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Who's forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it's Mary Nichols. She's run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state's zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing President Barack Obama's national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplishment in a four-decade career.
Nichols really does intend to force automakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency's heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California's famous highways. "If we're going to get our transportation system off petroleum," she says, "we've got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now."
We've seen campaigns to defend smoking and not wearing seatbelts and not getting vaccinated. Is this like that, or is there more to it?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 03 2015, @08:04PM
May as well introduce some incentives for personal solar panels installations and it may be dandy.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 03 2015, @08:17PM
I'm guessing she'd likely approve of that as well. And probably also high-quality passenger rail so that fewer people need to drive in the first place.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 03 2015, @09:36PM
Solar better come first, because the best estimates are that if the auto fleet were converted to electric tomorrow we would need easily twice the grid capacity that we have today.
Most places are already trying to tax households with car chargers built in. Of course none of that money will go to grid development, it will simply be sucked away by government.
I doubt they will pour that tax money back into roads either. They will add miles drive taxes to handle that. That of course means monitoring.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @11:33PM
For 30k per household, California could, TODAY, all but eliminate power plants.
Figure in a couple grand extra for 1KW wind generators to supplement the solar on low output days and you can have 24/7 power production with battery backing (unlike those tesla packs 10ish KWh of lead acids are only 2-3k, which provides 10KW output from the panels during daylight, while charging and up to equivalent output during nighttime for climate control or your pot farm.)
At current prices it is not 'grid competitive', being around 0.18/KWh figuring in battery replacements and a 30 year life, but it is an up-front purchase with known future output and limited maintenence requirements.
If everybody were to do this, not only could they have 'free' charged cars every morning, but also pre-paid electrical for their entire household for essentially the rest of their life.
Think about the possitibilities, especially if another price hike were to happen.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @08:34PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Monday August 03 2015, @08:46PM
Then why is there still so much petroll used?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @09:22PM
The other possible answer could be that people have cars and they want to go places and are willing to pay the current price of gas and the sum total of that being the path of least resistance.
(Score: 2) by twistedcubic on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:11AM
Oil and renewables would not be on equal footing if you removed incentives. The former industry has nearly a century of head starts in incentives.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14PM
But with any new tech it has to beat the old tech usually at the old techs own game. It is an uphill climb. DVD was better than VHS. No one wanted a refrigerator until it was cheaper than having ice delivered for their icebox. Of course price is usually the biggest impediment to adoption and these analogies are imperfect, there is a lot more infrastructure involved with new energy tech.
As it exists now, solar and other renewables are just economically lame. Someday with advances in the tech it will become feasible. But there are some HUGE gaps to make up. When it catches up I will be buying also but I will keep my extra cash for now.
(Score: 2) by Translation Error on Monday August 03 2015, @08:56PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday August 03 2015, @09:15PM
Totally and completely untrue.
Not even in an "all generalizations are false" sense. Just in a "refuses to acknowledge any sane system of economics" sense. The US government has price supports for food crops to ensure that in the event of a war or blockade, it can feed its own citizens. This is loosely classed as "sanity". In a "purer" free market, cheaper international land values and unskilled labor would almost instantly bankrupt american farmers. People would eat today, but there would be no infrastructure for the next time shit goes down.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @09:59PM
Cars themselves aren't economically feasible by themselves. This comes up constantly in publicly funded car and airport vs completely privately owned train discussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:04PM
That argument is similar to the argument that if you have to light a fire (i.e. to provide energy to start it) then it cannot produce energy. In other words, totally bogus.
Of course the art is to distinguish combustible substances from non-combustible ones. A piece of wood won't too easily start burning, but if you manage to set it on fire, it will give you a lot of energy. OTOH no matter how hard you try, you'll never get granite to burn.
The question is whether renewables are more like wood, or more like granite. But that cannot be answered by a simple argument like yours: You'll classify wood as non-combustible.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 03 2015, @08:49PM
We don't need another Enron. We already have an ageing infrastructure ran by for-profit energy companies that would shit itself from the additional load. No where in the article is this talked about.
Point is if they want to push electric cars as hard as they want to, they also have to push utilities to upgrade infrastructure. ConEd was warning all of south queens (NYC) to turn power hungry appliances like air conditioners, washers and dryers off in the middle of a heatwave to allow them to conduct repairs. Either it was a hoax to keep their loads light during peak or they were serious. You think air conditioners and dryers are high loads? Wait until we have millions of electric car chargers installed. There is no way the current grid would support an all electric automobile society.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14AM
That's a real problem, but it's a sort of chicken and egg thing. If the cars aren't there, then the normal demand on the infrastructure doesn't need supplementing. Sometimes it does, but it's "uneconomical" to "overbuild" or "overmaintain".
So it's a question of timing, as much as anything else. How can the electric cars be fed into the system at a rate just sufficient to allow the grid to be strengthened to keep up with it. Of course, there's also the question of how the grid companies can be motivated to build-up and maintain the grid. They seem quite happy to skimp on needed maintenance already.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:02AM
I have never understood why time-of-day based electricity rates are so uncommon in the USA. They have been used for decades in the UK and many appliances include a delay timer so that they can be run at night.