to simply recreate the service station infrastructure, only substituting electrons for fossil fuels.
In other words, only a well-off minority will enjoy the convenience of home-charging that is so much a part of electric car boosterism. The rest of the motoring populace will still have to seek out their local Esso, albeit with much longer wait times.
The point of all this is none of the predictions of future EV use should be taken as gospel. But it doesn’t mean we should not invest in an emissions-reduced future or that the battery-powered car will not play a significant part in that cleaner future.
But we really need to doff our rose-tinted glasses and apply a little ruthless logic to our projections. One should, as the timeaged adage prophesies, always shoot for the stars — but setting public policy on getting there is a fool’s errand.