As President Joe Biden tries to force Americans to drive electric vehicles despite the lack of infrastructure to support them, one energy analyst says consumers are headed toward a very big pothole.
Bill Cinnamon told The Center Square that EVs can be cheaper to operate than gas vehicles, but only if you pay attention to how you charge them.
He also said consumer adoption of EVs will likely stall when drivers realize how expensive charging can be if you do it anywhere but at home.
“If we trade gas stations for utility-based EV charging during the day, our costs to drive the car and fuel up those cars is going to cost even more than gas at $3.50 a gallon,” Cinnamon said.
The national average gas price this morning was $3.923, according to AAA, but electricity prices are likely to rise as well as increasing numbers of EVs on the road increase the demand for power from the grid.
For example, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker wants to see 1 million EVs on the roads of his state by 2030, The Center Square reported.
He apparently has a long way to go, as the state currently has about 36,000 EVs registered, or a little less than half of 1 percent of the 7.23 million passenger cars the Office of the Illinois Secretary of State said were registered there in 2021.
Nowhere to go but up, I guess.
A number of what The Center Square referred to as “rural states” (I’m not sure how they define that) have asked the Federal Highway Administration to ease up on restrictions dictating where and how chargers must be installed. Without a national charging network, however, there’s only so mainstream the adoption of EVs can go.
Would you feel safe with an EV plugged into your home?
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Cinnamon himself seems to support the idea of electric vehicles in general and told the outlet that EVs are “great for the environment,” but with one caveat for consumers.
“If you are planning to buy an EV, you should definitely charge your car at home, ideally from rooftop solar under full retail net metering,” he said.
Which makes sense. They’re not going to be great for anyone’s environment if no one buys them.
All of this is according to plan, as Matthew Continetti pointed out in a column last week for The Washington Free Beacon.
“Biden knew what he was doing. The ‘clean energy transition,’ as [National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council director Brian Deese] put it, is among the top priorities of the Democratic Party. The transition involves hiking the cost of carbon-based energy to the point where renewable alternatives become affordable by comparison. You decrease supply of oil and gas until prices rise enough for the average consumer to search online for a Tesla.”
(Note that I didn’t say that it was a good plan, just that it was a plan.)
That’s why people in this administration keep saying things like, “people from rural to suburban to urban communities can all benefit from the gas savings of driving an EV,” as Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said earlier this year.
It sounds tone deaf, but that’s not the real problem. Trust me: You don’t get to be the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana by being tone deaf.
They’re not super interested in saving you money; they’ve very interested in getting you out of that 1992 Ford Mustang and into an electric Hummer, or something.
“Biden’s regulations and restrictions accomplished what he wanted: more expensive oil and gas,” Continetti wrote. “His problem is that voters do not want the future the climate Cassandras have in store for them.”
They’re going to want it even less when they realize how much the electricity will cost at a public charging station to power that future.
