UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) is today releasing a new report on lessons learned to advance electric vehicle (EV) deployment in France and California. Electric Vehicles and Global Urban Adoption: Policy Solutions from France and California is based on a June 2019 international conference at UC Berkeley, co-sponsored by CentraleSupélec and Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in France, featuring speakers from California and French utilities, energy regulators and industry.
Electric vehicles are important to both California and France because transportation accounts for approximately 20 percent of emissions in Europe, 30 percent in the United States, and 40 percent in California (and even more when factoring in emissions from oil refineries). Yet electric vehicles still represent a small share of the overall vehicle market worldwide, at under 10 percent of new car sales in California and under 2 percent in France, despite aggressive policy targets.
Deployment in California and France is more perhaps more complicated than other jurisdictions, given that approximately 40 percent of residents in both places live in multi-unit dwellings, such as apartments, townhouses, and condominiums. Many of these dwellings are in urban areas with little or no access to charging, given the lack of dedicated parking spots and lower vehicle ownership rates. French law requires builders of new apartment buildings to install chargers, but residents of existing buildings don’t receive those benefits.
As leaders in California and France seek to boost EV adoption, speakers at the conference identified the following challenges, also summarized in the report:
- Lack of access to affordable, convenient private electric vehicles;
- Complexity and cost of installing charging in urban settings and existing multifamily buildings;
- Declining federal incentives and insufficient vehicle demand;
- Electricity rate design decreases the financial viability of charging stations;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities; and
- Need for grid infrastructure upgrades to avoid high costs on first-movers.
The conference speakers also discussed priority solutions, as the report details, including:
- National and state governments could require owners of existing multifamily buildings to install charging stations;
- National and state governments could assist transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft in encouraging electric vehicle adoption among their drivers, through support for the deployment of fast-charging hubs, driver education programs, and new pilot projects; and
- Electric utilities and regulators could develop new rate designs to incentivize charging while optimizing grid efficiency.
These and other solutions are discussed in the report, which will hopefully help stakeholders in both jurisdictions achieve an electric future for transportation. Bonne route!
When President Trump announced in June that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, France eagerly stepped into the leadership void. French President Macron responded by offering millions in new grant money for climate science research.
The winners were just announced, including 13 American scientists out of the 18 winners. I spoke to KCBS radio in San Francisco yesterday about the program and what it means for the United States going forward. You can listen to the 4 minute clip here:
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.
