White House threatens to veto anti-EV bill just passed by US House
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Peltota represents Alaska at large, another major oil hub, and her tribe's Alaskan Native Corporation (Calista Corporation) has the oil drilling rights to the North Slope oil fields. On a separate note I had a buddy who used to lobby for ANCSAs before becoming a Pharma lobbyist. Good guy, and ANSCAs would actually be a better operating model for the lower 48 instead of the current tribal sovereignity one.
Don Davis's constituency in South Carolina hosts Volkswagen, Honda, etc's entire US manufacturing supply chain.
I can't think of a reason for Jared Golden to vote against this. ME-2 doesn't have a significant oil or automotive economy
Edit: Forgot Jared Golden is on the Small Business Committee - Car Dealerships tend to be the largest small businesses in constituencies.
EV manufacturers should (and most likely are) try to expand manufacturing in Ohio, South Carolina, and Indiana to better lobby in their favor.
Tesla clearly did a bit of this by expanding operations in NV and TX.
Open factories in Red Districts, employ a statistically significant amount of residents, and then the Congressmember will flip.
That's the issue. Most of those parts are manufactured in an automated manner already.
An ICE vehicle has more parts, and less portions of the supply chain automated.
This translates to more jobs for the various OEMs.
Any attempt at transforming an ICE OEM to an EV OEM translates to job losses as well as lower margins [0], which is why both unions (eg. UAW) and ICE manufacturers (eg. Toyota in Japan) have been lobbying against EVs.
These D- Congress members are all in districts where victory margins were relatively low and where the downstream impact of EV manufacturing could have a similar impact to what NatGas and Renewables had on Coal and Oil.
[0] - https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...
An ONG terminal will employ more (unionized) people than Renewable repairs, and it's not like Battery companies are rushing there to train employees from scratch for a product who's entire manufacturing chain is largely automated [0]
Unemployed people vote for alternatives, and it's not like the US can shoot a couple protesters or take them to a blacksite for the "greater good"
I'd recommend watching For All Mankind season 3 - it touches on this point.
[0] - https://www.emobility-engineering.com/automated-battery-manu...
A lot of the supply chain in EV manufacturing is also largely automated compared to ICE manufacturing - a major reason for the UAW strike.
Kinda interesting how Scandinavian unions are up in arms against Tesla but said nothing against Geely/Volvo moving R&D jobs to China.
Not a Musk fanboy btw. He clearly needs to step away from the public spotlight to help his companies perform without scandal.
[0] - https://www.just-auto.com/news/china-volvo-and-geely-open-ne...
[1] - https://www.motor1.com/news/665644/volvo-cuts-1300-white-col...
[2] - https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
Volvo has been Geely for over a decade now, and they've been doing R&D layoffs in Sweden yearly since 2009.
Have to kill dealerships off faster. They will fight the transition to the death.
Both create a significant amount of economic inertia which stymies change in their respective industries, as they each have a Senator or two to bribe.
The reason I mentioned the two together is that they are somewhat similar as far as being evenly spread throughout the country, yet not part of a national monopoly like telecom and energy.
So instead of a couple national CEOs to lobby Senators via their home states, you have hundreds, spread across all of the states.
EVs have a fraction of the total number of parts compared to ICE Vehicles, and repairs might be owned by the manufacturer, not the dealership.
The biggest repair is a battery replacement and that's largely unskilled and low manpower.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
> electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries
These are repairs owned by the manufacturer, not the dealership.
This is the equivalent of lobbying for coal against natural gas
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-3-and-model-y-cost-less-tha...
> At $38,990, the base Model 3 sedan now costs $8,700 less than the average amount paid for a car or truck in the US. The starting price for a Model Y SUV is $3,700 below the average auto price of roughly $48,000, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Green. Tesla started cutting prices at the start of the year, twisting the screws on legacy automakers that were already struggling to make electric vehicles profitably.
> “Now the fun part of cost declines ... life after price parity,” said Sam Korus, an analyst at Ark Investment Management, which manages funds with approximately $1.27 billion in Tesla stock. “There is no reason why battery costs or EVs should halt their price declines at price parity. The product can continue to cost less, or it continues to sit in the same price segment and performance improves.”
Not sure why Jalopnik would compare the Model 3 prices to a "segment" including cars and trucks.
Perhaps because the actual average price for a new mid size sedan in October 2023 is actually $32,400...
> The starting price for a Model Y SUV is $3,700 below the average auto price of roughly $48,000
The average price for a new Crossover SUV in October 2023 is $35,700.
I think it's highly disingenous to compare against "all cars and trucks", not against segment.
Now the Model S is almost at the average in its segment, starting at $74,900 versus $73,536 for the "luxury car" segment (I don't actually agree that the Model S is a luxury car, more 'high end', but we'll go with it.
Source: KBB via https://clark.com/cars/average-new-car-price/
https://money.com/ev-vs-gas-cars-price-difference-decreasing...
Next year the tax credit will be incorporated into the sale price which should help sales.
And idk the idea that the average American needs the 7500 credit baked into the price or they simply won't do enough research on their $50000 put hase to realize it exists otherwise doesn't seem great. It's either a stupid change, or the average car buyer... Isn't the brightest.
The cheapest car in the USA is the Nissan Versa at 18K USD? What EV costs 18K?
There is still a 10K USD gap to cover.
https://www.cars.com/articles/here-are-the-11-cheapest-elect...
> Total Cost of Ownership page will show you exactly how much that new car will cost you over five years, based on its MSRP, ....
https://www.cars.com/articles/cars-com-introduces-total-cost...
Which is true, but that doesn't mean TCO and purchase price are one and the same. The page you originally linked discusses purchase price, not TCO, so it's not very useful for analyzing outside1234's claim since it only provides one part of TCO.
The Wuling Mini is around $5k. It might not be road legal for the USA, but you can imagine it will do really well in developing economies.
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(Also, welcome!)
EV subsidies have mostly lined the pockets of wealthy luxury car buyers who would have bought an EV anyway. Those subsidies would have reduced emissions far more if the subsidies had gone to making economy hybrids the same price as non-hybrids.
Even if EVs are powered by fossil fuels. A powerplan producing electricity and transmitting it to your house is orders of magnitude more efficient than generating energy from gasoline in a motorvehicle using an internal combustion engine.
Also we can curb emissions at the power plant and track them dramatically easier.
And more EVs does not mean more power plants turning on per se. Most EVs are charged at night when power usage drops dramatically (and when you get cheaper rates on your electricity).
The real answer here is using more green house gas free power options like nuclear and solar and wind. I doubt we'll see much nuclear in the near future because it is so cheap to create solar and wind farms at this point and there's dramatically less risk despite it being dramatically less productive.
> As of 2022, Woodley's research showed that aggregate use of EVs below 55,749 miles may — in the U.S., at least — fail to generate any emissions benefit over gas-powered vehicles.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/when-buying-a...
Also, If we end up using coal to charge an electric vehicle, its carbon emissions are actually higher than that of can you an ICE vehicle.
Then if you have to replace the battery on your EV, that will reset some of that carbon offset.
Only 20% of electricity in the US is generated with coal, and phaseout continues at speed. There is over 1TW of renewables in US interconnect queues.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38243912 (citations)
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/01/us-coal-electricity-dro...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55439
https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter...
“The United States has at least 1,350 GW of wind and solar capacity and 680 GW of storage is waiting to be connected, which is enough to double the country’s electricity supply.”
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/08/solar-lcoe-now-29-low...
Consider:
Scenario A: 1,000,000 EVs are put on the road. Scenario B: 1,000,000 gas cars are put on the road.
Scenario A: 100% of zero carbon energy is consumed by existing demand. Remaining demand is met by fossil fuels including the energy needed to power the 1,000,000 EVs. Scenario B: 100% of zero carbon energy is consumed by existing demand. Remaining demand is met by fossil fuels, not including the energy to power additional EVs.
In Scenario A, more energy is generated by fossil fuels by exactly the amount of energy used to charge the EVs. In the US, at no point in time, day or night, summer or winter does any zero carbon energy go to waste. So increasing demand means more fossil fuels being burned.
Are you just forgetting the part where there's less gasoline demand or any efficiency differences?
In Scenario B, no amount of clean energy deployment changes the emissions of transportation. In fact, a good chunk of that production is likely wasted due to the mismatch of production and demand, without the benefit of storage.
Multiple countries at present, at times, exceed their energy demand by renewable production...but the excess is pretty much just lost, their isn't adequate storage to bank that energy.
EVs do bank that energy, and more importantly they're likely to do it during the parts of the day demand isn't as high (i.e. peak sunshine).
Moreover, centralized emissions control or reduction is much more addressable then 1,000,000 individual combustion engines.
This is simply not true. It's more efficient, but a typical gasoline car gets around 20% efficiency (large diesel trucks can be significantly greater).
A modern, state of the art combined cycle natural gas fired power plant is only up to around 60% efficient. There's some additional loss for distribution, charging the EV battery, and in the electric motor, but it's not large and you're probably about 50% efficient overall.
Another win is that natural gas emits around 25% less CO2 than gasoline per unit of energy. And of course if you're powering your car with solar, then that's much better.
Anyway, thermal efficiency is on the order of 2.5x better, not "orders of magnitude".
On top of that, per megawatt, building out new solar is cheaper than keeping existing coal plants running. The solar transition is largely constrained by the duck curve, which can be mitigated using v2g technology, so as time passes, the power sources get greener out of purely economic considerations.
As long as you're not throwing out brand new ICE vehicles and just replacing worn out ones, both the TCO and the total carbon footprint goes down when switching to EVs.
Raising the demand at night will disproportionately come from nuclear, and if anything by raising the baseline, it'll mean those nuclear plants are running more around the clock _decreasing_ the amount of gas peakers needed during the day.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...
There's a lot wrong with this comment, but this bit especially is just made up nonsense.
According to [1] 39.7% of USA energy generation on average is already either renewables or nuclear, and as other commenters have pointed out even if it was 100% coal including transmission losses it would still be more efficient than petrol in an ICE.
And saying that all additional power production built in the US grid will be 100% coal or natural gas for the next two decades is a bizarre claim.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
The electricity grid has something called a Capacity Factor. Capacity is the ability to produce power measured in Watts. The Capactiy Factor is the fraction of capacity which is actually producing that power at any instant in time. Power demand and supply must be almost exactly in sync at all times to maintain grid stability. This is achieved by turning on and off coal and natural gas power stations, which can be done relatively quickly, to ramp up and ramp down production as demand fluctuates. Capacity must always greatly exceed typical demand so that unusually high demand can be met. Nuclear, wind, solar and hydroelectric power plants always produce whatever power they can independent of demand. This is for a diverse set of safety and environmental reasons. Only fossil fuel plants can "load follow" to meet changes in demand. Like I stated in my original comment, all load following in the US is done with fossil fuels, and that will be the case for many years or several decades to come. Increases in capacity will mostly come from carbon free sources, but until those sources can load follow, either by dumping unused energy in off-peak hours or by storing that energy until it is needed, all load following will be done with fossil fuels. This means additional demand is going to be met entirely with fossil fuels for a long time to come. I hope that helps you understand the concept of marginal demand better.
Power demand from EV charging is pretty predictable too - the bulk of it happens overnight when demand is usually lowest from everything else.
EVs sold today are going to be charged on the grid we have today. if that makes their carbon footprint barely better than gas and slightly worse than a hybrid it means our subsidies would be better used to increase carbon free electricity generation and increase hybrid sales. Once EVs have smaller carbon footprints then it will make sense to subsidize them. If you don't care about the short term then yes. The long term solution is full carbon free electricity and EVs
Some, but nowhere close to most. If 90% charge their cars at night, or even just at the grocery store after work, that is off peak.
Thanks to the EV success, lithium batteries costs are falling exponentially. Coincidentally, photovoltaics costs are also falling exponentially.
Conclusion: regarding electricity production, fossil fuels are soon not going to be competitive, PV + batteries would be so much cheaper...
When? With the actual costs curves, in less than a decade.