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By: Cornelis “Kees” van Kooten
According to a mandate from the British Columbia government, 90 per cent of new vehicle sales in the province must be electric by 2030 and 100 per cent must be electric by 2035. This is impractical.
The provincial government stands to lose hundreds of millions in revenue. Not only is it subsidizing electric vehicle (EV) purchases, but it will also forfeit significant income from fuel taxes, which could amount to nearly $1 billion annually. Attempting to recover these losses with a per-kilometre-driven tax on EVs would likely result in a backlash from owners and discourage new buyers.
In California, rising electricity demand is driven in part by artificial intelligence and data centres. However, preliminary calculations suggest that the transition to EVs will contribute the most to the state’s increased electrical load, adding more than 50 per cent to the current load by 2045 (assuming current population and no other economic growth).
For B.C., an increase in EV demand is less of a problem because the province relies more on hydroelectricity. Nonetheless, it would need at least another Site C equivalent if the province went all-EV.
The B.C. government hopes wind turbines will make up for the increased electricity demand, but this creates additional problems. Reliance on wind power requires the construction of fast-responding gas plants to provide backup power during wind “down” times. This approach raises the price of electricity because you essentially run two electrical grids, one as backup for the other. Politicians are aware of this extra expense but prefer to stick their heads in the sand rather than face the problem. While carbon taxes are widely regarded as an effective tool for reducing emissions by allowing market forces to guide decisions, introducing additional regulatory mandates undermines this approach. With a carbon tax in place, the market is incentivized to find the most efficient methods of reducing emissions, whether through EV adoption or other solutions. Regulatory mandates interfere with these market-driven outcomes.
What’s more, the environmental benefits of EVs do not accrue immediately. Life-cycle analyses indicate that an EV must be driven anywhere between 41,000 to 120,000 kilometres before it has lower emissions than a conventional internal combustion engine (ICE). It all depends on the makeup of the electricity grid. For a grid that’s heavily reliant on hydroelectricity, EVs can contribute to lower CO2 emissions after two years; for a grid reliant on coal and natural gas (such as China’s) it could take 10 years or more driving an EV before there’s an environmental benefit. If there’s some felt urgency to addressing climate change, increasing CO2 emissions early on, only to play catch-up in the future, is not desirable.
Investment in infrastructure could offer more immediate and effective emissions reductions. In B.C. regions such as the Lower Mainland, significant emissions arise from traffic congestion, with vehicles idling at traffic lights or stuck in bottlenecks. Alleviating congestion through targeted infrastructure improvements, such as upgrades to the Massey Tunnel and Highway 1, would reduce emissions and improve efficiency for all vehicles.
Infrastructure improvements could do much more than EVs to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions and, importantly, also reduce congestion that increases the costs of transportation whether in EVs or ICEs.
The economic implications of an all-EV strategy also warrant serious consideration. EVs are essentially sourced from China despite efforts in North America to produce them domestically. China has a huge cost advantage and controls many of the inputs (e.g. lithium) into production. As a result, the automobile manufacturing sector in Canada is under threat of disappearing if Canada goes all-EV.
To meet this threat, Canada would need to put greater emphasis on the extraction and trade of fossil fuels, minerals and metals, and production of forest and agricultural products, to ensure that our exchange rate does not collapse to the point where we can no longer afford to purchase goods from abroad.
In addition to these economic concerns, EVs pose practical challenges. They are extremely heavy and more damaging to roads than ICE vehicles; they can spontaneously ignite; they are hazardous to dispose; and they require batteries to be replaced even in small fender-benders, to name just a few of the drawbacks. It’s even been recommended that EVs be parked on the street rather than in parking garages over fears that an EV fire could bring down the entire garage structure.
Finally, there’s also the possibility that consumers may attempt to work around B.C.’s requirement for new car sales to be electric by purchasing and registering new ICEs in other jurisdictions, perhaps Alberta or in other parts of B.C. where (cold) weather and other factors are against reliance on EVs.
Overall, a wholesale shift to EVs raises substantial environmental, economic and practical concerns. I am not entirely against EVs, but they are a very poor choice if the aim is to save us from CO2-driven “climate change” at low cost.
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