Electric Vehicles aren't impossible for US

There's a very interesting post going around Face Book that caught my attention. It is about Norway being "realistically" on its way to being 100% EV (electric vehicle) by 2025. I had to do some research. Granted, it was only a couple of hours or so, but it was good research and the information was readily available from good and reliable sources. In February 2015 Norway's National Transportation Plan 2018-2029 set the goal of 100% EV by 2025. Before someone gets their nose bent out of shape, stops reading, and starts ranting about how it is easier for Norway to do this, let me say that as wonderful as it would be for the US, there are at least three very real and critical issues that would need overcome - two of the US problems and one of a global nature.

Norway has the largest per capita use of EV in the world. If you look at the numbers and at the trend, they could pull this off. One of the biggest negative aspects in the US is that most electricity is still generated by "dirty" methods; e.g. fossil fuels. Only 13.3% of our energy comes from solar and 16.7% comes from photovoltaic.(1)  Wind accounts for 4% and water accounts for 6.1% of our electricity.(2)  If the US were to have 37% of our vehicles be EV right now, we would be creating almost as much pollution by generating the necessary electricity. Norway, on the other hand, has the cleanest fleet in the world using 98% hydro to generate the electric demand. Got us there. But we do have tremendous green resources in this country. The problem is that we refuse to turn to them because it means that someone might not have the opportunity to crawl down a hole and get black lung. We are doing the same thing today that Americans did at the turn of the 20th century where they tried to stop the production of cars because they were going to put horse and buggy people out of work. Of course we all know how that turned out. (Hint: look in your garage or driveway.) There were way more well paying jobs in the new auto industry. The same is happening today. The solar industry alone (in 2015) was providing 204,000 full-time jobs while coal, including transportation of coal and burning of coal in a power plant, only had 174,000 full-time jobs. Solar alone is already surpassing dirty and archaic methods. But this is another argument I don't want to tackle here. Suffice it to say, Norway has an advantage because it's power is already 98% green. Nevertheless, I would dare to say we have more potential renewable power sources than Norway. Our sheer size, which we will see later is one of our biggest excuses for doing nothing about most things, is to our benefit. We can put wind generators in fields surrounded by wheat or corn. We have a tremendously large amount of our country that is ideal for solar generation. Did you know that Rome is the same latitude as New York City?

Before we get too far into the subject, let me briefly share the global problem that pro-renewable advocates frequently forget, making them ripe targets for the old-guard fossil fuel advocates; viz. the pollution factors related to the producing, maintaining and disposal of batteries. Battery technology has come light years and the problems aren't quite as serious as nuclear power rods, but there are still issues that will need to be addressed. We are already beginning to recycle batteries. We must just get a lot more efficient. If you are interested in the new battery technology, check out the new lithium deep cell batteries for use with solar panels. They are lighter, greener and amazingly more efficient. Granted they cost $1200 for a 100 AmpHr battery, but you can run them down to zero. A 224 AmpHr AGM battery or battery system costs about $1000 and can only be run down 50% without hurting it. So price wise you're getting as much, if not more, for your money. But that's another topic. 

The third, and perhaps most difficult, problem to overcome is our size. We love to use our size to get us out of doing anything from switching to metric to using solar energy. It is really a very poor excuse but we're so good at using it and we use it so frequently that we've all come to believe that it is as certain as gravity or death. I will, however, admit that our size does make this issue more of a challenge. People in Europe have no idea how big North America is. Europe could easily be put inside Alaska with room to spare. Actually much of Europe could fit in Texas or Montana. Most Americans have no idea how small Europe is. Friends of mine, when I lived in Dublin, owned a car. They would fill up in Dublin; take the ferry to Hollyhead, Wales; drive across England to south of London; take another ferry to France; drive from the North Sea to the French Riviera; button hook through Italy and Switzerland; and get gas in Austria, because it had cheaper gas.

Yes, we have much bigger vehicles because we use them differently. We have exceptionally poor public transportation ever since the slogan "a car in every garage" caught public attention. When I lived in Dublin only about 3% of the population owned cars. We didn't need to. I usually walked into the university each day, but, if I wanted, I could catch a bus or train at a very affordable cost just a couple of blocks from home.

What all this means is that we do have a challenge that other smaller countries don't have ... we have to come up with vehicles capable of meeting our transportation needs. We're going to have to find ways to make the EV go further before charging and generally carry a bigger payload. I know that we have the technological knowledge and skills to meet these needs. It is a matter that we don't want to meet them. Back in the late 1970s I owned a 100% EV garden tractor. The electric motor generally has more torque than an internal combustion engine. While tractors of equal size couldn't pull a plow, I actually pulled discs through my 1/4 acre garden. It was made by General Electric. They dropped the project beause there was too much objection by the gas-motor tractor industry. They sold their line of electric tractors to a company that made gas tractors. Of course they were soon gone and forgotten. Of course, we could also start working our way back to good public transportation which would be a double-win for us.

Weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels is going to be the biggest challenge. Tell someone something long enough and they will believe it. We've been told that we can't live without fossil fuel for so long that very few of us doubt it. The truth of the matter is that that isn't true. I bet many people really know the truth but if we were to admit it we'd have to do something about it or admit that we're not world leaders but archaic technoslugs.

FOOTNOTES.

(1)  Scientist will tell you that CSP (solar cells) create electricity therefore they are photovoltaic (PV) but that there is a systemic difference between CSP and PV. That's why I provided both numbers for the US.  

(2) These numbers do not reflect the private individuals who generate their own power like the people of the North Fork in Montana who personal use solar, wind and hydro power generated on their own property and not turned back into the grid.  Just within a mile of where we are at present there are several hundreds of  couples/families living totally off the public power grid and generating their own electricity. Most of it is solar but there are more and more wind generators. I'm considering getting a wind generator as well.