The environment is important to me. Clean energy is important to me. Electric vehicles? I’m not convinced. The United States can benefit greatly from renewable energy, but electric cars are not The Way. We in the US would like for manufacturing to return to our shores. Politicians believe that manufacturing means making the things that China is already making, like electric vehicles and batteries. It is my humble opinion that while green energy is of vital importance to the future of the US, I just don’t think that we can beat China at something that they have already gotten a head start on. How big of a head start? The US has roughly 239 gigawatts of solar capacity. China has added more solar capacity in 2024 that the US has to date. China didn’t accomplish this feat purely by being awesome. They did it by doing all the usual stuff that China does.
A lot of my ham radio gear comes from China. If I want cheap electronics, there is really only one supplier. I am a big fan of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. They weigh less, hold more energy, and live longer than lead acid batteries. They are also available almost exclusively from China. The same is true of solar panels. When you are shooting at a moving target, you don’t aim for where the target is, you aim for where the target will be. Instead of aiming at solar panels and EVs, I would like for the US to aim for what comes after that.
Electric vehicles in their current form are not suited for a place like North America. North America is huge. The United States takes forever to drive across. 20 years ago I drove from Seattle to Cincinnati in 3 days. If I had to stop every 300 miles to spend almost an hour recharging, that trip would have taken weeks. EVs are great for short frequent trips, like commuting or running errands. If I had a garage to charge it, and I never left the Cincinnati metro area, an EV would save me a fortune. I can tell that the math checks out on that because Amazon is phasing in electric delivery vehicles. But I travel by car to the North Carolina coast multiple times a year, and renting a car for that would suck.
With an EV I would need to rent a gasoline car for a Great American Roadtrip. Towing capacity is another concern with EVs. Electric pickups and SUV’s lose a lot of range when towing. If I want to haul a camper or a flat bed trailer, or a mobile comms center, an EV isn’t going to measure up. Most of my driving is less than 50 miles a day of commuting, errand running, and hauling kids to and fro. My Toyota Prius gets roughly 40 miles per gallon on average. If I had a place to charge it, I would get a plug-in hybrid, like the Rav-4 Prime.
Charging an EV anywhere but at home is expensive and time-consuming. Fully charging an EV at a Level 3 charger takes close to an hour, and it only saves 15-20% compared to gasoline. Charging at home will cost less than half as much as the L3. If I am charging a car from the electrical grid, it’s still burning coal or natural gas and creating carbon emissions. If I lived in the south-western US, I could use solar to charge an EV. I admit that solar charging is where the EV really shines as a green alternative, but that has more to do with the electrical grid. Producing electricity in the southwest, and storing it in some medium (batteries, hydrogen, etc.) for delivery to the northeast would create good jobs.
Producing power for the electrical grid probably uses more fossil fuels than transportation. That is the place for green energy investment. Houses and buildings probably use less fossil fuel than transportation, but in a building it doesn’t matter how heavy the batteries are, and it’s fine if it takes 12 hours to charge them. Also, unlike vehicles, houses and buildings are made with cement, which is a major producer of greenhouse gasses. Retro-fitting homes and commercial buildings for local solar production and heating/cooling efficiency makes more sense to me. Even if the electrical grid stayed on coal and gas, off-grid residential electricity production could vastly reduce America’s reliance on it. Also, each home making its own power would be a godsend in a natural disaster where the power grid was down.
In terms of greenhouse gas production, I imagine transportation is the top producer, with passenger cars being the worst. Again, the solution in my opinion is not to replace gasoline passenger cars with electrics, but to just get more cars off the road. Public transportation, walk-able/bike-able cities, and remote work will probably do more to reduce car emissions than EVs will. Public transportation is another place where it doesn’t matter how big the batteries are, or how long it takes to charge them. Even if it took 18 hours of charging to get 6 hours of work time for an electric bus, a transit system can run one fleet of vehicles while another fleet charges. Wouldn’t that require a huge empty lot outside of the city to store all of them? Yes. Sounds like a great place to put up a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines.
A major consumer of petroleum and producer of greenhouse gasses is agriculture. Between the giant machines for planting, harvesting, and irrigation, the pesticides and fertilizers, and all the transportation and refrigeration, I think there is room for sustainability improvements that will offset more than passenger EV’s. Especially if We, The People, deindustrialize agriculture and take on more localized and regenerative food growing techniques. Does that mean everyone in the US needs to start growing corn and raising chickens in their backyards? No, but if they wanted to, that would be a great “work from home” job for some people.
My final issue with EV’s is that they are still made of plastic, rubber, and glass, all materials that are either made from oil, or require super high temperatures to manufacture. Where does that energy come from? Where do those materials go when the car gets totaled in an accident? Even if 50% of the cars on the road got replaced with EV’s, there is still the problem of what to do with the obsolete cars. Melting them down? How does that kind of heat get produced? What do those junk smashing machines run on?
I think that part of the sustainability practice for the future should include recovery of materials from the end of the products’ life. Speaking of waste materials, the damage to produce the current population of vehicles has already been done. Why not build an industry around keeping these cars on the road for more than 100,000 miles? The 2025 Jeep Cherokee looks like a plastic luxury car that wouldn’t survive hitting a speed bump, let alone a muddy dirt road. Meanwhile, a 20-year-old pickup truck with 200,000 miles on it that is actively on fire costs $40,000. So, keeping older vehicles running for longer is important because they have the kinds of capabilities that modern cars and trucks do not. Maybe in addition to selling new and used vehicles, there should be a new category of “salvaged vehicles”.
In conclusion, I believe that green energy and green manufacturing are key elements for addressing not just climate change, but also many of America’s economic problems. I just don’t think that Electric Vehicles are the silver bullet that they are made out to be. I know that cars are a major part of the American spirit, and I think that they still should be. But I also think that serious decarbonization should look past the EV and at the systemic issues of American industry.