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Don’t forget the other good thing about electric cars.
The electric car push is about carbon. You know the logic: If we all switch to EVs, and if we power those EV with mostly renewable energy, then the world could slash the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the transportation sector. The electrification effort is so centered on fighting climate change that it’s easy to forget there’s another big, shiny benefit of switching from gas engines to battery power: cleaner air.
CO2 isn’t the only thing that comes out of a tailpipe, after all. Cars also spew volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrous oxides (NOx), and fine particulate matter into the atmosphere with every gallon of gasoline they use. Long before environmentalists viewed cars as a climate villain, they saw internal combustion as a public enemy that poisoned the air. Cars made the smog that obscured the mountains in Los Angeles, and they have caused higher rates of health problems like asthma, birth defects, and premature deaths.
To be sure, EVs are not pollution-free. They tend to be heavy, which increases the rate at which tires break down and shed microparticles. It takes carbon emissions to make lithium-ion batteries. An EV’s pollution benefits are only as good as the electricity that powers it. Even so, the EV era could help Americans breathe easier, and new studies are beginning to show just how much a difference electrification can make.
Here in California, electric vehicles have become a common sight — this year they reached 25 percent of total car sales. To quantify the health benefits of this evolving automotive fleet, researchers at the University of Southern California’s Keck Medical Center studied a variety of ZIP codes across the state where the adoption of zero-emission vehicles jumped by tenfold between 2013 and 2019. They compared that vehicle data against air pollution numbers and asthma-related ER visits in the same places, finding a significant reduction in both. The numbers should be trending even better by now. Across California, zero-emission vehicle adoption has soared past 20 per 1,000 people, compared to 14.1 per 1,000 people at the end of the study’s time period.
Another study, from March 2023, looked at 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas through the lens of the EPA’s air quality model health impact tools. The goal: to see which places would gain the most from a major surge where nearly all drivers owned EVs by 2050. L.A. led the way, with an estimated 1,163 premature deaths prevented every year by better air quality, corresponding to more than $12 billion in health benefits. New York City, Chicago, the cities of California’s Central Valley, and Dallas followed close behind.
Joshua Linn, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies environmental economics, released his own model of EV air pollution gains this January, which put a rough price tag on both the climate and health benefits of EV adoption. A few years ago, he told me, it was more difficult to demonstrate that the electrification of cars would create a positive effect. Gasoline engines had gotten more efficient, making it a little less damaging to choose combustion when buying another car. A few older studies found that electrification actually could be worse for air quality — but, he said, those studies presumed the country would keep burning mostly fossil fuels for its electricity, which means atmospheric pollution from burning coal or gas would skyrocket alongside America’s demand for electricity.
That’s not what happened. With today’s rising use of renewable energy, he says, it’s clear EV adoption will lead to better air quality along with the associated gains in human health. “The cleaner grid wins,” he says. “The power sector is just getting so much cleaner. We anticipate that, over the next 10 or 15 years, buying a plug-in vehicle now and charging it over that vehicle's lifetime is going to be better for the environment than gasoline.”
Even so, it remains tricky to quantify air quality and health impacts. While carbon emissions are seen as a global climate problem, air pollution can be an intensely local issue. A New York City, or Boston, or Atlanta with a high percentage of EVs would see a major decrease in the pollutants coming from cars stuck in gridlock, and people living next to congested roads would breathe much easier. (For a historical analogue, see how families living close to toll booths saw rates of premature births decline with the introduction of the EZ-pass system, when cars began to roll through toll checkpoints rather than sitting there, spewing poison as they fumbled with coins.) But if the U.S. kept burning fossil fuels to make electricity, Linn says, then all those noxious chemicals would simply migrate elsewhere.
“You are moving the pollution away from typically more densely populated areas. You’re moving it towards the power plants, which tend to be located in less dense populated areas. But at the same time, those power plants are shooting that pollution way up into the atmosphere and then it can travel — it can affect pollution far down wind and often in urban areas.” That, he says, is why it’s so important to keep moving the grid toward renewable energy.
Local differences in air pollution also mean that not all areas will experience the air quality benefits of the EV revolution equally. USC’s study was careful to note that because electric cars remain so comparatively expensive, less-affluent neighborhoods have much lower rates of adoption and lower associated gains in air quality. (Research in 2019 claimed that only neighborhoods with average income above $65,000 saw positive air quality effects from EV adoption.)
Some benefits will cross over, Linn says, especially when lost people drive through lower-income neighborhoods in electric vehicles rather than gasoline ones. But the economics of EVs, and their clean-air benefits, still leave a lot to be desired.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.