Happy 2016! With the new year here, I wanted to reflect on some of the big environmental accomplishments of 2015. Here are my top three best pieces of news on climate change:
3. Paris Climate Agreement: Sure, it was mostly political theater, with a non-enforceable international agreement that could be undermined as soon as next year by a Republican U.S. president. But it was necessary theater. No international action can happen without it, and it’s sets the political foundation for domestic action on carbon reduction in countries and states all over the world. It was also an example of how China’s new commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions has changed the politics of climate change.
2. U.S. and California’s Continued Commitment to Solar: Solar PV has made huge gains in terms of efficiency and price competitiveness over the past five years. But its progress could have been badly undermined had the U.S. federal government not continued the policy of giving a 30% investment tax credit for solar PV (and other renewable energy) purchases. Meanwhile, California, solar PV’s largest market, could have dramatically killed demand by gutting the rate incentives for homeowners to go solar. Fortunately, both governments backed away from the brink. The new federal budget continues the investment tax credit, while California’s energy regulator appears committed to keeping the current rate incentives intact (although Severin Bornstein offers a compelling case for an alternative approach). The resulting demand will ensure that solar PV is here to stay and will only become more cost-competitive with fossil-fuel sources of power going forward.
1. Tesla’s Increasing Sales Rate: It was a down year for EVs, with cheap gas prices and not a lot of new models to choose from. Tesla vehicles may still be a plaything for the wealthy, but the company’s dominance at the top of the EV market will eventually lead to an energy revolution for all — and that’s no understatement. Encouragingly, Tesla sales were up 60% in 2015 over 2014, to over 50,000 units, blowing by Nissan LEAF’s sales of about 18,000. And with the new all-electric SUV Model X ramping up, we’re starting to see Tesla’s long-range plan take shape: start at the top, and then use the sales to fund a mass-market EV. When that model comes out, we’ll finally get the transition to a low-carbon economy we need: cheap battery electric transportation, coupled with mass energy storage from the batteries, both in and out of the vehicles.
We’ll see what 2016 brings, but for now, we certainly have something to celebrate as 2015 hits the books.
I have to admit to being perplexed about the opposition to Elon Musk’s and other’s plan to force Volkswagen to invest in electric vehicles. Public health and social equity advocates teamed up to write a counter-response to Musk’s letter [PDF] to the California Air Resources Board, which had urged the EV option. The equity and public health leaders instead focus on the wrongs to VW drivers as well as the impact on low-income communities. They want immediate reparations to these groups, among other demands. They also don’t seem to see the value in requiring VW to do more on EVs.
From my perspective, the two approaches don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Why can’t we craft a punishment that benefits these communities and drivers and also pushes VW toward electric vehicles?
Used LEAFs are going for under $10,000.
But the larger question is: what exactly is the long-term plan by these groups to clean up California’s highly polluted low-income communities and also provide them cheaper transportation? The answer to my mind is the immediate electrification of as much of our transportation system as possible, and Musk’s plan would help achieve that goal.
Cheap electric vehicles will dramatically clean the air for all Californians, and particularly for many low-income community members who live alongside busy highways. These vehicles are also cheaper to fuel on a monthly basis, leading to lower-cost travel for everyone. Yes, many power plants are disproportionately located in low-income communities of color, but the grid is getting cleaner and more reliant on utility-scale renewable power. And the pollution reduction benefits are still there with electrification.
Yes, electric vehicles are primarily for wealthy Californians — for now. But we need the wealthy to invest in batteries in order to bring the costs down for everyone, which is happening. In the next few years, we’ll see a number of mass-market options for long-range EVs.
And it’s not like many low-income people can’t afford an EV right now. Some used Nissan LEAFs are going for under $10,000, you can lease a Fiat EV for under $100 a month, and the state clean vehicle rebate program is now taking into account income levels to give lower-income Californians more money back on EV purchases. When you factor in the cheap transportation fuel from electricity, these are fantastic deals.
Finally, I share the concern that an EV-focused punishment could be rewarding VW with a new line of business. The NRG EV infrastructure “punishment” clearly has not gone well for the state. So any settlement along these lines truly need to be punitive, requiring VW to spend money it wouldn’t have otherwise, and on vehicles and infrastructure that won’t necessarily be good for the company’s bottom line but would be good for the public.
But getting VW to invest in electric vehicles as a general principle is not only a good thing for all Californians, it’s especially critical for low-income residents. Indeed, to my mind it’s the only viable way forward to clean their air and provide them vital economic benefits at the same time.
I suggested a few weeks ago that the state punish Volkswagen by requiring them to support electric vehicle deployment, and apparently a bunch of clean technology folks like Elon Musk agree with me. They wrote a letter to the California Air Resources Board urging them to impose a zero-emission vehicle credit buying requirement on VW, as well as mandating that they build EVs here in California.
Of course it’s in Musk’s business interest to propose this idea, but I think it makes sense. It may not satisfy consumer advocates burned about customers now driving defective products, or environmental justice advocates upset about the localized pollution from these cheating vehicles. But look at the bigger picture: investment now in electric vehicles will bring down their cost, allowing most people in California to buy one by 2030 or sooner and cleaning the air and climate in the process.
My only concern, as I voiced in the original blog post, is that California has not proven to be effective at negotiating these “punishments.” The eVgo settlement requiring more electric vehicle chargers has been just short of a disaster, and it’s not clear anyone in state government is learning any lessons from that experience. But in concept, the idea makes sense for the California economy and environment, as well as for the affected communities.
When we think of ways to reduce emissions from petroleum-based transportation fuels, electric vehicles get much of the headlines. Battery electric transportation certainly offers a viable, long-term alternative to petroleum fuels. But we’re still a few years away from an affordable, mass-market electric vehicle, and battery technology may be decades away, if ever, from being suitable for uses like long-haul trucking and aviation.
So what do we do in the meantime, if we hope to achieve California’s carbon reduction goals? Transportation, after all, is the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
The response may in fact be growing all around us. Biofuels from agricultural sources like canola and corn, as well as algae, forest residue, and food waste, among others, can provide a low-carbon alternative to petroleum fuels, depending on its source and type. Certainly not all biofuels are environmentally beneficial, and one of the knocks on the federal Renewable Fuels Standard statute, with just-released new implementing rules from EPA announced on Monday, is that the law promotes biofuels that may actually be worse for the environment than petroleum fuels, given their production pathways and land use impacts.
But here in California, we have the opportunity to meet our climate goals while producing as much as half of our biofuels from low-carbon, in-state sources. To suggest policies that could boost this in-state production, UC Berkeley and UCLA Law are today releasing a new report “Planting Fuels: How California Can Boost Local, Low-Carbon Biofuel Production.” The report is the 16th in the two law schools’ Climate Change and Business Research Initiative, generously supported by Bank of America since 2009.
While California has a small but growing amount of biofuel production and consumption, federal and state leaders could do more to boost low-carbon, innovative biofuels. These leaders could:
- Provide greater support for in-state biofuel production, taking into account the full range of local biofuel carbon benefits and co-products, like biochar compost that can sequester carbon and thin-film plastic to bed strawberries and tomatoes;
- Offer financial incentives for automakers and gas stations to allow and sell greater amounts of low-carbon biofuels and higher blend rates; and
- Improve access to and financial support for in-state feedstock production, particularly on idled farmland and forest lands to reduce wildfire risks.
With these steps, California could power our cars, trucks and airplanes in a more environmentally beneficial manner, while boosting local economies in the process.
To learn more about the report and its recommendations, please join us for a webinar on December 14th from 11am to noon. Speakers will include:
- Tim Olsen, energy and fuels program manager at the California Energy Commission
- Lisa Mortenson, chief executive officer at Community Fuels
- Mary Solecki, western states advocate for Environmental Entrepreneurs
You can register via this site. We hope you can join for further discussion on this important topic.
BP isn’t exactly synonymous with clean and green energy, given the oil blowout in their Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010. But their analysis of the future of green energy is pretty positive [PDF]. As Greenbiz summarizes:
Bringing together previously internal analysis from BP’s energy experts, the document predicts the world will have a plentiful supply of affordable energy through the next few decades thanks to advances in all forms of energy technologies — from battery storage innovations to better extraction techniques for oil.
BP predicts the global energy system will remain heavily reliant on fossil fuels for decades to come. However, it also envisages strong growth potential for clean energy systems and supporting technology such as battery storage and electric vehicles.
What struck me among the five key points was #3, regarding the need for — and effect of — carbon pricing on future energy scenarios:
3. Carbon pricing will have a massive impact on competitiveness of renewables
Without a carbon price, gas and coal will remain the lowest-cost options for generating electricity in North America through 2050, according to the BP analysis. However, with the introduction of a relatively modest carbon price of $40 per tonne of CO2, new-build gas and renewables will start to displace coal.
With a higher carbon price — $80 per tonne of CO2 — onshore wind will be cost-competitive with natural gas by 2050, according to BP. This is based on analysis that applies a grid integration cost to renewables because of their intermittent energy supply.
This conclusion points to the importance of the international talks in Paris next month, where for the first time international negotiators may finally agree to even a modest floor on carbon pricing worldwide. We’ll need it as something to build on, while subnational entities like California and more progressive nations move forward to implement their own carbon pricing, either through cap-and-trade or direct taxes.
It’s on, and we’re up against global warming. Energy storage is the critical clean technology piece to decarbonize the grid (at least without nuclear power). The good news is that innovation is really taking off, now that the market for storage is clearer, with more renewables and electric vehicles.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
In October, an international team of scientists announced a breakthrough in overcoming major obstacles in next generation energy storage and creating a battery that has five to 10 times the energy density of the best batteries on the market now. In September, Whitacre won a $500,000 invention prize for his eco-friendly water-oriented battery. And in April, Elon Musk announced plans for his Tesla Motors to sell high-tech batteries for homes with solar panels to store electricity for night time and cloudy day use, weaning the homes off dirtier power from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
“The pace of innovation does seem to be accelerating,” said JB Straubel, chief technical officer and co-founder of Tesla with Musk. “We’re kind of right at the tipping point where the current performance and lifetime of batteries roughly equal that of fossil fuels. If you are able to double that, the prospects are huge.”
Some of these breakthroughs will take years to commercialize, but at least we know in the near-term that lithium ion battery costs are coming down about 8-10 percent a year. Bottom line: lots of changes will happen on both the grid and in vehicles with these innovations.
And it can’t come soon enough.
The Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal is another sad example of corporate malfeasance. For those not following the story, the basics are as follows: Volkswagen secretly installed “defeat devices” on approximately 11 million vehicles worldwide that could detect when the cars were being tested for emissions and then reduce the emissions to avoid being penalized. While the vehicles performed well during laboratory testing, in reality the emissions were up to 40 times the legal limit. You can see the map of affected areas from the pollution via Grist here.
So what remedies should California, as the state most immediately affected, seek from VW? At a minimum, state leaders should use the opportunity to bolster reduced emissions from vehicles going forward. And that means improving the deployment of battery electric technologies in vehicles.
VW should do more than NRG to support electric vehicles.
California has gone down this path before. When Enron and other energy companies defrauded electricity ratepayers with the rolling black-outs in California back in 2000 and 2001, the state eventually settled with NRG, the corporate entity that assumed the liability through corporate acquisitions. State negotiators required that NRG spend $100 million on electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
But that settlement has so far not worked out well. NRG is way behind schedule and state auditors are investigating what’s going on. So state leaders need to learn from that experience and find a more direct way for VW to pay for its malfeasance and pollution.
A relatively simple way to do it would be to require VW, via settlement terms, to purchase a set amount of “zero emission vehicle (ZEV)” credits from automakers making battery electrics. That would boost their supply and reduce the costs of electric vehicles. Or VW could pay into a fund that reduces the cost of purchasing or leasing electric vehicles, via a point-of-sale cash rebate, for example. And to be clear, these requirements should not be the only settlement terms, but the ones directly related to repairing the harm to the environment from this cheating.
Of course, we have years of litigation to come on this scandal. But state leaders should start thinking now about how to make some lemonade out of these bitter VW lemons, while learning from past experiences.
The attacks in Paris on Friday were another reminder of the threat that Middle Eastern instability poses to the rest of the world. The news affected me more than the usual foreign event, since I was just in Paris for an electric vehicle conference last December and am planning to attend the United Nations conference on climate change there in just a few weeks.
I’m struck by the similarities to 9/11 in the United States, in terms of the willingness of many in France and the United States to retaliate militarily in the Middle East. As an example, France just launched a big bombing assault yesterday on an ISIS stronghold in Syria.
I can certainly relate to the impulse to retaliate, but it seems that most of the political chatter now is about our military intervention options in response to the attacks, from large-scale to targeted.
But no one seems to be discussing with any seriousness another option: divest from the Middle East. And by divestment, I mean stop investing in the economies of that region, specifically in oil. Fortunately, we have an existing technology that can help with this effort: electric vehicles.
I ran some numbers on the cost of large-scale war versus the cost of investing in electric vehicles, and the results are pretty staggering. The Iraq War, as a point of comparison for a large-scale military effort, will end up costing the United States over $2 trillion dollars (and the war in Afghanistan is estimated to cost $1 trillion). If you assume an electric vehicle costs $30,000 (the price of a Nissan LEAF after incentives), that’s enough money to buy over 66.7 million electric vehicles, or one for every two households in America — and many households in urban areas may not even have a car. Assuming that each of these vehicles displace 10,000 driving miles on gas per year at 25 miles per gallon, that could save 26.7 billion gallons of gasoline annually, or almost a quarter of United States annual consumption.
Of course, if the United States government (and other willing governments around the world) actually bought that many electric vehicles, the cost of the vehicles would fall dramatically with the economies of scale, so these figures are quite conservative.
The result of this huge decrease in demand for oil would be the economic collapse of many petro-states around the world, including some parts of the United States, like Texas. Middle Eastern countries would have to find different industries to gain their wealth and would be hard-pressed to support terrorism financially. Meanwhile, for the United States, the region would no longer be of strategic importance to us and could be left to sort out its own problems without American lives on the line. And of course the investment in electric vehicles would not only bolster our domestic economy and electric utilities, it would clean our air and stabilize our global climate.
All in all, electric vehicles as a response to Middle Eastern terrorism seems like an important option to consider, if our leaders are willing to do so.
The Toyota RAV4 EV was a great car but Toyota couldn’t have cared less about it.
Companies like Nissan and maybe General Motors have moved quickly and aggressively to build electric vehicles. But so far they seem to be the exception. Most big automakers have proceeded cautiously, or in some cases they have worked to obstruct progress on battery electrics through their lobbying efforts.
Why the resistance? Particularly when battery electrics offer a better driving performance and economically are going to be cost-competitive with internal combustion engines in the next decade or so?
Mike Barnard at Clean Technica offers a detailed and interesting read explaining the institutional barriers at these companies that prevent innovation from happening. First and foremost is what they would lose:
[T]o make a good electric car you have to start from the ground up and throw a bunch of stuff away:
- You have to throw away your frames. All of them. To build an effective, long-range, high-performing electric car, you have to start with something like the Tesla power slab at or below the level of the axles.
- You have to throw away all of your engine management software. All of the experience built up on eking amazing compromises out of an internal combustion engine is irrelevant when faced with an AC or DC motor.
- You have to throw away your internal combustion motor. No hybrid, serial hybrid, range extender BS. You have to throw it away. And start with the assumption that you are going to achieve range, fast charging, and performance by committing to electric motors and batteries.
- You have to throw away all of your mechanical steering and control systems. Everything is drive-by-wire. Anything else is a waste of space, weight, and time. All of those experienced engineers, all of those solutions that worked, gone. They all assume frames that you don’t have any more, and specific areas for mechanical linkages which are no longer there.
- You have to throw away all of your traction control systems. They are all designed around the ludicrously varying power output of an internal combustion engine, which changes literally every microsecond at every change of speed and driver input because those engines have such narrow power bands. Instead, you can rely on tremendously straightforward power to your wheels which is much more finely controllable. Your actual traction control results will be much better, but all of the hacks you built up will be useless.
- You have to throw away all of your emission controls experience and knowledge and technology and investments and branding. It’s completely unnecessary.
- You have to throw away your entire fuel storage and delivery system. The tank, the lines, the pumps, the injection systems, all of it. It’s all obsolete.
- You have to throw away your body panels. They all depend on the frame and the gas tank and the mechanical linkages taking up space that they don’t take up anymore.
- You have to throw away your seat mounting systems, and possibly your seats. They expect a lot of wasted space due to motor and transmission drive shaft hump and gas tank that just aren’t there anymore. They depend on a frame which doesn’t exist anymore.
Basically, these companies and their engineers would lose a lot of jobs and expertise to gamble on a new technology. It’s a classic case study in innovation and large companies. With Tesla and soon Apple and Google and others moving into this space, Big Auto could face some major turmoil if they don’t adapt soon.
Yesterday I drove my 85-mile range Nissan LEAF about 50 miles to a destination and decided to fast-charge it there for the return trip. I checked Plugshare.com and found an eVgo fast-charge station (their “Freedom Station”), relatively conveniently located at a mall near my destination. Here’s what a typical one looks like:
You may recall that eVgo (really energy company NRG) got into this charging game as a “punishment” for having defrauded ratepayers with rolling blackouts in the early part of the last decade. The settlement with the state called for the company to spend $100 million in charging infrastructure, but the company has not been able to deliver and is now subject to a California Public Utilities Commission audit to determine what’s going wrong.
Now in my case yesterday I found that there was in fact a station I could access. When I got there, I was pleased with two things: first, the charger was unoccupied, and second, it was actually working.
But here’s where eVgo and its state overlords need improvement. First, there’s no easy way to pay if you’re not part of the eVgo “network” — a monthly subscription service. Otherwise, you have to call a 1-800 number and then work your way to a person to manually take down your credit card number like it’s 1995.
Could you imagine the same setup if you went to a gas station? What if you couldn’t fill up your car at Chevron unless you were a “member”, or else you’d have to jump through hoops? Solution: make it simple. Let drivers simply swipe their credit card and be done with it. Ditch these bogus “network” plan requirements.
Second, the pricing. I was informed by the customer service rep taking my credit card that it would be a flat $10 charge. I only needed an additional 40% charge though to get back home without stress. So why should I pay $10 like I’m getting a full battery charge? Why not pay by the kilowatt hour, like you would at a gas station (paying by gallon)?
California and the charging companies need to do much better than this if they hope to encourage EV adoption and public charging. SB 350 now authorizes utilities to get into this charging game at ratepayer expense. But if the result is simply enabling more of these dysfunctional business models, then it will be money wasted.
