The Climate Case for EVs Goes Deeper Than You Think

On the surface, the climate case for electric vehicles is simple: Battery-powered cars can eliminate our need to burn dirty gasoline and diesel, and as more renewables come onto the grid will only run more and more cleanly. But the benefits that can be gained from electrifying the vehicle fleet run far deeper, a case that a variety of speakers made at Heatmap House on Wednesday as part of New York Climate Week.

Andrew Peterman, director of advanced energy solutions at the EV maker Rivian, explained how electric vehicles are becoming a multi-tiered grid solution. Rivian itself is cooperating with drivers and utilities to create automatic smart charging so that EVs can charge when energy is abundant and inexpensive, saving the user money — in some cases as much as $1,000 per year — and easing strain on the grid. Doing so helps to keep electricity prices down, which is good for the country and for the bottom line of an electric vehicle maker.

“Our ability to sell and give people value out of an electric vehicle can only be enabled if we transform the grid to be able to be affordable, reliable, and cleaner for everyone,” Peterman told Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman. “We need to use our role in the energy system to enable customers to get more value out of the grid. So everything we do is about grid transformation to enable electric vehicles to have an even stronger and stronger value proposition. When we bring down electricity costs, that brings down the total cost of ownership for our vehicle owners.”

Of course, energy can go in the other direction, too. Now that millions of EVs are on the road, the multitude of kilowatt-hours stored in EV batteries can be a grid asset. That goes for vehicle-to-grid integration, where EVs can discharge energy to help balance the grid when they’re not driving. But it’s an especially compelling proposition when those batteries get older and are no longer optimal for powering vehicles. Rivian is working with partners such as Redwood Materials to recycle old EV batteries and to repurpose some as grid storage. The same is true at Waymo, whose fleet of autonomous, only-electric rideshare vehicles have racked up hundreds of thousands of miles in some cases.

“Our fleets are sometimes outlasting our batteries where they still work, but they’re just not optimal for the ride-hailing fleet,” Waymo head of environment and sustainability Adam Lenz told Nico Lauricella, Heatmap’s CEO and editor in chief. “So we’re taking those batteries out, refreshing them, and then there’s still a lot of life left on this battery. We’re working with a partner that’s based out of L.A. County where we provide service and they’re deploying those batteries to support front of the meter grid storage.” (Waymo is also a sponsor of Heatmap House.)

It’s clear that the rideshare economy will be dominated by electric vehicles, and Lenz argued that this fact helps extend the climate benefits of electrification and autonomy to people who don’t want to drive or have been priced out by the upfront costs of an EV. The promise that self-driving cars will ultimately be much safer compared to those driven by fallible humans makes it safer to walk or bike, the most sustainable transportation methods. Waymo recently introduced a partnership with Visa to give San Francisco Bay Area riders a $2.85 Waymo account credit (the price of a bus ride in S.F.) when they combine a rideshare trip with a train or bus linkup to create a mulit-modal journey — a roundabout way to create “free” buses.

Across the country, EV charging could help give New York City not only cleaner skies but also improved grid management. The city’s Green Ride Initiative is meant to have New York’s taxi and rideshare trips be majority-electric by 2030, yet NYC has been a charging desert compared to other dense cities like London. Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of charging company it’s electric, came to Heatmap House to discuss her company’s recent win of a contract to install 700 new street chargers in New York, which has only 88 today.

It’s not just how many chargers are going in, she said, but where — the majority will go into neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where rideshare drivers live and park their cars overnight. Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, added: “It makes a lot of sense also when you think about the impact to the grid. If you are directing a lot of that charging at night, particularly for these high mileage use cases, that actually puts downward pressure on electricity rates. EVs are a very, very flexible load.”