Electric Hummers won't save us

The Biden administration is poised to make a big push for electric transportation. According to reports that have come out over the past couple days, the administration intends to tighten pollution limits so much that by 2032 around 67 percent of new passenger vehicles would have to be electric. 

Although often lauded for its ambition, Biden’s earlier stated plan would have seen just half of passenger cars by EVs by the end of this decade. Either way, our transportation would be almost unrecognizable to the present day’s, as EVs made up just 5.8 percent of vehicle sales last year.

Biden’s plan makes sense at first glance. The United States has to make big changes if it’s to meet its Paris accord commitments. Carbon emissions in 2022 and 2021 were higher than in 2020. Emissions last year were 3% below 2019 levels, but only 13.8% under 2005 levels. Transportation comprises a huge chunk of current emissions, so electrifying our transport sector should bring down emissions considerably. 

The problem, as many utility people know, is that our grid isn’t ready for the demand spike that such a rapid EV transition would produce. We’re struggling as it stands now. California is threatened by rolling blackouts every summer, it seems, and Texas has notoriously suffered catastrophic blackouts in the past couple years. Imagine how fair if suddenly everyone were driving electric Ford F-150s!

For a long time, many hoped an electric future would be made possible by swaths of new clean energy. However, about 10 years since we were promised that batteries would make renewables fully scalable, they still seem much too pesky to be trusted. Nuclear, despite recent PR wins, is still not fully embraced by the public and is very expensive to build. What’s more, all new generation in our country is a huge headache to connect to the grid thanks to disastrous transmission regulations. 

How can we hope to accommodate a rapid electric transportation revolution without loads of new generation? We simply can’t, so long as our electric transportation system is a mirror copy of our 20th century fossil fuel one. 

Highway culture, Mom, dad and 16-year-old Billy all driving their own SUVs , buses being for poor people, etc. That needs to be changed. I understand it’s our culture, but some aspects of certain cultures are inferior to others. And it’s time to admit that the Dutch have us beat. 

If our transportation sector is going electric, it must also become more efficient. Smaller vehicles, more ride sharing, more lanes, better sidewalks. All of this is in order. 

Is there hope? Stephen Baker, the co-author of Hop Skip Go: How the Mobility Revolution is Transforming our Lives (Harper Collins, 2019), gave me reason to believe so when I interviewed him a few years ago: 

“The biggest one [misconception], I’d say, is that people tend to assume that new technologies will simply follow the patterns of the old. For example, today you drive around in a gasoline-powered machine, tomorrow it will be electric, and a decade from now autonomous. But you’ll keep following the same itineraries.

This isn’t the case. In the next stage of networked mobility, transportation should be far more efficient. Most of us have cars that are only in service 5% of the time. The rest of the time they’re parked. The idea for networked (and eventually autonomous) cars is to squeeze much more production out of them, most likely as a shared resource. This could dramatically reduce our consumption of energy. Then again, if transportation is cheap and efficient, we might use it much more capriciously, perhaps sending an autonomous car across town for tacos or croissants.”

My fingers are crossed that the electric vehicle transition changes more than just the engines. For the sake of our grid and our planet, I hope we radically transform the way we move about.