Yeah, Like This Is Going To Work Out

The Biden Administration (well, actually WRBA) keeps trying to ram electric vehicles down the motoring public’s throats. It’s using the EPA as a means of doing so.

But per usual the one thing that is being devoutly ignored is that electric vehicles require electricity to charge them.

Little mention has been made about where all this electricity needed to charge them is going to come from. Yes, some noise has been made about using renewable sources to do so, but the truth is that renewables will never be able to do so. Too many renewables true believers cannot seem to do math, cannot figure out that the amount of land needed to provide the electricity just to charge EVs, let alone for other uses also being mandated by WRBA. They can’t be built fast enough nor will they provide anywhere enough electricity when it’s needed.

Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.

One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.

Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.

Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent.

Making electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines requires electricity.

When you throw trillions of government dollars at reviving manufacturing, you get more manufacturing.

Manufacturing requires electricity.

Intermittent wind and solar power require fossil fuel backup.

There are other points brought up that dismantle the argument for forcing everyone into EVs, and switching heating/cooling, stoves, clothes-dryers, and so on to electricity. Our electrical grid can’t possibly meet the demand all these changes require.

The environmentalists won’t let the utilities build the power plants we need to build – nuclear – be they SMRs of traditional design or molten salt reactors that are much safer to operate and can use ‘depleted’ fuel from older reactors – uranium and plutonium – burning them until all of the long-lived radioisotopes are gone. Generating electricity from diffuse sources is never cheap. It also isn’t reliable. It is also variable, something electric grids really don’t like. (This is something South Australia found out the hard way when they went full renewables after shutting down their last coal-fired plants.)