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Suppose you’d never heard of the gas-powered car. One day, someone comes along to evangelize a new Honda CR-V as the hottest thing in technology. You might rightfully ask: Are you serious? You want me to put my family inside a box propelled by petroleum explosions? I’m supposed to maintain a machine made of thousands of moving parts ready to fail at any time, and that needs a fossil fuel imported largely from hostile nations?
Hank Green of YouTube fame recently posted such a thought experiment on Threads to point out the power of the status quo. After a century of our burning gasoline to get around, the frankly bizarre nature of internal combustion has become invisible. Instead, it is the ascendant electric car that is met by the doubt and derision that scoffs at anything new and different.
I’m not going to tell you EVs don’t have growing pains. But the big arguments against them aren’t as impressive as they sound.
Some anti-EV complaints are little more than bad-faith attacks drummed up by petroleum partisans and others with an ax to grind against electrification. For example, there is the notion that EVs aren’t actually better for the climate because they produce more emissions than gas cars. Opponents adore this one, since it would negate the rationale for electrifying the car fleet.
Except, it’s wrong. It may be true that building an EV requires slightly more upfront carbon emissions, which are caused by mining the essential materials and making the battery. However, combustion cars more than make up the difference by burning fossil fuels, and spewing a constant stream of climate pollution, for as many years as they run. Meanwhile, an EV gets cleaner and cleaner as the grid that supplies its electricity adds more and more renewables to its makeup. You’d basically have to burn nothing but coal for EVs to be worse over their lifespans.
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What about the annoyance of EV ownership? Some antagonists suggest driving electric is like using cloth diapers: an onerous, soul-sucking inconvenience taken on for the sake of saving the planet. Don’t believe it. EV life has its quirks, sure. On the other hand, I’ve covered the numerous ways that EVs are just plain better than gas cars, which includes the impressive zoom off the starting line, the ability to use your garage as a refueling station, and much more.
Range anxiety, held up as a dealbreaker for some buyers considering an EV, isn’t the problem you think it is. The fear is essentially nil for people who can charge an EV at home: You’ll wake up each morning with 80 or 90 percent of battery capacity, which is more than enough for all your daily driving needs. Finding a public charger is mainly a problem for longer trips, and the growing number of fast-charging stations means there’ll be one. Furthermore, battery ranges are getting longer and charging times are getting shorter. As this trend continues, range anxiety is quickly diminishing, as is the convenience difference between gas and electric.
Some naysayers say it’s impossible for an electric vehicle to meet their needs. I get it. It’d be easy to look at maps of U.S. charging infrastructure and conclude that if you don’t live in one of the big metropolitan areas where plugs are abundant, then EV ownership is impossible or impractical. Well, not necessarily.
Yes, those who reside in truly rural parts of America, and drive many miles far from the interstate highway system, ought to wait on going electric. But you don’t need to live in Los Angeles to live with an EV. Remember, if you can charge at home, then your house supplies the energy for the vast majority of your driving. Fast chargers now line the major highways even in states with low EV ownership to date, so you could drive a long distance as long as it’s not into the hinterlands. Having an EV especially makes sense in a two-car family where the other car is, say, a traditional hybrid. Simply accomplish most of your local driving on cleaner, electric power, and take out the Prius if you’re driving to a far-flung national park.
EVs are too expensive, they say. That one is true. However, while the federal tax credits for electric vehicles were already perplexing and are getting worse, they exist. If you can manage to navigate them, it is still possible to save $7,500 up front on buying an EV, an amount that brings them much closer to their gasoline counterparts. And that’s before the credits and rebates available in many states for buying zero-emissions cars or installing home charging stations. It also doesn’t include the savings from reduced routine maintenance and low fuel costs, both of which make electrics cheaper to operate as the years go by.
In addition, those high sticker prices won’t stay high forever. A lot of the EVs that have hit the market so far are high-end, and their eye-popping MSRP helps carmakers cover the costs of designing new all-electric platforms and building big batteries. As the electric market matures, more entry-level models will emerge, made possible in part by the cost of batteries falling as the industry reaches a bigger scale.
There is a long list of alleged reasons why electrification supposedly cannot work across an entire country or the world. Among them: Battery materials are scarce, and must be mined in problematic areas. The grid supposedly can’t handle the extra demand (it can), and we can’t put enough renewable energy on the grid for EVs to make a maximum climate impact. Charging infrastructure is woefully inadequate.
These all are issues to be sorted, surely. The fundamental problem with this kind of anti-electric rhetoric around them, though, is that it suggests such problems are unsolvable. They’re not. New sources for raw materials are being found, such as the giant lithium deposit discovered this year near the Oregon-Nevada border. The ascendant EV battery recycling industry has the potential to recover most of the precious metals from spent cells. In the longer term, scientists are at work on novel chemistries that could use more abundant and easily obtained materials to make the batteries of tomorrow from something other than lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
The electricity grid does need to be improved, with more high-capacity transmission lines and energy storage solutions to allow for saving solar and wind energy for later. Frankly, though, our decaying infrastructure needs hardening anyway, and the EV revolution may help provide the push to get such projects past political gridlock. In the meantime, there are available smart solutions such as trying to line up energy demand with renewable supply — for example, by charging all our new EVs in midday when the sun is shining.
Maybe the people who say those solutions are too expensive or too difficult simply have no vision. After all, many of them would be out there stumping about the power of American ingenuity — if that ingenuity were in pursuit of a technology that profited them or appealed to their voters. While the EV transition will be hard, what would be even harder is giving up and living with the effects of unmitigated climate change, or trying to realize 11th-hour miracle solutions to save the planet like direct air capture.
The only truly compelling argument against EVs is that they don’t go far enough. They are still cars, after all, and a society that drives electric cars still wastes its land on parking lots and kills thousands of its citizens each year through crashes and collisions with other vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians. Sticking with cars just because they fit into the civilization we’ve built is a missed opportunity to build a walkable, bikeable, better future. There’s no arguing with that one.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …